Manet: the Man Who Invented Modern Art

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

If anyone ever asked me who was the most mysterious

and enigmatic painter I know, the one who's hardest to pin down,

I know who my answer would be.

The man who painted that.

Edouard Manet.

People say Manet invented modern art, that he's the greatest revolutionary of the 19th century.

And of course, I love his work.

I adore it. But put me in a corner

and force me to tell you exactly why, and I don't think I can.

I've looked and looked and looked at his paintings.

Without being boastful, I know an enormous amount about him.

And yet I've never penetrated to his core and really understood him.

And nor has anyone else.

This is Manet's most-notorious picture, Olympia,

the most-controversial and provocative nude of the 19th century.

When this was shown at the Salon of 1865, the gates of hell opened up

and their contents poured down on Manet's head.

What a scandal! What uproar! What drama!

This caused a rumpus, too. And this.

And this.

And even this.

It's as if everything Manet painted wasn't what you were supposed to paint.

He moved the goalposts and rewrote the rules.

The man was a rebel through and through...

though he never looked like one.

Now, this can't go on.

We can't let a painter as revolutionary and magnificent

as the man who did that slip through our grasp.

It's time to crack his code,

time to break his secret,

time to get to the bottom of Edouard Manet.

The Ile de la Cite,

that mysterious and secretive Gothic island in the middle of the Seine,

where the Hunchback of Notre Dame resided.

This was the original heart of the city, surrounded by water,

easy to protect, the ancient epicentre of being French.

It was also where Manet's father worked - over there at the Palais de Justice.

The Manets were lawyers and judges.

For eight generations, they'd dispensed wisdom and rules to their fellow Frenchmen.

Manet's father, Auguste, was a judge.

His father had been a judge too,

and the grandfather before that.

So, not surprisingly, they expected little Edouard,

born 23rd January 1832,

to become a judge as well.

The father was a really important figure in the French judiciary.

He worked here, at the Palais de Justice, as the head of the civil courts,

presiding over domestic disputes,

arguments over wills and copyright, a thoroughly respectable figure

who would never, ever have wanted his eldest son

to become one of those new-fangled artists.

The idea that a Manet would one day grow up to paint this,

or this, would have been utterly discombobulating to Auguste.

I think it's worth suggesting right at the outset that one of the reasons Manet did paint this...

and this...was because he knew what they'd make of it

at the Palais de Justice,

and that only spurred him on.

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Manet's mother, Eugenie-Desiree Fournier,

had a more inventive background

because she was the goddaughter of the King of Sweden.

Eugenie was 20 when she married Auguste Manet. He was 34.

She brought with her a generous Swedish dowry,

and more importantly for Manet, a rare passion for music.

She'd trained as a singer and was good enough to sing

at small private concerts and other people's soirees.

This passion for music was to be her most-rewarding gift to her eldest son.

Music was to play a critical role in Manet's work and life.

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Manet grew up in a changing city, and flux was his inheritance.

The modern age was arriving in Paris at a brutal lick, and no-one was ready for it.

The French Emperor, Napoleon III, nephew of the first Napoleon,

had seized power in a low-grade coup d'etat,

promising to make France great again,

as great as she had been under the first Bonaparte.

A little man with a big name,

Napoleon III had one eye on history and the other on his legacy.

And everywhere Manet would have looked as he grew up, tradition and modernity

were tussling for the soul of the new France.

This tussle continued in Manet's own family as well.

His parents wanted him to study law and keep up the family tradition of producing judges.

But Manet's own heart was elsewhere.

SEAGULLS SCREECH

There's a photo of him as a young boy, the only one I've seen.

So alert, such a piercing gaze.

Too intelligent and questioning, surely, to be a judge.

His first ambition was to join the navy.

When he was 17, he set off on a long sea voyage to Rio de Janeiro,

which taught him so much about the sea, and perhaps a little about Latin women, too.

When he came back, he failed his naval exams.

The only thing Manet was ever going to be was an artist.

The chap with a walrus moustache is Thomas Couture,

in his time, the most-appreciated painter in Paris.

Couture ran a workshop for young artists, and after lots of badgering, Manet senior

finally agreed to let Manet junior study in Couture's workshop in 1850.

Manet stayed there for six years, which, at 120 francs a year,

adds up to a very long and very expensive apprenticeship.

Couture had made his own reputation in 1847, when he showed

this grotesque, flesh-laden monstrosity at the Paris Salon.

It was called Les Romains de la Decadence -

"the Roman orgy".

And that, alas, is exactly what it showed -

an enthusiastic Roman love-in, featuring a cast of hundreds.

Although he was responsible for this monstrosity,

Couture would always advise his pupils

to paint the world around them, the new Paris,

the trains, the factories.

"Don't paint someone else's history,"

he would advise them hypocritically,

"paint your own." And that's exactly what Manet did.

You must have noticed that the French harbour an interesting

and resilient compulsion to make big urban statements.

They all do it -

Mitterrand, with his grand project at the Louvre.

Pompidou, with his extraordinary and pipey centre.

And all these ostentatious building projects can trace their origins back

to the dreams of one man, that ruthless rebuilder of Paris, Baron Haussmann.

Haussmann wasn't actually a baron.

He was just "Monsieur Haussmann",

but he called himself "baron" to give himself some appropriate status.

Between 1853, when the Emperor made him prefect of the Seine,

and 1870, when he was sacked for being so unpopular, Haussmann transformed Paris.

And I mean transformed.

Pretty much everything we think of as Paris today was Haussmann's doing.

These big Parisian vistas,

the huge, wide boulevards,

Haussmann did it all.

So what's all this got to do with Manet? As it happens, rather a lot.

First off, it's important to recognise that the Paris he was living in for most of his adult life

was a city in flux, a giant demolition site looking for its final shape.

Manet couldn't get away from the smell of change.

Nor could anyone else.

But there's something more, something crucial.

When Haussmann was knocking down the old neighbourhoods, he was knocking down the old certainties as well.

People's personal geographies were being crushed - the inner maps they had inherited.

I was in Beijing just before the Olympics, and the same thing was happening there.

The old cantons were being demolished, all the undesirables moved out into the suburbs.

