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Beeny Manet Morgue PDF
Beeny Manet Morgue PDF
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to Representations
Even the most determined enemies of Edouard Manet’s talent admit that he
paints inanimate objects well.
—Emile Zola, 1867
a b s t r a c t In 1864, with his Christ and the Angels, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York,
Manet drew an uneasy connection between the Paris salon and the public morgue, replacing the
eloquent, universal body we expect to find in a religious history painting with a silent and particular
corpse of the kind exhibited at the new Morgue of Paris. This replacement marked Manet’s rupture with
the French tradition of religious history painting and signaled the birth of a new aesthetic vision, born at
the Morgue, and defined by Zola as Naturalism. Rep re s en ta t io ns 122. Spring 2013 © The Regents
of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 51–82. All rights
reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University
of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2013.122.1.51. 51
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Thus, by midcentury, the Morgue had come to stand for a new mode of
regarding bodies—a mode that implied a heterogeneous mass audience;
a mode at once coldly appraising and salacious, forensic and prurient;
a mode that denied expressive agency to the body presented (or repre-
sented).23 Charles Dickens described this new way of looking in his 1863
account of the institution:
There was a little pity, but not much, and that mostly with a selfish touch in
it. . . . There was more of a secretly brooding contemplation and curiosity. . . . There
was a wolfish stare at the object. . . . And there was a much more general, purpose-
less, vacant staring at it—like looking at waxwork, without a catalogue, and not
knowing what to make of it.24
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Christ’s dirtiness, it would seem, more than his deadness, was the issue of
concern. For of course the bare fact of Christ’s deadness did not make the
painting radical. The slumped central figure and basic composition seem to
derive from Paolo Veronese’s Christ with the Virgin and an Angel (fig. 9) or
from seventeenth-century Spanish precedents, such as Francisco Ribalta’s
Dead Christ with Two Angels (fig. 10), a painting then in the Paris collection of
James-Alexandre Pourtalès-Gorgier, another of whose pictures likely inspired
the Dead Toreador.34
Manet’s unflinching approach to Christ’s bodily death also relates the
image to older iconographic types: particularly the recumbent Christ in the
tomb.35 Perhaps the most celebrated example of that subject in the nine-
teenth century, as it remains today, was Hans Holbein’s 1521 painting in
Basel (fig. 11).36 The picture, which plays a sinister role in Fyodor Dostoyev-
sky’s 1868 novel The Idiot, presents Christ as an emaciated corpse, his mouth
agape, his fingers clenched in rigor mortis, his eyes rolled back into their
sockets.37 Naturally, the freak-show vividness of such imagery was not in-
tended simply to titillate; in Leo Steinberg’s famous formulation, ‘‘Realism,
the more penetrating the better,’’ was, in the Renaissance, ‘‘a consecrated
form of worship.’’38 By emphasizing Christ’s literal, physiological suffering
and death, Holbein could underscore the twin miracles of his incarnation
and resurrection. To redeem mankind and be resurrected, Christ had first
to die. Thus, by highlighting Christ’s deadness, Holbein’s picture could
point the way to resurrection and redemption.
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figure 12. Philippe de Champaigne, The Dead Christ, before 1654. Oil on canvas.
Musée du Louvre, Paris.
A Christian Painting?
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Hurel suspended judgment on his old friend’s work, despite his suspicion of
its underlying antireligious sentiment, because he could not be certain what
it actually meant, ‘‘à quoi’’ precisely ‘‘tend son oeuvre.’’ Another reason for
Hurel’s surprising suspension of judgment emerges from the account of the
1865 Salon given by Hurel’s colleague, Félix Jahyer, another ultra-Catholic
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The fact that Manet may not have been a ‘‘véritable croyant’’ thus did not
exclude his picture from the possession of theological meaning, in the eyes
of contemporary critics. Through his contact with Hurel, Manet’s work
might have come to ‘‘reflect’’ religious ideas that its maker did not share.
But the image itself gives no basis to speculation that primarily religious
concerns drove the artist to take on this most Catholic of subjects.
