Dali House

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.

Between 1867 and ‘69 he painted four versions of Max’s sorrowful end. The first one, shown here, missed the mark in its haste to capture the chaos of the violent scene. The second, below, was an exercise in paring away the flesh to get at the marrow of the matter; the third was a study building up to the last.

Art historians now rank his final version of “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian”, the one that appears at the top of this post, right up there with Goya’s “The Third of May, 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid”, from which it borrowed heavily, and Picasso’s “Guernica”, as paintings of political events that managed to hit the nail on the head and not seem manipulative, maudlin or morally pushy.

This time Manet had now walled in the event, cutting off any chance of escape from the ugly truth, and turned the riflemen’s backs in deadly resoluteness. The smoke of their gunpowder filled the air with clouds that suggest reverie, allowing room for contemplation. We see the brave Maximilian flanked by his Mexican generals, Tomás Mejía, who has just been hit by the first round, and fearful Miguel Miramón, gripping his emperor’s hand.

Terrific, said Manet, and put it in a bag to take to the Salon. I’ve read two versions of why it didn’t get there. One is that he was “informed unofficially” that it would be refused, not because is slagged off Napoleon but because it lacked any gesture or facial expression or other indicator of moral certitude — it was too ambiguous! The thoroughly influential novelist and critic Émile Zola pointed out that the firing squad’s uniform looked trés French, so it was pretty obvious here who was being blamed for Maximilian’s death, but that didn’t cut it with the decision-makers.

The other version was that either Napoleon’s censors grabbed the painting and sliced it into pieces, or at least that Manet himself or someone in his family did so proactively. Shortly after Manet’s death, Edgar Degas — outraged by the vandalism — recovered the fragments and glued them in their proper places on a large canvas. This “collage” was purchased by the National Gallery in London in 1918, though the pieces yet again went their separate ways at some point, only to be reassembled once more in 1992.

The Salon of the following year didn’t even want to hear the name Manet, so he organised an exhibition of his own in his studio. One visitor asked about the large canvas that was turned facing the wall, and Manet replied that it wasn’t done yet.

By the end of 1869, even with a thaw in the domestic political climate, it was clear that Manet’s diatribe in oils, now in its final version, wouldn’t be seen publicly anytime soon in France, if ever. Somebody could get in trouble if it was publicly shown. Enter Émilie Ambré and Gaston de Beauplan with an ambitious plan: take it to the United States, get the critics there swooning, then the English will want to see it, and then France can’t very well miss out, right?

The idea seemed flawless. Franco-US relations, damaged during America’s civil war, were improving again. Americans hated the kind of political tyranny assailed in the painting. Manet could become famous overseas. And the piece could earn a lot of dough on one of the Great Picture exhibitions then common on both sides of the Atlantic — highly publicised single-painting tours, superstar treatment all the way, hot tickets, fan frenzy, the lot.

Plus, there was the added drawing power of Ambré and Beauplan, sort of the Liz and Dick of their day, forever hauling around with them a whiff of scandal that no one could ignore.

Émilie Ambré was an olive-skinned, Algerian-born entertainer with ambitions of becoming a famous opera diva. While her performing troupe was in The Hague in 1877 she had an affair with Holland’s playboy king William III, whom she claimed had thanked her with a bag of jewels and the title Comtesse d’Amboise.

Ambré knew Manet through the Paris theatre scene and reckoned he might be able to talk his pal Antonin Proust into reviving “Carmen” onstage with her in the title role. Manet went as far as painting her portrait as Carmen — and entrusting her with Maximilian’s Yankee holiday.

Meanwhile Émilie may or may not have been married to Gaston de Beauplan, a noble scion whose family tree opposed the nuptials in court, Dad vowing to have Gaston chucked in a mental asylum if he went through with his intentions. So when Ambré and Beauplan rowed into New York harbour in October 1879, they were carrying with them much more of interest to the press than just a painting by a Frenchman who very few Americans knew.

Her Majesty’s Italian Opera Co, Émilie’s outfit, got down to performing right away, and on December 1 Manet’s Execution started its own two-week run. Admission was 25 cents, the standard fee for Great Picture displays, but the show was cursed with public obliviousness. Ambré and Beauplan had no clue about what they were doing.

For one thing, they arranged the exhibition in a Broadway basement far, far south of the entertainment district, and at the same time as the circus. Greasepaint easily trumped oil paint. A few hundred posters were put up and just as quickly posted over; there was no newspaper advertising. The art critic for the New York Herald was hired to write a preview but decided that Manet’s hand had been a bit loose with the pigment and the work seemed unfinished. Only 120 invitations were sent out for the grand opening; only half were accepted.

Planning and promotion improved considerably in Boston, where the opera troupe and the Execution relocated on December 30, but the painting exhibition from January 3 to 9, 1880, still drew only about 100 people. Manet, who’d invested his own money in the tour, was taking a bath. When the performers moved on to Chicago, the painting went back to New York to wait in humiliated darkness for their return.