An ancient city was being forced to become a modern one, whether it wanted to or not.

Manet's Paris was like that as well.

And this alienation of the people, the removal of their sense of place,

was being played out not just in the streets of the city, but in Manet's studio as well.

He was now in his late twenties, but looked older -

prematurely balding, bearded.

And the vagabonds, drunks and gypsies

loitering in his earliest pictures can, at first glance,

seem rather conservative, too.

But only at first glance.

I'm in Washington DC at the National Gallery of Art.

I'm going to see a painting that you won't have seen if you've visited the gallery in the past two years,

because it hasn't been hanging on the walls.

The reason it hasn't been hanging on the walls

is because it's being restored.

It's one of Manet's most-celebrated early masterpieces - The Old Musician.

Anne, is this the painting I remember seeing two years ago?

I don't think it is. It's completely changed tonality.

-It's like a different picture.

-It's completely different. It was covered with thick, yellow varnish,

and it made it very dark, very morose, very sombre. What we have now

is a painting with a great deal of light and colour,

and as you said, a very, very different painting.

And some spectacular brushwork going on here.

I mean, look at this. This could be a piece of abstract expressionism

-from the 1950s, couldn't it?

-Absolutely.

It's such brave and free paintwork.

When you remove the yellow veil which unifies everything,

all of a sudden you get this wonderful

sense of depth, because instead of everything being flattened

by a yellow layer, you get the feeling

of figures in the foreground and a landscape in the background.

For myself, seeing something like this close up for the first time -

I don't think I've ever been as close to a Manet before, certainly not a great one -

it does have this extraordinary variety to it.

If you look at this area and compare it with that area or that area,

it's almost like a patchwork of different effects.

He could have hidden all of these things, but he chose not to do that.

One of the things we love about Manet is that he intentionally abrades his own paint sometimes.

He rubs through it to expose the ground layer underneath, and you get

this sort of soft quality. You can see it in the shoes here.

-You can see he's rubbed through the paint and taken it away...

-Oh, yes!

..either scraping with a dry tool or using a rag,

but we know it's not damaged, because then he comes over with this beautiful, luscious area.

You can see this. He's deliberately taken some of the surface off to create this...

It almost looks like a digital spot pattern from a modern computer.

One could add white paint, but you won't get the same softness and that sort of

broken quality of the paint, that rubbing through, where you get the texture as well as the variety.

So we're talking about extreme technical inventiveness?

Absolutely. He was truly a genius. He could really handle paint.

FLAMENCO MUSIC PLAYS

Just as Manet was emerging as an independent artist, Paris was struck down by a debilitating illness.

Indeed, the whole of France seemed suddenly to succumb to it.

The illness made you twitchy and excitable.

It quickened the pulse and sweated the brow.

"Hispanomania" it was called - a mad passion for all things Spanish.

Spanish art, Spanish song, Spanish dance,

Spanish storylines, Spanish tears, Spanish bloodlust -

the French were obsessed with all of them.

Napoleon III had a Spanish wife, the beautiful Empress Eugenie,

so that was definitely part of it.

Rumour had it that the Empress would sometimes go to fancy-dress balls in a matador's costume.

No hot-blooded French male could resist the thought of that.

Spanish art was also being rediscovered at the time.

Velazquez, Murillo Goya...

Their work was so dark and gutsy, so tangible, so direct,

so utterly unlike the billowing pink mythologies favoured by French art.

Manet had encountered Spanish art at the Louvre when he was in Couture's studio.

He was devoted to Velazquez and had learnt much of his directness from him.

And that confrontational air you get in his pictures, that feeling that his art is going

mano a mano with you, that was inherited from Spanish art as well.

HE SINGS IN SPANISH

Spain may only have been just across the border from France,

but emotionally, it was another world,

and it spoke to something deep inside Manet.

On the outside, he was notoriously dapper, always impeccably turned out

with his yellow gloves and his walking stick.

You can tell from the pictures of him painted by his friends that he gave very little away.

He was buttoned up, secretive, elegant and proper.

But one of my suspicions about Manet is that beneath this dapper exterior,

he was surprisingly emotional and tender.

This emotional inner life of his primed him to respond to Spanishness

and led him to some peculiar and fascinating early art -

the Spanish guitarist, caught open-mouthed in mid-song.

Manet's brother, Gustave, as a snake-hipped majo,

with something of the wolf about him.

And this curious female bullfighter, pushed out unconvincingly

among the bulls in a strange clash of realities.

In 1862, an exuberant troupe of Spanish singers and dancers

arrived in Paris from Madrid to perform at the Hippodrome.

Their star was one Lola Melea,

who sang and danced under the glorious stage-name of Lola de Valence.

Lola, la-la-la Lola.

She drove the French mad.

Manet's friend, the poet Zacharie Astruc, wrote a very bad song about her.

And Manet himself painted her on stage...so unexpectedly.

It's such a forlorn picture.

Lola de Valence, the crowd behind her, dressed up to the nines

in her colourful Spanish costume, with her fan, her mantilla.

But when you look at her face, instead of excitement or the energy

you would expect to see there,

there is sadness instead, and introspection.

Lola was to be the first of Manet's forlorn modern heroines, his thinking women.

Spanish art taught him to mistrust appearances and probe further.

Beneath the blur of the castanets and the bang-bang-bang of the dancing feet, there was

always something deeper going on, something more intense and pressing.

Have you heard of Zaltbommel in Holland?

Me neither, which is why I've come here and tracked down the cathedral,

because Zaltbommel is an important location for Manet.

This church, the imposing St Maartenskerk, had an excellent organist,

Carolus Antonius Leenhoff, whose daughter, Suzanne Leenhoff,

became Manet's piano teacher... and then his lover,

possibly the mother of his son,

and finally, his wife.

Suzanne Leenhoff was plump, placid and musically talented.

The story in Zaltbommel is that she was heard playing

by no less a figure than Franz Liszt,

who encouraged her to move to Paris to progress her music.

In Paris, she started giving piano lessons to make ends meet.

When she was 19, she was employed by the Manet family to teach their sons.

We don't know exactly what happened next.

We can only speculate feverishly.

But on January 29th 1852, Suzanne, who was now 22,

gave birth to a son and named him Leon Edouard.

