Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergères (detail)
At the heart of Manet’s work is an unalloyed erotic sensitivity — similar to Baudelaire’s but without the poet’s rhetoric of torment. Manet responded to the sensuous charge in things and in paint and to the sexual charge in people, not as anything hidden and shadowy but as the very flavor of civilized existence. His contemporaries, bemused by their changing world, could not relax enough to appreciate his life-affirming joke: that in rendering the animal in the bonnet or frock coat, he conferred an integrity on living men and women that made them proof against whatever dehumanizing forces the world could inflict.
Peter Schjeldahl
Comments