BARBEY D'AUREVILLY and his admiration for BAUDELAIRE.

Jules BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (1808- 1889)

Signed autograph manuscript – Salon of 1872. An ignoramus at the Salon.

Three pages and two lines in-folio mounted on strong paper. [Paris. Early July 1872]

“Finally, the last reason in favor of Mr. Manet: among the men who hoped a lot from this young painter – and from the beginning – there was Baudelaire; and in art, Baudelaire is someone. His gaze was deep, over and under acute , almost somnambulistic... He saw . »

Superb manuscript by Barbey d'Aurevilly, in polychrome ink, discussing the Salon of 1872, and praising the artistic qualities of Edouard Manet and the critical sense of Charles Baudelaire.

Barbey d'Aurevilly, who claimed to have only developed an interest in art relatively late, had until then written a few scattered texts on the subject. In 1872, he agreed to report on the Salon for the newspaper Le Gaulois , choosing to adopt an original tone, as he wrote to Armand Royer on April 17, 1872: "I have never done a Salon and I will this one, in my own way which will not be that of the neighbor, I answer you, nor even that of anyone.”

He published, in this newspaper, from May 23 to July 3, twenty-one art reviews under the provocative generic title " Salon of 1872. An ignoramus at the Salon ."  This manuscript (twenty-first and final article) is the French dandy's final criticism of the Salon.

After mentioning his disappointment with the work of Camille Corot, Barbey d'Aurevilly marveled at Le Combat du Kearsarge et de l'Alabama , a work by Manet presented at the Salon. Evoking Turner, Stendhal, Byron, Chateaubriand, he praises the late Charles Baudelaire and his artistic analyses.

The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama was produced by Manet in 1865, immortalizing the naval combat between the two American ships which took place off the coast of Cherbourg in June 1864. The two ships, one southern, the other northern, fought in the Civil War, more than 6,000 kilometers from their nation.

Manet's painting was acquired in 1878 by Marguerite Charpentier (1848.1904), salonniere and art collector, and is today kept at the Museum of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Strikingly aesthetic, a true handwritten painting as such, these four pages offer a formidable critique of a mind in search of “Sensations of art”.

Full text:

“ The Exhibition Hall closes today. I am also closing mine, in this diary, because I do not have the right to live there one day longer than the event that gave birth to me there... Besides, I have almost everything said about the flower of the works exhibited... about the few paintings which, for one reason or another, must be taken from the pile... The pile is, in fact, victorious at the Salon this year, in this glorious time of the Republic, which is , itself, the triumph of the pile!

I am not the Saint Vincent de Paul of the poverty of painting and I leave them, without sadness, at not being able to extend my excursion in a Salon without much overall value, where original works are so rare and where genres even everything is missing, for example the landscape which makes a hiatus , despite the medals which want to block it, this hiatus , and which are only pieces next to the hole. Yes, the number of paintings does nothing, the landscape is missing from the Salon, if we demand, for it to be, this difficult genre, the superiority without which the works of art really are not. Too bad for egalitarians, there is only superiority in the world, but particularly in the Arts , the most ferocious of Aristocracy! No unknown and new landscaper has emerged in the absence of the old ones who this year had the success of absence and the triumph of regret. The names of MM. Corot and French stand out, it is true, on the turf of insignificant young names, which will not erase theirs, but Mr. Corot does not renew himself . It's always the same blond fan artist, always painting the same blondies, faded like blondes after twenty-five years, and Mr. French, with his idyll of Daphnis and Chloé , has only made one Institute painting, a chickadee . Mr. French is only a little chick of the big Poussin who was a rooster! As for Mr. Jules Breton, I leave him under the knife of Théophile Silvestre... Among the descriptions of natural things, only one gave me a strong feeling of Nature, and it is not strictly speaking a landscaper nor a landscape than the man and the painting I am going to talk about. Surprise yourself a little, as I surprised myself! … I am going to talk about Mr. Édouard Manet and his painting of the Combat of Kearsage and Alabama .