On the birth certificate, the father of this boy, Leon, is named Koella.

No first name, just Koella. Now, this Koella has never been found.

No trace of him exists.

A few years later, however, when Leon was baptised, Edouard Manet served as his godfather.

And since Suzanne and Manet ended up living together, it's usually assumed

that young Edouard Manet, who was only 17 when he met Suzanne,

must have been the father.

He certainly went on to put Leon into many

of his most mysterious pictures.

Recently, however, the very uncomfortable suggestion has been made that Leon's father

wasn't actually Edouard Manet, the painter,

but HIS father, Auguste Manet, the high court judge.

Some sort of cover-up was definitely being orchestrated -

a deal between the Manets and Suzanne.

In public, she never admitted that Leon was her son.

Instead, he would always be presented as her younger brother or a visiting nephew.

Even at her funeral, Leon was never officially accepted as Suzanne's son.

All this would just be tittle-tattle

and not worth our attention if it had no impact on Manet's art.

But of course, it did -

a mysterious, secretive, but powerful impact.

In Manet's first pictures of Suzanne,

she's such a vulnerable and terrorised presence.

This bashful nude in Buenos Aires,

The Surprised Nymph, is inspired by the Bible story

of Susanna and the Elders, which describes how the gentle Susanna was bathing

when a group of lecherous village elders spied on her and demanded her favours.

Something personal is at stake here.

Was Manet's father Leon's father too, or was it Manet himself?

It's something we need to decide in this film.

But one thing's certain.

Beneath this polite, elegant, traditional facade

that the Manets were presenting to the world,

all sorts of powerful raptures and passions were stirring.

And that wasn't just true of the Manets.

It was true of the whole of Paris and of modern life itself.

The Manet family lands were situated just to the north of Paris,

around St Ouen and Gennevillier.

They owned 150 acres of these valuable northern suburbs by the river.

Manet's grandfather and his great-grandfather

had both been mayors of Gennevillier, and had streets named after them.

Manet would come up here for weekends and short holidays.

The family still owned a large house not far from the river.

Of course, at that time, it looked nothing like this.

Progress has been particularly cruel to St Ouen and Gennevillier.

If you want to see how the land actually looked in Manet's time, you need to turn to his art.

The Manet family lands were the setting

for several of his most personal pictures,

including a particularly secretive one

that was about to make Manet famous, though not in the way he wanted.

To succeed as an artist in Manet's Paris, you needed first to succeed at that monstrous, unwelcoming,

unhealthy art event, the Paris Salon.

The Salon was the largest exhibition in the world, and had been for nearly 300 years.

It started in 1673 as a prestigious selection of the best French art.

It took place once a year in a gigantic exhibition hall on the Champs-Elysees.

The Salon was a dog-eats-dog, rat-eats-rat kind of event.

The art, piled high from floor to ceiling,

was selected by a jury of France's most-conservative artists.

The trouble is, everyone needed the Salon.

There was no network yet of art dealers and private collections.

If you wanted to make your name in art and sell your pictures, the Salon was the only way.

Getting in was always tough.

But even by the cruel standards of the Salon,

the jury of 1863 was particularly harsh.

Of the 5,000 or so pictures sent in,

the Salon of 1863 rejected nearly half. It was a massacre.

But also a big political mistake,

because among the artists rejected by this particularly arrogant French jury

was the Emperor's favourite landscape painter, who immediately complained to his sire.

Napoleon III rushed over for a special Salon preview,

and was appalled to find his taste being questioned so brutally.

So, he had one of the unlikeliest brainwaves in the history of modern art

and decided to put on a salon of the rejected works,

the Salon des Refuses.

Housed in the same building as the official Salon,

the rebel show quickly amassed a clutch of dismissive nicknames.

The Salon of the Banished,

the Salon of the Heretics, the Salon of the Pariahs.

Manet showed three paintings, arranged together like a modern altar piece.

On either side, a Spanish subject.

And in the middle, a picture that everyone noticed

and which caused them to gibber and giggle.

GIGGLING

Today, it's one of the most famous images in art

but when it first appeared, at the Salon des Refuses of 1863,

The Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe, or as we rather clunkily call it,

The Luncheon On The Grass, inspired huge amounts of raucous laughter.

"Some seek ideal beauty", smirked a typical critic,

"Monsieur Manet seeks ideal ugliness."

In later years, later centuries, there would be many occasions when

the public would turn up in droves to have a good laugh at modern art.

So it's important to remember that 1863,

the year they all laughed at Manet, was the start of that awful tradition.

Manet's most obvious ambition in the Dejeuner was to modernise a famous old master,

one of the Louvre's one most precious possessions,

Le Concert Champetre,

attributed in those days to Giorgione.

Two fleshy renaissance nymphs loll around a classical landscape

with a pair of male musicians.

The boys have kept their clothes on.

The girls haven't.

This idea, that the men were dressed and the women weren't,

was what Manet took most obviously from Giorgione.

It was also the chief reason for all the giggles.

The girl they guffawed was some common whore

from the Bois de Boulogne, a fille de plaisir.

The men were callow students,

so uncouth they hadn't even taken their hats off in her presence.

The woman has the features of Manet's favourite new model,

Victorine Meurant,

who stares out at us with that compelling directness

that Manet seemed always to notice in her.

It's been suggested, though, that the body in the painting

was actually modelled by Suzanne Leenhoff and that Manet

added Victorine's face later to disguise Suzanne's presence.

I'm rather inclined to believe that.

It's a bulky, fleshy, Rubensian body,

with generous rolls of fat behind her neck

and eminently graspable love handles around her waist.

Those are Suzanne's dimensions, not Victorine's.

The student in the middle, the one with the gormless expression,

was modelled by Suzanne's brother, Ferdinand Leenhoff, a sculptor.

He's basically a cipher in the picture,

he doesn't really mean much.

But the other student, he was posed by Manet's two brothers,

Eugene and Gustav, who took turns at being him.

Now, the actual pose of the second student was borrowed from

a famous painting by Raphael of the Judgement of Paris.

If you look in the lower right hand corner of the Raphael,

you'll see some river gods, arranged in the same way as Manet's group.