In a lengthy account of the failure on the website 19thCenturyArtWorldwide.org, Mishoe Brennecke lists many reasons. Chief among them was the European entrepreneurs’ miscalculation of American sentiment.

“The United States had refused to recognise Maximilian’s rule and maintained its support for Benito Juárez, the republican president … [It] pressured France to remove her troops, warning that their presence on North American soil was a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Fearing conflict, Napoleon III complied, and by mid-March 1867, French forces had departed Mexico, but despite encouragement from both France and the United States, Maximilian refused to remove himself to safety.”

A lithograph based on Manet’s painting.

The Americans thus saw Maximilian as having been complicit not only in the Mexican intrigue but in his own doom. He didn’t help matters with the “Black Decree”, which sanctioned the immediate execution of anyone found carrying arms, meaning republican rebels. When Manet’s picture washed up in the States, Mexico was still a mess, and Americans weren’t exactly enthusiastic to hear more about it.

Other than that, Brennecke writes, Manet’s picture wasn’t all that Great a Picture in the eyes of American critics, and anyway, people were getting tired of this Great Picture pomp.

“A really great picture is too noble a creation to be made a peep-show of,” she quotes one observer as saying. “To cart a painting from city to city, advertise it, illuminate [it], drape it, and spout over it is really to lower its dignity.”

Some critics found the subject matter too appalling. The Boston papers wondered who would have the “impudence” to paint such “howling blood-and-thunder melodrama”, and yet there were complaints that it lacked emotion. It was “unrelieved by any sympathy or sentiment”, the Boston Journal moaned. Elsewhere they chipped away at its historical accuracy. “The three men were over two paces apart,” the New York Herald hooted pedantically, “and were shot standing on a hillside with their executioners below them and inside a hollow square of 4,000 men. Mejía, besides, who is represented as of about the same height as his companions, was a very short man.”

Such details were readily available not just from published eyewitness accounts but from photographs of the event itself, circulating surreptitiously in France. The one here, credited to Roberto Sandoval, now belongs to the Hispanic Society of America.

Manet chose ultimately to alter the scene; his reasons remain in debate, but it’s pretty apparent that his intent was political.

John Elderfield writes in “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian”, released last year by MoMA Publications, that the artist “most likely did not know for certain what, precisely, happened at Querétaro”, just as the public today remains largely unaware of what’s really happening in Iraq.

“As the reports filtered in from abroad, they proved to be contradictory, unreliable, censored — as the matter was a huge embarrassment to Napoleon’s government. We must imagine Manet poring over a succession of newspaper stories of a distant, horrifying event, hoping for clarification and definitive truth, as we do now, and either not finding it or disbelieving it, as we do now. We must also imagine him piecing together fragments of news, knowing that they did not realistically or completely describe what had happened, but offered, rather, the means of an imaginative act of rediscovery to create truly political art.”

There are at least two novels about Maximilian’s execution and several celluloid versions, but these are the fundamental facts, and you can see where Elderfield gets his Iraq analogy:

In 1853 Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna asked Napoleon III to send troops to protect his life, and in exchange the French could install a ruler of their choosing. In January 1862 more than 10,000 British, French and Spanish troops arrived at Veracruz, ostensibly to force the government to pay its foreign debts. When it became clear that Napoleon, seeking foreign mineral wealth and a popularity boost at home, also had regime change in mind, Britain and Spain cleared out.

The emperor ultimately sent 38,000 troops, but after military setbacks in the face of a popular uprising against the French occupation, led by Benito Juárez, president of the Mexican Republic, he agreed to cut the number back to 25,000 — until they could be replaced by native forces.

The French, meanwhile, had picked Ferdinand Maximilian, 32, an archduke whose brother was the emperor of Austria, to assume command from its provisional government. He was installed as Mexico’s puppet emperor, and when he and his 24-year-old wife Charlotte — daughter of Leopold I of Belgium and first cousin to Britain’s Queen Victoria — arrived in June 1864, they brought along 6,000 Austrian and 2,000 Belgian soldiers. Though Napoleon wanted Mexico pacified, not conquered, Maximilian began his regime viciously by ordering the execution of all captured republican soldiers.

In the face of further humbling defeats at republican hands, Napoleon finally agreed to abandon his American adventure. Maximilian wanted to leave with the French troops, but Empress Charlotte convinced him that he had the backing of the Mexican people and could not withdraw honorably. She returned to Europe and repeatedly pleaded with Napoleon and Pope Pius IX for support, telling the pontiff that someone was trying to poison her and being deemed insane for her troubles. She never returned to Mexico.

Maximilian agreed to meet Juárez at Queretaro to negotiate, but his own imperial guard betrayed him. He surrendered on May 15 and was swiftly tried and convicted.