In the end Manet’s interest in treating a sacred subject surely had less to
do with either a profound religious sentiment or a rebellious desire to flout
Catholic doctrine than with his need to confront the French academic
tradition—and the relationship it implied between image and text—in its
most potent and public form: religious history painting. Coming up in
Thomas Couture’s atelier in the mid 1850s, when the master was completing
his suite of decorations for the Chapel of the Virgin at the church of Saint-
Eustache and when the state was handing out commissions for religious
paintings with unprecedented liberality, Manet belonged to a generation
that still understood ambitious painting as precisely the painting of religious
histories.55 Religious history painting was the arena in which the relationship
between form and meaning was most hotly and publicly contested.56 Witness
the caustic reception of Couture’s paintings—deemed insufficiently ideal-
ized—upon their unveiling in 1856. To paint a religious history picture as
willfully unintelligible as Manet’s, to exhibit at the salon a body so obstinately
resistant to reading—devotional or otherwise—was itself a radical gesture.
Here Bataille’s modernist proclivities are plain enough. The notion of paint-
ing’s ‘‘natural silence’’—much like that of modernism’s ‘‘will to silence,’’—
finds its echo in Zola’s theory of Naturalism, to which I will return.64 History
painting did not, as Bataille would have us believe, come crashing to an end
with Manet, but Bataille’s analysis forces us to acknowledge the radicalism of
Manet’s renunciation, his refusal to paint a picture that could be read in any
conventional sense. We can interpret Christ and the Angels neither as
a straightforward devotional work nor even as a violent renunciation of
Catholic doctrine. Confronted with the cadaver’s insistent and uncommu-
nicative corporeality, we can no longer read text into image, word into flesh.
This body is not schooled in Poussin’s alphabet.65
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Renan did not deny the possibility of resurrection, but his scientific demands—
randomly selected subjects, a panel of expert observers, and, most important,
iterable results—were, of course, incompatible with an understanding of
Christ’s resurrection as a miraculous unicum. They reflect Renan’s positivist
privileging of visible proof over the written testimony of the gospels.
The Frankenstein image Renan conjured of a laboratory resurrection,
moreover, resonated with contemporary fantasies of Morgue cadavers come
to life. The new, scientific facility, opened in 1864, sought to scrub the insti-
tution clean of a morbid mythology that had grown up around its old location
in the Place du Marché Neuf,78 but the penny press loved the Morgue, and
authors of sensational novels continued to set stories of unholy resurrection
there. The 1872 pocket novel Les Myste`res de la Morgue (fig. 14), for example,
describes a drowned convict displayed on a slab behind the great glass
window, who, quite suddenly ‘‘open[s] eyes wild but alive, most alive, and
gather[s] his strength to rise.’’79 Resurrection haunted the Morgue, an irra-
tional specter within the institution’s new positivist regime. The possibility—
or threat—of resurrection, hovers over Manet’s picture, too. The apparent
biological density of Christ’s corpse allows us to imagine him as a Morgue
zombie, opening his eyes like the pocket novel’s drowned man.
Among the countless tales of the Morgue and its specters, the
most vivid by far is Emile Zola’s 1867 Thére`se Raquin. The novel tells the story
of a murder and its consequences for those responsible. Zola’s antihero,
Laurent, first visits the Morgue to see whether his victim has turned up there:
He went straight to the glass that separates the spectators from the cadavers; he glued
his pale face to the panes; he looked. Before him were ranged the gray slabs. Here and
there, on the slabs, naked bodies made marks of green and yellow, white and red.80
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against his gray grounds; Laurent’s stare amounts to a kind of grisly formal
analysis. Just as the Salon could turn ordinary Parisians into amateurs of
painting, so too could the Morgue transform them into amateurs of death.
Having given up on finding his victim, Laurent returns to the Morgue for his
own amusement, taking
strange pleasure from looking violent death in the face. . . . The spectacle amused
him. . . . This brutally outstretched nudity, bloodstained, torn in places, attracted
and held him.81
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For Zola, the picture typified Manet’s new way of painting precisely because it
relied upon a new way of seeing, uninflected by moral meaning. The cadaver
appears not as Christ—that is, enunciating a sacred text—but simply as
a cadaver, ‘‘a fact,’’ in Elkins’s formulation, an ‘‘object, that can express itself
merely by being seen.’’ The painting’s appeal resided in its refusal of eloquence,
the frank uncommunicativeness that made other critics ask whether this
Christ was a Christ at all. Of course, the question was not so immaterial to
Zola as he would have had his reader believe. This cadaver painted in full light
both is and isn’t just any cadaver. To depict the body of Christ as a nameless
corpse dredged from the Seine was to sum up the Naturalist rebellion—its
privileging of flesh over word, ‘‘blood and nerves’’ over ‘‘soul.’’ Manet had
painted a corpse that was simply there, and thereness would become the orga-
nizing principle of Zola’s aesthetics. ‘‘Our artists are poets,’’ Zola famously
complained, but Manet was the exception.92 If academic history painting
continued to aspire to eloquence, the essential condition of language,
Manet’s Dead Christ aspired to a kind of silence, which Zola, the Naturalist
protomodernist, considered the essential condition of images.93
That the terrible silence, the grim Naturalism of both the Dead Christ and
Thére`se Raquin should have emerged from the Morgue is surely no accident.