There's something else to notice about this student with a hat,

something that's often overlooked.

His actual pose is a mirror image

of Michelangelo's Adam from the Sistine ceiling.

He's in exactly the same pose.

So, Manet's brother is a kind of Adam in reverse.

What about her, the figure at the back?

When the painting was first shown,

she was the subject of much merriment.

People complained that her scale was wrong, she was much too large.

But worse than that, what's she actually doing?

She seems to be douching herself,

washing her privates intimately.

Now, when do French women do that?

Manet himself enjoyed referring to this outrageous image

of contemporary sexual frolics as, "la partie carree."

What we would call, a foursome.

And much ink has been spilt in the search

for the real meaning of Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe.

It could just have been a scene from modern life, a bunch of naughty students having some outdoor fun.

But would that have been worth all this pictorial effort?

It could be a sex scene, pure and simple.

But it feels much too loaded for that.

Or, most intriguingly of all, it could be some veiled rumination

upon Manet's family situation.

Just before the picture was finished, in 1862, Manet's father,

the respectable High Court judge,

died from what we now know was tertiary syphilis.

And the Manet family set about insuring that his reputation would remains spotless

and that the subject of his possible fathering of Leon was never aired.

Unless, that is, you study the paintings of his son,

where the sins of the father sound a mysterious but insistent echo.

Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe was a deliberate act of provocation.

Public bathing in the nude was illegal at the time, and so was mixed bathing.

Everyone in that picture could have been brought here,

to the Palais de Justice,

before Manet's father and prosecuted for immoral behaviour.

A subject with which August Manet was,

of course, personally conversant.

There are telling but secretive details to the Dejeuner...

Hovering in the foliage, its wings outspread, is a bird, a bullfinch.

In Renaissance art, a hovering bird invariably represented

the Holy Ghost, disguised as a dove, arriving with grace at a baptism.

Next to Victorine's discarded clothes,

down in the corner, was a frog.

In religious art, frogs, toads and other creepy-crawlies,

were miniature embodiments of Satan,

slithery stand-ins for the wicked snake that tempted Eve

in the Garden of Eden and led to our downfall.

So is the Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe a disguised portrayal of Adam and Eve,

a painting about the fall of man?

Nearly.

But Manet is never that explicit.

That's not how he works.

He's a suggester of possibilities,

an implier, a hinter.

But I do think he had his father's lapses in mind when he painted this.

Old master sins are being cleverly re-imagined for the modern age

by a brazen Eve from the boulevards and a foppish, studenty Adam,

lounging provocatively around a cut-price modern paradise

that has been lost for the same old Garden of Eden reasons...

Because a man couldn't keep his hands off a woman.

Because a High Court judge died of syphilis

a few months before this picture was finished.

There are various stories about

how and where Manet met Victorine Meurant.

She became his greatest model, but also, a very juicy mystery.

According to one version of the story,

which I must say I would love to believe,

he actually bumped into her outside his father's law courts.

She'd been brought before the judge for illegal street singing.

Manet was on the way to meet his father, he noticed her,

he liked her, and he put her in his art.

Wouldn't that be glorious if it were true?

Another version is that he saw her coming out of a cafe

where she'd been performing that evening,

her guitar tucked quickly under her arm, on the way to another gig.

And that's certainly how he painted her in a delicious early portrayal.

She's in a hurry.

She's hitched up her skirts

and she's nibbling so enticingly at some cherries,

the fruits of paradise.

But the most likely scenario is that he came across her modelling somewhere.

She modelled for Couture, for instance, so he could have seen her there.

And something about her captivated him.

You can see it in all the paintings he made of her.

It doesn't surprise me at all, because she is,

on the evidence of his art, a strangely captivating woman.

STORM CLOUDS RUMBLE AND A CROW CAWS

In October 1863, Manet set off once again for Holland.

He had been before, to look at Dutch painting, but this trip was different.

This time, he was getting married.

No one in Paris had been told about it.

Baudelaire only found out about the wedding on the day Manet left.

They had been together for a decade or more

but none of Manet's friends had met Suzanne or knew anything about her.

So we're dealing here with an exceptionally discreet

and secretive individual, a man who gave nothing away.

No wonder his art is so hard to grasp.

I'm reminded of something the painter Mark Rothko once said,

"There's more power in telling little than in telling all."

Suzanne remains a shadowy figure.

We know she was plump, she played the piano, and that's about it.

Manet kept her away from his friends, and seemed almost

to segregate her in a separate compartment of his life.

The wedding was a glum affair. Manet arrived in early October

and stayed for three weeks, which is the time needed

for the bands to be published in the town hall.

No friends were invited, no family.

Leon wasn't here because he'd been sent temporarily to boarding school.

And so, on 28th October, two days before Suzanne's 34th birthday,

they were married in a civil ceremony in this town hall.

What the good people of the town made of this elegant French dandy's

marriage to their plump and dowdy kinswoman isn't recorded,

but I imagine it surprised them too.

Just before he left for Holland, Manet, who was now 32,

had managed to finish the second of his most infamous nudes.

And this time, the irresistible siren with the flower in her hair

was definitely not Suzanne Leenhoff.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Paris in the 1860s was the place to be.

Modern life in all its busy shades was crowding in on the city.

Manet's Paris was so fashionable. There was plenty of money around

and plenty of new urban pleasures on which to spend it.

Trains, racecourses, dance halls...

And an elegant new breed of city-dweller had emerged to partake of these new urban pleasures.

The poet Baudelaire christened this new type of city-dweller, "the flaneur."

What's a flaneur?

Well, I'm definitely not one.

I'm too slobbish.

The flaneur is the most elegant chap at the races, the one in the best clothes,

who moves exquisitely through the crowd with his gloves and his cane.

Manet, who was always very careful about his appearance,

and famous for his jaunty cravats and his yellow gloves,

was the flaneur's flaneur, an impeccable example of the breed.

Flaneurs had lots of leisure time,

which they spent going to the opera or taking in the races at Longchamp.

On a summer's day,

they might go boating on the Seine with a new female acquaintance

that they'd recently made at one of the fashionable dance halls

that were springing up all over Paris.

Unless, of course, Monsieur already had a mistress, which most messieurs did.