At the execution on June 19 (shown here is a lithograph by Goineau of the event), Maximilian and Generals Mejía and Miramón were placed well apart, each with his own firing squad awaiting the command. The emperor was on the right, not in the middle, Juárez reserving that “place of honour” for Miramón, who had set up a rival government in 1859-60 and subsequently nearly captured him in a lightning raid on Zacatecas. (Other accounts suggest it was Maximilian who felt that Miramón deserved to be central, in a genuine nod to his greater honour.)

“May my blood be the last to be spilled as a sacrifice for the country,” Maximilian declared, according to a physician present at the execution, “and if it did require some of its sons, may it be for the good of the nation and never to betray it.” He then reportedly gave each of his executioners a gold coin and told them to aim for his heart. It was money wasted.

Upon the first volley Miramón lay dead, but the others were only wounded. Mejía was in fact still standing. A soldier stepped forward and shot him in the head. Another stood over Maximilian to finish him off, but only managed to shoot him in the lung and ignite his vest with the musket flash. Someone threw water on him to extinguish the flames.

One account had it that two more soldiers tried in succession to complete the kill, but both of their rifles misfired. Finally the sergeant killed Maximilian with a shot at point-blank range. A forensic study of the evidence concluded that, of the six bullets that struck the emperor, three hit the chest, one finding its way to the heart. It was said that he waved a hand as if to call for a second volley, though this was more likely a convulsion.

Only some of these details were available to Manet when he set out to depict the horror. He had to assume, for example, that the firing squad would be wearing typical rebel garb of flared pants and sombreros. This turned out not to be the case: the soldiers were indeed in uniforms closely resembling those of French troops.

Regardless, right from the start, in his first painting, Manet indicted Napoleon III by evoking the composition and emotion of Goya’s “The Third of May”, which depicts the execution of Spanish nationalists by invading French soldiers under the orders of his uncle, Napoleon I.

By the time of his second version, Manet had learned the truth about the soldiers’ uniform and brought into his studio a squad of French infantry to pose for him. The sergeant on the right — readying his musket to deliver the coup de grâce if needed — even resembled Napoleon III.

In the third version there is an officer raising his sword to give the command to fire. Manet included this in the final canvas as well, but painted over it, perhaps, as Elderfield suggests, imagining “an execution without a cause, implacably happening by itself, with spectators looking on, as we look on, not knowing who is to be blamed for the killing”.

And the wall appears, the enclosing wall of empire, or, to Elderfield, another reference to Goya, “this time to his bullfight scenes — to make the space of the execution resemble a place devoted to the ritual killing of animals”.

There is now a sombrero on Maximilian’s head, which some observers have interpreted as a martyr’s halo, a religious symbol that accentuates the placement of Maximilian between the generals, a la Jesus’ crucifixion. It was doubtless also another jibe at the government, which had claimed that Maximilian was received in Mexico as a messiah.

And watch the transfiguration of the gunsmoke: By the final version, the emperor is a shrouded, pale ghost fading into the clouds. Elderfield believes Manet was playing with time as he portrayed the smoke’s drift, “showing us not only the instantaneous moment, but also the moment extended in slow motion”.

Jerry Saltz, in the Village Voice, went as far as crediting Manet with anticipating, in his cool, snapshot-like fastidiousness and lack of conventional narrative sequence, the “exploded vision” that led on from there, in turn, to Cezanne, Picasso and Mondrian.

In an appraisal that at times struggles for coherence, David Boje nevertheless makes some interesting observations. The most intriguing is that “The Execution of Maximilian” is clearly mistitled. It is, in fact, the execution of General Mejía, a pureblood Indian like Juárez, “who, if you follow the directing gaze of the rifles, is the central image of the painting, not Maximilian”.

“Maximilian is in the centre of those to be executed, but the more dramatic of the three is Mejía … Manet denies both Maximilian and General Miramón their visual centrality by executing General Mejía … Mejía is dramatically staged, with an outflung arm … At the same time the blue-eyed, blond-haired young emperor of Mexico is physically linked, in grasped hands, to [Mejía and Miramón].”

With Napoleon as his target, Boje suggests, Manet takes a gamble that he can get the painting past the censors by using a detached style in his “strategically placed iconic images”, by focusing on “the abjection, the degraded quality of a struggle of empire that has brought Juárez to a point where he must execute, not Maximilian, but Mejía”.

There is one other element in the final version that doesn’t appear in its predecessors, and yet which adds a barb of poignancy that mustn’t be overlooked: the shadow at the sergeant’s feet. Manet has made sure there is evidence that we have witnessed the crime, and dares us to try and deny it.

The final version of “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian” is at the Mannheim, Städtische Kunsthalle, the first version at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the second at the National Gallery in London and the third at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The original lithograph belongs to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.