The repetition of history:
Everyone’s a critic
Two weeks and 140 years ago something happened in Mexico that got Éduard Manet and a whole lot of other people upset. What happened next is also an amazing story.
Manet, not content at having tossed bombs into the courtyard of public opinion with a pair of inflammatory paintings featuring gratuitous nudity, set out in 1867 to blow a hole in French politics with this festive Mexican scene. Then he exported the resentment that it caused to America, to see what kind of damage he could foment there. It was a near-complete rout all the way — for Manet, that is.
Monsieur Manet, a dementedly provocative mass of quirks on two legs, was at the time actually persevering in art long enough to be gaining some critical and public acceptance. The avant garde had started to catch up with him and tempers had cooled about the pompously naked “Olympia” and the muffin-in-the-buff in “Dejeuner sur l’herbe”. Time for another unholy scandal, he seems to have decided.
Politics obliged by providing the subject matter wrapped in newsprint: Maximilian, the Habsburg duke whom Napoleon III had maniacally named emperor of Mexico three years earlier, had been abandoned there when the French troops were yanked out at the outset of a civil war, and had now, on June 19, 1867, been shot by a firing squad. The travesty boiled Manet’s republican blood and he went after Napoleon with vermillion-tinged brushes in both hands. See the rest.