And it was to her boudoir that he would repair at the end of the day

for a few extra-marital thrills, an added soupcon of l'amour.

Of all Manet's pointed evocations of modern life,

the one that seemed to annoy the most people was this one.

Olympia, the most notorious courtesan in Napoleon III's Paris.

Olympia was unveiled at the Paris Salon of 1865

and the sight of her did to the 19th century French audience

more or less what stepping on the tail of a cat does to a cat...

It made them very angry.

Manet was used to bad reviews.

His Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe had already been mauled by the critics.

But nothing could have prepared him for the onslaught of hatred

and mockery that accompanied the unveiling of Olympia.

"A sort of female gorilla",

complained Le Moniteur Universel.

"The putrefying body recalls the horrors of the morgue,"

spat Victor de Jankovic.

"Manet has made himself the apostle of the ugly,"

decided Felix Jarreur.

Now either I'm blind or people in the 1860s had completely different eyesight from me,

because however much I look at Olympia,

I can't see anything ugly or repulsive about her.

I suppose she's quite short, but a gorilla?!

And is this enticing paleness of hers

really the colouring of the morgue?

Isn't she rather tender and beautiful

and a touch nervous about being examined so frankly by us?

Manet based her on Titian's celebrated Venus of Urbino

and one of the things he was trying to do

was to paint a modern Venus for Paris in the 1860s,

a working equivalent of a goddess.

But the name Olympia had other connotations, naughty ones.

Not only was it the kind of stage name used by

high-class prostitutes at the time,

who loved to call themselves Octavia or Artemisia or Aspasia,

Olympia was also the name of one of the most rapacious courtesans

in history, the notorious Olympia Maidalchini.

Olympia Maidalchini was the mistress of Innocent X,

that seemingly formidable Baroque Pope

who had been painted by Manet's great hero, Velazquez.

Velazquez gave us an Innocent X who seems so stern and fierce.

But in real life, Olympia Maldacini had Innocent X in the palm of her hand.

They called her, "La Papessa", the Lady Pope.

And for more than a decade in the 17th century,

Olympia Maldacini ruled the Catholic Church.

So this Olympia, Manet's Olympia, arrived on the Salon's stage

with a dangerous reputation already in place.

He shows her stretched out on a bed.

There's a flower in her hair,

a little black lace around her neck, and on her wrist, a bracelet.

The bracelet contained an actual lock of Manet's hair,

cut off when he was a boy and carried around by his mum.

Make of that what you will.

So Olympia presents herself to us on her bed. And her servant girl,

a mysterious presence at the back, is bringing in a bunch of flowers.

Who are they from?

This is where the action gets really interesting and problematic.

The way Olympia is looking out at us and the way that the servant girl

is showing her the flowers, makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion

that we out here, the picture's spectators, are the clients she's waiting for.

We're the ones who sent her the flowers.

We're the next volunteers for her bed.

This was what was so annoying about the picture.

Every man at the Salon was being accused of being Olympia's client,

of visiting brothels and having mistresses, of paying for love.

And since all of them were doing exactly that,

Olympia hit a very uncomfortable nail right on the head.

The detail that particularly annoyed people and caused the most giggles,

was the black cat at the bottom of the bed.

In Titian's original,

it had been a curled up dog, representing fidelity.

But in Manet's outrageous re-imagining,

the loyal dog is replaced by an angry black pussy,

with its tail stuck provocatively in the air.

See how cattily it turns in our direction.

"Stay away from my mistress!", it seems to be hissing.

"You cad!"

For many years, no one was quite sure when Manet had painted some of his most important pictures.

Then Juliet began to research these matters

and finally tracked down this important studio.

Tell us about this place where we're standing?

It strikes me as rather different from most of the Haussmann period architecture you see around here?

Well, yes, because this was really when Paris was beginning to be developed.

This area where we are now was in the middle of nowhere.

It was open countryside.

There was a great plain of, sort of, bare, derelict ground

between here and the Batignolles, for example.

So, Manet moved into this new building

and he found this very splendid studio.

KNOCKING

Allo? Madame, Madame Boulain? Bonjour.

-Bonjour.

-Merci.

Merci.

Je suis Waldemar Januszczak.

Madame Wilson-Bareau, experte de Manet!

Bonjour.

THEY EXCHANGE GREETINGS IN FRENCH

So, Juliet, this is the space as Manet would have known it?

More or less, yes. I suspect that it wouldn't have had

a staircase and as big a balcony.

And I think he just had a cube, basically.

So, I'm imagining now

that we're in a kind of tall, light-filled space,

and three deep on the walls, some of Manet's greatest pictures.

And we know, unlike many artists, that Manet's studio was,

as it were, like, it had a monastery feel to it.

There was nothing in it that wasn't useful.

There was probably a couch or two, some chairs, a table, and he would

have had pictures stacked in racks and with their face to the wall.

So, Olympia may have been over here...

-Exactly.

-The Old Musician over here.

Yes, one thing that one has to remember is that

paintings were not painted in the twinkling of an eye.

We know, for example, that Olympia must have been begun perhaps even

as early as the late '50s, or certainly 1860 onwards.

I'm sure he goes on adding bits.

I think he added the black cat to Olympia just before it went into the Salon.

-A final touch?

-The final touch.

MEWING

The museum in Mannheim, Germany.

A big statement of a building.

It dates from 1907 and because it's so stern and bossy,

I've always thought it's a particularly suitable location

for one of Manet's most important pictures.

One of the hardest things a painter can do, any painter,

is to capture a resonant moment of their own history.

To make great art out of great politics.

No-one has managed to make an image of the Iraq war, for instance,

that will really speak to subsequent generations.

And in the annals of modern art, I can only think

of two great paintings that address the history of their own times

with appropriate power and resonance.

One is Picasso's Guernica, of course,

the ultimate 20th Century reflection upon the barbarism of war.

And the other...

Is in here.

Manet's Execution Of Maximilian.

MILITARY-STYLE MUSIC PLAYS

It shows the climax of Napoleon III's

most inglorious foreign adventure, his Iraq, his Vietnam.

We're actually in Mexico.

What on earth are the French doing here?

A good question.

The French didn't like the Americans. They still don't.