Edouard Manet, according to some, has no talent. He is a systematic and voluntary smearer, who has recently been mercilessly ridiculed , which does not imply that he is ridiculous (ah! no! for example!). According to others, he is a man of genius, no less! who like all men of genius, these gentlemen of art and thought, know everything without having learned anything. For my part, I only know one painting from Mr. Manet's work, his Spanish Dancer , too Chinese for me and which I am not Chinese enough to like very much, but in which I nevertheless recognize new . But what I love more than all the paintings, what I go to first and foremost, is the man, artist or thinker who wants to trample on the common idea and pass over it, the dagger to the point, the Initiative! On the other hand, the good reputations, which all my life have played their music to me, have given me a prejudice in favor of the bad ones, and I willingly endure the insult, the ridicule, the insolent laughter in which we roll them like peeled peaches in sugar, to judge what is going on with these bad reputations, sometimes as misleading as the good ones. Finally, the last reason in favor of Mr. Manet: among the men who hoped a lot from this young painter – and from the beginning – there was Baudelaire; and in art, Baudelaire is someone. His gaze was deep, over and under acute , almost somnambulistic... He saw . His Aesthetic Works, which are full of thoughts that painting suggested to him, give a great idea of ​​the faculties of the art critic that he would have been, and that death took away. He liked audacity, and that of Manet did not frighten him. What would he have said if he had lived and seen the Battle of Kearsage and Alabama ? I don't know - but the fact remains that I, who do not see as clearly as Baudelaire in the future of a man and in his potential faculties, I was touched, in front of this painting of Kearsage and Alabama , of a sensation that I did not believe Mr. Manet capable of shaking off from me.

It’s a feeling of nature and landscape… very simple and very powerful. How can I believe that I owe it to Mr. Manet?… If there is a man of civilization, of advanced and bluish , – as they say of partridges – if there is a refined and a disgusted in this time, where all the sheep of panurges drown in a cliché , and in this flock of sheep, a ram who wants to escape this ocean of old things - If there is a trickster and a roué d'art , it is M. Manet . And now, in creating his painting – a painting of war and boarding, which he conceived and produced with the retaliation of a man who wants, by any means, to escape the awful cliché that overwhelms us – he It is what is most natural, most primitive, most within reach of any brush since the world began, that Mr. Manet best expressed in his painting of Kearsage and Alabama .

A less devious man than Mr. Manet would have placed his fighting ships in the foreground, to better concentrate the spectator's attention on the combat itself. ; but Mr. Manet did like Stendhal, in his battle of Waterloo, seen from behind, and in a single small group, far from the battlefield. He did like Chateaubriand, who received the impression of this terrible Waterloo through the tremors of the earth , shaken by the cannon, a few leagues from the battles, and even like Byron, who cuts off the joy, the movement and the music of 'a ball in Brussels by the sound of the first cannon shot, coming from the distance! … Mr. Manet has thrown his two ships back into the horizon. He had the coquetry to make them smaller by the distance. But the sea that he swells around, the sea that he extends and brings up to the frame of his painting, speaks enough of the combat in itself, and it is more terrible than the combat... We judge the combat according to its swells – according to the deep upheaval, according to the tearing away of the abyss, of its swollen waves.

I am from the sea. I was raised in the foam of the sea. I have privateers and fishmongers in my race, since I am Norman and of Scandinavian race, and this sea of ​​Mr. Manet gave me caught on her waves , and I told myself that I knew her. It is wonderfully captured observation... Mr. Manet's painting is above all a marvelous seascape . This is a sublime landscape in all the deep meaning of the word , a landscape which is here neither the eternal purple clearing in the woods, towards the evening, nor the eternal peeper of the waters which reflect from the overturned trees, No ! But a view of the sea – infinite – beneath lost and almost imperceptible vessels, on the horizon! ... The sea which should only be a detail, an accompaniment, a backdrop in Mr. Manet's painting, becomes, by dint of its success, the main object, the interest, the life of the painting . Once the famous Turner made a landscape with an atmosphere, nothing more than an atmosphere, – a sky empty of everything except light and color. Mr. Manet could have painted the sea by himself . He could have eliminated his ships, and his picture would have been even greater. The sea alone, with its swell, turgid and green, stronger than the men who agitate and cannon on its surface, and whose cannonballs fall into its chasms without ever being able to fill them!