The institution, as we have seen, posited a new model of seeing—a form of
vision without articulable meaning—in which even the most potentially
eloquent object, the human body, might be estranged, disenchanted, and
rendered speechless. By importing this form of vision into a history painting
of heroic scale and sacred subject, Manet turned his picture into a sort of
allegory for the death of history painting. Christ’s cadaver negates the aca-
demic doctrine of history painting as word-made-flesh, leaving us instead
with painting as flesh itself, as corpse, as thing.
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I wish to thank Anne Higonnet for the reading group where this article began
and Cordula Grewe for her guidance throughout its preparation. I am also
grateful to Stephen Eisenman and the other panelists in the session of the
2010 College Art Association conference where I first presented this material,
as well as to David Freedberg, Scott Allan, and Abraham Frank for their criti-
cism and encouragement.
1. Victor de Jankovitz, E´tude sur le Salon de 1865 (Besançon, 1865), 23–24:
‘‘L’auteur nous représente,’’ complained one critic ‘‘sous le nom d’Olympia,
une jeune fille. . . . Le corps d’une couleur faisandée, rappelle l’horreur de la
Morgue.’’ Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
2. Victor Fournel [Geronte, pseud.], ‘‘Les Excentriques et les grotesques,’’ La
Gazette de France, June 30, 1865: ‘‘exposée toute nue sur son lit, comme un
cadavre sur les dalles de la Morgue.’’
3. Ego [pseud.], ‘‘Courrier de Paris,’’ Le Monde Illustré, May 13, 1865, 291: ‘‘Son
corps a la teinte livide d’un cadavre exposé à la Morgue.’’
4. Paul de Saint-Victor for La Presse, May 28, 1865: ‘‘La foule se presse, comme à la
Morgue, devant l’Olympia faisandée.’’
5. The salient examples of these approaches appear in T. J. Clark, The Painting of
Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984) (Princeton, 1999),
esp. 96, and Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven, 2002), esp. 158.
6. See the official report: César Daly, ‘‘La Nouvelle Morgue de Paris,’’ La Revue
générale de l’architecture et des travaux publics 22 (1864): 230, maps 33–39. On the
curtain, see Firmin Maillard, Notes Générales sur la Morgue de Paris (Paris, 1877),
8.
7. The painting Dead Toreador, now at the National Gallery in Washington, is
a fragment of the larger composition called Incident in a Bullfight that Manet
exhibited in 1864. For a reconstruction of the complete painting, which
included another fragment now in the Frick Collection, see Ann Hoenigswald’s
contribution to Manet’s The Dead Toreador and The Bullfight: Fragments of a Lost
Salon Painting Reunited, exh. cat. (New York, 1999). For another perspective on
the proliferation of corpses in Manet’s work at this moment, see James Rubin,
‘‘Manet’s Heroic Corpses and the Politics of Their Time,’’ in Perspectives on
Manet, ed. Therese Dolan (Burlington, VT, 2012), 119–38.
8. See Tony Bennett, ‘‘The Exhibitionary Complex,’’ in The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory, and Politics (London, 1995), 17–88.
9. A reporter for Le Paris (August 31, 1891) referred to the Morgue as the only
‘‘free theater in Paris with the exception of July 14 and Sunday at the Salon.’’
Quoted in Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-
sie`cle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), 61.
10. On the question of nudity and respectability at the salon, see Jennifer L. Shaw,
‘‘The Figure of Venus: Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Salon of 1863,’’ Art History
14, no. 4 (December 1991): 540–70.
11. As George Hamilton and Carol Armstrong have pointed out, Manet completed
the Olympia during the summer of 1863 but held it back, despite its composi-
tional resonances with the Dead Christ, until the Salon of 1865. See George
Hamilton, Manet and His Critics (New Haven, 1954), 56, and Armstrong, Manet
Manette, 158–59.
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