So they decided to interfere in the affairs of Mexico and to install

a puppet emperor, loyal to the French, on the American doorstep.

The Mexicans, however, already had a ruler they'd voted for themselves.

So, in 1863, Napoleon III engineered what we now call,

"some regime change".

He set in his troops and forcibly imposed an Austrian archduke,

Ferdinand Maximilian, on the Mexican people.

Maximilian was well-meaning and naive.

But he wasn't Mexican and he shouldn't have been here.

It didn't last long.

The French soon learned that keeping a large army in Mexico was impossibly costly.

So, after a couple of disgruntled years,

they pulled out and abandoned their puppet emperor.

And Maximilian, loathed by the people, was overthrown, hunted down,

and as we can see, executed, on June 19th, 1867,

with a couple of his loyal Mexican generals.

Reports of the execution quickly reached Paris and Manet,

the staunch Republican who needed little encouragement to despise Napoleon III,

began work immediately on a war picture

that would powerfully indict the behaviour of the French.

His first version, based on sketchy newspaper reports,

is a wispy, impressionistic thing.

Some men in sombreros,

shooting into the mists as the smoke swirls doomily.

As more and more information about the execution got back to Paris,

Manet kept returning doggedly to the image and starting again.

This painting in the National Gallery in London,

which was cut up after his death, was his second attempt.

By now, he'd learned that the Mexican firing squad

was dressed in uniforms very similar to the ones worn by the French.

So, the Mexican firing squad becomes a surrogate French firing squad.

And Maximilian is being killed by his own side.

The National Gallery picture was set outside

in a dry and scrubby Mexican landscape

that wasn't claustrophobic enough for Manet, not intense enough.

So for this, the final and greatest version,

the culmination, the masterpiece,

Manet puts his firing squad in front of a blank and immovable wall

that seems somehow to concentrate the violence,

and which brings to the scene some of that pent up,

ceremonial intensity of a bullfight.

That's Maximilian in his saintly sombrero,

flanked by the two Mexican generals who stayed loyal to him,

Thomas Mejia and Miguel Miramon.

The firing squad really was that close.

They were lousy shots and that's how it was done.

But in reality, there were three firing squads, one for each victim.

But Manet crowds them all together in one deadly block

to focus the tragedy.

The whole thing seems to be taking place in the slowest of slow motions.

A constant playing and replaying of the scene that seems never

to finish, like an irredeemable sin that can never be scrubbed away.

This figure here fiddling with his gun is crucial.

He's the soldier who will actually deliver the coup de grace

that finally kills Maximilian.

Because, of course, the execution was bungled.

Most of the shots missed, and he had to go over to the struggling body,

place his gun against Maximilian's chest and shoot him point blank.

The face of this final soldier is actually

a lightly disguised portrait of Napoleon III himself. Manet

is accusing his emperor of being personally responsible for all this.

Even more brilliantly,

you see this shadow here?

Who's casting that?

Where does it come from?

The only possible answer is from out here.

We're the ones that are casting it.

And that's the point. Whoever looks at this scene

is being accused of being there and doing nothing.

This act of immense pictorial daring lifts this great war painting

into the realms of an historical masterpiece.

Manet's Death of Maximilian is apportioning universal blame,

and this deliberate entanglement of the man in the street

with a faraway moment of history was new and modern.

Perversely, the only place the painting was actually shown

was America, where it went on a rather desultory tour in the 1870s.

In France, it was never exhibited because it was censored.

So it was only after Manet's death that we finally found out what he'd been up to.

History didn't like Napoleon III much either, or so it seemed.

Because in 1870, it arranged for him to go to war with the Prussians.

And that was a battle the Little Emperor was never going to win.

The Franco-Prussian War didn't last long.

The French, with Napoleon at their head, were no match for Bismarck and the Germans.

The fighting was quickly over.

Here in Paris though, the Prussians decided to starve

the enemy into submission, and that took much longer.

Bismarck had predicted that eight days without cafe au lait would break the Parisians.

But he was wrong.

Paris held out for months. Manet sent Suzanne off to the Pyrenees

while he stayed behind bravely as a gunner in the artillery.

And this place, the Jardin des Plantes, was to prove an invaluable resource for the besieged Parisians,

because pretty much everything in here could be cooked and then eaten.

On the 99th day of the siege, the Christmas menu

began with stuffed donkeys' heads and elephant consomme,

and progressed to roast camel, kangaroo stew and wolf haunch in antelope sauce.

Bonjour.

Lolly, s'il vous plait.

The Manet family cat was eaten, and the writer Theophile Gaultier

describes a delicious new recipe that everyone in Paris was trying.

Rat pate.

Although the siege of Paris was historically crucial because it led

at last to the overthrow of Napoleon III,

aesthetically, it triggered nothing much in Manet's art.

All he had time to scribble down

was this grubby snow scene of Paris during the siege. To keep in contact

with the outside world, the French began using hot air balloons.

And the other great invention of the times was the pigeon post.

Manet's pigeon post letters to Suzanne have survived, and they are,

I suggest, the most important things to come out of the siege.

They're astonishingly tender.

"I put pictures of you all round the bedroom," he writes.

"So every day, you're the first and the last thing I see."

On New Year's Day 1871,

the pigeons carried a letter from him to her

regretting that for the first time

since they'd met, he couldn't give her a New Year's kiss.

Manet is always presented as a cool,

elegant, well-dressed Parisian flaneur.

And most of the time, that's what he was.

But among the secrets that he kept so fiercely hidden from the world

was the secret of his own tenderness.

This deep and warm love he had for his wife.

This sentimentality he was capable of.

It's an important insight, because it helps us to notice

how so many of the women in his art

are having their vulnerability noted by a caring and besotted male gaze.

These are looks that are often described as blank,

but there's nothing blank about them at all.

Many beautiful women passed through Manet's art.

He was a notorious charmer.

Witty, handsome, clever.

Women liked him, and he repaid their interest

by putting them in his pictures and making them irresistible.

This dark beauty here,

Berthe Morisot, was particularly taken with him, and he with her.

He painted her 11 times,

and never failed to respond to her dark, smouldering beauty.

The Morisots were the same social class as the Manets.

Well-to-do upper bourgeoisie.