Very great – that – in execution and idea! Mr. Manet, despite the adored and execrable civilization which corrupts us all, can become a painter of great Nature. Today, with his Alabama navy, he has married Nature!... He did like the Doge in Venice and threw a golden ring into the sea!

So, just one landscaper! that came out of the Show this year! And it’s Mr. Edouard Manet! Is it incredible? … Unbelievable thing, but certain, but incontestable for me. As for the portraits which, even more than the landscape , – this genre so tempting in a materialist era where the human soul is chased everywhere; as for portraits which, even more than landscapes , must, one day, absorb great painting and make it disappear, what will I tell you about it? It's raining this year at the Salon. It's all the scourges of Egypt in one... But only one which justifies the furious vanity of a race which is no longer beautiful or powerful, and which has no right to display itself in such insolent proportions in its humiliated Museums, just one that makes you raise your head and say proudly, – like Madame Bordas singing “La Canaille”: – Well, I’m in! there are not any !!

Tasteless poses; lymphatic faces, hydrangea pale, bluish or greenish; subjects of monsters to paint on Chinese vases; type of enriched bourgeois, in their Sunday best, beaten (they are a little, at the moment), happy and... the rest; Cabotine toilets and notary outfits – this is what I saw all along the line, and I have not, I admit, looked for the names of all these rags which are not dear to me ! and I would not have found them in the booklet because vanity, defiant by dint of being vanity, did not dare to write them there... Among these portraits, the only ones that interest me, the portraits of women, – because men only have a face for me when they have a lot of spirit, soul and genius , – I have only seen one, who I will call the Blue Lady, inscribed with the initials of Mme LA, by Mr. Saint-Pierre, in the booklet. It's charming in color, in arrangement, in artifice. She knows how to get on with this woman. It is, in itself, its own poem. Is women's poetry elsewhere? All blue and white , with pearls on the neck and reflections of pearls on the complexion; her blond hair, falling, like a golden fringe, in the folds of the dress. A rose, – the only thing that is neither white nor blue , in this azure and in this light, – a rose stops the gaze between the two breasts, – it is the arrow! Eyes as sapphire as the ring, but alas much less alive, – waiting – will he come? – the ray that the sapphire does not expect, and which would perhaps make a human sapphire from these two insignificant blue stones!

And that's all and everything would be said, but there is one portrait among all that I cannot reject with the others , because these portraits were three days (only three days) the event of the Salon! Among these portraits, I do not want to hide that of Mr. Thiers, like that of Marino Faliero, the decapitated one. I do not want it, first of all for Mr. Thiers who only has old age as Marino Faliero, but especially for Miss Jacquemart, who supports with one more example my already expressed opinion on the virile impotence of all women who make men in the arts . “She did what she could after all, the poor devil! » Madame de Staël ended up saying, of an actress whom she had praised with passion, without being able to share her passion with anyone. I am very convinced that Miss Jacquemart also did everything she could; but it came out neither dry, nor ordinary, nor laboriously mediocre, and unfortunately, it is similar, although Mr. Thiers, in appearance, is better than that. It is neither so shriveled, nor so battered, nor so stewed. The aesthetic needs of Miss Jacquemart which one day made her choose the head of Mr. Duruy to give an idea of ​​the strength and transcendence of her ideal, are her aesthetic needs satisfied? ...It's very likely, but my people always ask: What? a complete M. Thiers as he is... if I said so! One evening at Madame Récamier's, we were talking about the First Consul (the President of the Republic at the time), we were praising the beauty of his hands and even the splendor of his nails. Ah! let's not talk politics! said the Duke of Montmorency. Barbey d'Aurevilly. »