And just as I would send my daughters to have music lessons, so they sent their daughters to have

art lessons, and Berthe decided to become a painter,

which was unusual for a young woman at the time.

She met Manet some time at the end of the 1860s, and he promptly put her into his art.

This famous painting, Le Balcon, has been invented twice.

Once by Goya in the 18th century, and again by Manet a century later.

In both their cases, the balcony above the street houses

an unreachable beauty, a femme fatale who is too high to touch.

Something about Berthe Morisot reminded Manet of the Goya woman - dark-eyed, sexy.

So he recreated Goya's painting and put her up here,

where we just can't reach her.

It's obvious that she got to him, but he was married and considerably older.

So art historians have tied themselves into exquisite knots

trying to decide whether they actually had an affair.

It's clear from her letters that she hero-worshipped Manet.

She fell into depressions when he wasn't there, and went through intense anorexic phases.

When you look at his pictures of her, you feel you're intruding on a private relationship.

Berthe Morisot went on to marry Manet's brother, Eugene,

so she could finally sign herself Mrs E. Manet.

My own view is that theirs was an unconsummated passion,

full of frustrated desire on both sides.

In real life, it must have been rather painful.

But in artistic terms, it brought such a sizzle to his portrayals of her.

Morisot did something else for Manet.

As a painter herself, she was soon to be involved with the Impressionists,

and her example was to have a delicate impact on Manet's touch.

He never became a proper Impressionist himself, as we'll see.

But he came close, and that was due, in some part, to her.

You see those big red windows up on the first and second floor?

Something exceptionally important in art happened up there.

Because that's where Impressionism was born.

In April 1874, a group of disaffected artists

decided they'd had enough of being rejected by the Paris Salon, so they organised their own exhibition.

It was a chaotic affair.

The photographer Nadar had been using the space as a studio,

but it had got too expensive for him and Nadar was moving on.

In the meantime, he was happy to let the disaffected artists put on a show in there.

The artists gave themselves an impressive sounding name -

La Societe Anonyme Des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs.

And on April 15th 1874,

they opened the doors of Nadar's studio to the paying public.

There were 30 artists in the show.

Ten of the pictures were by someone called Degas.

There was another nine by a man called Monet.

Three by a certain Cezanne, and five by Pissarro.

The entrance fee was one franc, and by the end of the day, 175 people

could be bothered to climb up there and see what was inside.

No-one liked it much.

The reviews were coruscating.

A particularly cynical reviewer, Louis Leroy,

picked out a moody picture by Monet,

painted of Le Havre at dawn, and called Impression Sunrise.

"This bunch," he chuckled, "are just Impressionists."

The name stuck, and from now on,

the bunch would be known as "the Impressionists."

Manet wasn't in the show.

The others kept badgering him to join, but he refused.

Altogether, the Impressionists had eight exhibitions, and Manet wasn't doing any of them.

"I will never exhibit in the shack next door," he explained to Degas, haughtily.

"I enter the Salon through the front door."

But the Salon didn't want him, as usual.

Half his pictures were rejected.

And the attentions of this new gang of admirers began to seem rather appealing.

Manet usually spent the summer by the sea. But in 1874,

he decided to stay in Paris,

painting in and around his family lands,

with that Impressionist chap, Monet.

Manet had known Monet for several years.

And you know that confusion that people still feel today between Monet and Manet?

Well, it was always there. The first time that Monet showed at the Paris Salon,

in the same room as Manet in 1865, Manet was appalled

and accused Monet of deliberately using the similarity between their names to get himself noticed.

But after this shaky beginning, their friendship flourished.

Monet said Manet is the "Raphael of water."

Their relationship was based on two things, mutual respect and money.

Manet was forever lending cash to the impoverished Monet, and Monet was forever asking for it.

In the fine summer of 1874, Manet and Monet explored the river together.

Monet had rigged up this floating studio for himself,

a rowing boat with a makeshift tarpaulin for a cabin.

Manet painted him at work there, while Madame Monet sat fretfully at the back avoiding the sun.

Manet had worked outdoors before, on the beach, by the sea, but never as keenly as he did during

this great Impressionist summer of his on the banks of the Seine.

It was as if he was taking the Impressionists on at their own game,

showing them all how it should be done.

The most ambitious painting he did was a view from here,

with Argenteuil on the other side of the river.

It shows one of his wife's brothers, Rudolph Leenhoff, flirting

on the river bank with a local floozy he'd picked up at a dance.

We don't know her name.

We just know that she was a femme de plaisir, and a frequent visitor to the local dance halls.

When Manet showed his view of Argenteuil at the next Salon, the critics rounded on him again

and had a particularly good laugh at the Mediterranean blue with which he'd painted the Seine.

And it's true, there's not much blue outside there today.

But get the sun in the right place, and turn up here at the right

time of day, and you'll see that Manet was painting the truth.

And you'll see all this coming to life.

It isn't really the weather that interests him, or the play of light on the water.

Surely what interests Manet more is the relationship between the couples.

The picture they paint of the modern world, and its impact on the friendship between men and women.

I came across an amusing cartoon the other day on the front cover of a satirical magazine, and it showed

Manet wearing a wobbly crown and holding a vivid palette in his hand.

The headline was, "The King of Impressionism."

Because that's what everybody thought he was.

But he wasn't really.

The modern life that Manet painted wasn't carefree enough to be impressionist.

That summer, he'd begun feeling pains in his legs.

Walking had begun to hurt.

And although he didn't know it yet, the terrible truth was

that just like his father, he'd contracted syphilis.

It was extremely prevalent. Of course, in the 19th century,

it was an incurable condition, it was a major cause of

nervous system problems,

and a major cause of skin problems in France.

There were whole hospitals dedicated to the treatment of syphilis.

So people were aware, were they, of what they were dealing with?

-They knew it was a sexually transmitted disease?

-They did.

It was like a physical manifestation of a kind of moral problem, so it had a mythology that grew up around it,

it almost was a punishment for behaviour that was considered to be inappropriate at the time.

With Manet, the initial symptoms were that he just felt pains in his legs?

That's right. It sounds very much like he had a condition called tabes dorsalis,

which is where syphilis affects the spine, particularly the back part of the spine which controls

-movement in the legs.

-That might be why he had to use a cane all the time?

Absolutely, and one of the characteristic problems that people with syphilis get

when it starts affecting their legs is that they are unable to balance without using visual cues.

You become unsteady on your feet and more likely to fall.

Manet seems to have been in, well, I suppose the modern phrase for it is in denial about what he had, because

right to the very end, he just refused to accept that his condition was incurable.

Absolutely. And up until penicillin came along, it WAS incurable.

We don't know where he got it.

We don't know who he got it from, or when.

But we do know how grimly it began to affect him, now that he was in his 40s.

Manet was too ill now to get out much.

He stopped frequenting the cafes where he'd gone to gossip about art.

The range of new urban pleasures still open to him

was whittled down to two. The first of these

was the company of beautiful young women, who passed through his studio and whom he'd paint

in a series of delightful,

impressionistic renderings of the perfect Parisian girl about town.

And when he wasn't enjoying the spectacle of beautiful women,

Manet began painting a series of gorgeous little still lifes.

Just a few flowers in a vase,

quick-fire evocations of an imperishable spring.

What Manet's friends could never have suspected

was that against all the odds,

this man who was having such trouble painting little flower studies

still had one huge statement in him.

Manet surprised everyone by somehow finding the strength

and the ambition to produce one final masterpiece.

In 1869, a new nightclub opened in Paris.

It was where everyone went, the new place to be.

Its original name was the Folies de Trevise, but the Duc de Trevise

objected, so the name was changed to the Folies-Bergere.

Why did the Duke object?

Because of what went on at the Folies in those days.

The flirting, the drinking, the prostitution.

Everyone paid two francs to get in.

Young girls, old girls and those in between.

So the decadence here was democratic.

Manet was a regular visitor.

He could lose himself in the smoke and forget his illness.

At the Folies-Bergere, nobody noticed that he needed a cane now to walk with.

One night, he encountered a particular barmaid.

Her name was Suzon.

Not Suzanne, but Suzon, which was close enough for Manet.

So he asked her to pose for him, and painted her so memorably.

The result is perhaps his most involving and thought-provoking picture.

It hangs now at the Courtauld Institute in London.

And ever since it was painted in the winter of 1882,

people have puzzled over it.

Suzon stands at the bar and gazes sadly into space.

At least, I think she's sad.

Others disagree. This elusive look on her face

has been described as blank, bored,

over-made up and even under-made up.

There's no consensus.

She's dressed in the typical barmaid uniform of the Folies.

Black bodice, frilly neckline, except for these flowers

across her decolletage.

Those are unusual. At the Folies-Bergere,

the barmaids generally displayed a little more of themselves.

There's even a naughty cartoon on the subject.

So she's at the bar, and she's serving a customer who's out here, where I am.

But as you can see, if I'm here and the cameraman is behind me,

then the three of us form a horribly confusing and ugly reflection, overlapping and messy.

So Manet, in a brilliant and fearless bit of modern picture-making,

has actually moved the reflection from behind Suzon,

where you can't see it, to over here, where you can.

Bookloads of speculation have been published about this mysterious reflection.

But the simple truth is, if it had stayed where it should be,

we couldn't have seen it.

In the reflection, Suzon is serving a top-hatted chap with a moustache,

rather blurred and insubstantial.

He's been described as sinister, but shadowy is a better word.

And of course, he is you, in your Belle-Epoque form.

There are other details to note as well.

Up in the corner, a pair of dangling legs,

a trapeze artiste is performing for the crowd.

Among the bottles, some Bass beer.

The Folies-Bergere was now popular with English tourists.

What were they here for?

What can it all mean?

What are we being told?

The fact that so many people have so many views about the Folies-Bergere

is proof of the painting's potency.

This is one of the greatest masterpieces in London.

It never fails to set the emotions whirling and the mind ticking.

My own view is that it's a simpler painting than we usually admit.

Manet is showing us his tender side again, that remarkable empathy he had with modern women.

The shifted reflection has become the barmaid's outer reality, the world out here.

She, meanwhile, stands and dreams in her inner reality,

cut off from us in a world of her own.

Suzon is another of his Suzannes, a female victim of the male gaze,

a casualty of the city.

And art historians can twist themselves into as many compositional knots as they want,

but they can't change the fact that this is a painting about a girl lost in her own thoughts.

Sad, exposed, vulnerable, and therefore, so very modern.

The Folies-Bergere was to be Manet's final masterpiece.

He had saved his greatest fireworks till last.

The illness had now gotten so fierce that he could no longer stand up to paint.

The curtain was falling.

The play was done.

By the winter of 1882, he could no longer move.

His leg had swollen up into a giant, black mess.

Gangrene had set in, and when the doctors touched his toes, his nails fell off.

The only hope left was amputation.

So they cut his leg off just below the knee.

But it was too late, and it was clear

he only had days to live.

Manet wrote a hasty will, leaving everything to Suzanne,

and adding the firm instruction

that on her death, Leon was to inherit his estate.

It's the kind of thing you do for a son, isn't it?

And although we'll never know for sure if Leon was fathered by Manet, or by Manet's father,

or by someone else entirely, in the end,

this relationship between a secretive painter

and the young man he painted so often is surely a paternal one.

At least, that's what I thought yesterday.

Today, I'm not so sure.

And tomorrow, I'll go back to thinking it's the father again.

That's Manet for you.

Slippery as an eel.

As for his position as an artist, I can't think of any painter

who was further ahead of his own times than Manet.

Did he invent modern art?

No, of course not. One man could never do that.

Did he punch a hole in the wall, though, through which modernity could pour?

Oh, yes, he did that all right.

The end came quietly, in the middle of the evening.

He wasn't religious, so he waved away the Archbishop of Paris,

who waited until Manet was comatose

before going against his wishes and administering the last rites.

He died at seven o'clock on April 30th, 1883, aged just 51.

He was buried here at Passy Cemetery,

near Berthe Morisot's house.

His coffin was carried proudly by Claude Monet and Emile Zola.

Degas, who was too old to help, walked behind them and could be heard to mutter,

"Il etait plus grand que nous le croyons."

"He was greater than we thought."

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