Visual Art - Two Manet masterpieces go head to head in London. Richard Cork is transfixed
For as long as I can remember, Suzon the barmaid has presided effortlessly over the great French paintings in the Courtauld collection. Resting her hands on a marble counter at the Folies-Bergere, she gazes out at us with an expression at once detached, forlorn and stoical. Manet, the master of ambiguity, left his viewers to make up their own minds about Suzon's mood.
Yet he could hardly have been more sensuous and tactile in his depiction of the champagne, flowers, fruit and creme de menthe laid out so enticingly before her.
Now, in an inspired act of exhibition-making, the bored yet mesmeric barmaid finds her pre-eminence challenged. Another Manet masterpiece has arrived at the Courtauld Gallery, on loan from the Neue Pinakothek in Munich. And although it was painted more than a decade before A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, this large and magisterial canvas is equally irresistible. Manet called it, with characteristic terseness, The Luncheon. But the image he presented does not seem centrally concerned with a meal.
Like the Folies-Bergere painting, it is dominated by a youthful figure, who stares out, deadpan yet compelling. In this sense, he can be seen as the male forerunner of Suzon, showing just how consistent Manet's involvement with social isolation really was. But in every other respect, the young man differs from the barmaid. We know that the 16-year-old Leon Leenhoff, the son of Manet's wife Suzanne, posed for the picture during a summer holiday spent by the artist's family in Boulogne.
The year was 1868, and the adolescent looks very formal in his buttoned- up black jacket, smart striped shirt and carefully knotted tie. At the same time, though, the boater propped at a jaunty angle on his head suggests that he is eager to leave, and feels restless with the whole notion of continuing the meal. Perched somewhat defiantly on the table's edge, he turns his back on the food, wine and people visible behind. Leon's expression could be described as sulky, but Manet has not allowed us to feel sure about the teenager's mood. He might alternatively be lost in a daydream, or gazing through a distant window at the sun and sea beyond.
A similar doubt surrounds Leon's origins. Historians have always thought that Manet, who married Suzanne only five years before painting The Luncheon, was the boy's father. Leon had been born when she was piano teacher to the Manet family, and he undoubtedly became Manet's ward.
Recently, however, speculation has centred on Manet's own father, Auguste, a senior judge. No one can prove it for certain, but Leon may well have been the illegitimate son of this eminently respectable patriarch, who would have tried hard to cover up his embarrassing sexual indiscretion.
Because Leon's paternity remains so controversial, it threatens to dominate interpretations of The Luncheon. But he is accompanied by other, equally tantalising elements. Why has Manet allowed the lemon peel to dangle over the side of the table? Who is the bearded man smoking a cigar, half lost in the shadows? Why is the maid with the coffee-pot pausing, as if distracted? Is she looking at the armour piled up strangely on the chair, and sharing our bewilderment at the presence of such an ancient helmet, sword and scabbard?
Amid all these questions, we do know that the cigar-smoker was modelled by the artist Auguste Rousselin, a neighbour in Boulogne and Manet's former fellow student. But the enigma remains. Is it merely a coincidence that Rousselin has the same first name as Manet's father? We cannot tell. The overall meaning of The Luncheon is as elusive as the smoke hovering in the air above Rousselin's dark shoulder.
Perhaps the whole point of this arresting canvas lies in the very lack of obvious links between its disparate contents. Each of the three figures seems alone, and they may well feel alienated from one another.
The possibility that Manet was pre-occupied with social disjunction grows stronger when we look back at the Folies-Bergere canvas, as nobody could feel more fundamentally on her own than Suzon. She may appear to be attentive to customers, including the moustachioed punter in a top hat. But the barmaid's eyes look inwards rather than being directed at the world beyond the marble top. She could be just as much in thrall to her own reverie as Leon in The Luncheon. Or perhaps she resents the fact that her job is far less glamorous than the lives led by her customers. The Folies-Bergere was, after all, one of the most fashionable cafes- concerts in Paris. In the mirror stretching panoramically behind Suzon, we see the reflection of an elegant crowd beneath an immense, scintillating chandelier. Manet's friend Mery Laurent is leaning on the balcony in a dazzling white dress and long yellow gloves. She turns coolly towards the top-hatted man beside her, and everyone else appears equally oblivious to the girl on a trapeze above. Her green-clad boots are visible, hanging in space near the corner of the painting. But Manet abruptly sliced off the rest of her body, as if to imply that the Folies-Bergere's habitues are far more fascinating than a mere circus act.
To Suzon, they are all out of reach. Blurred and fugitive, they seem very removed from the barmaid stranded behind her row of wares. Manet, already stricken with the syphilis that would kill him only a year later, must have struggled with this elaborate and demanding picture. Too weak to stand without a stick, he relied on his formidable reserves of tenacity in order to give these bottles, roses and oranges such intense, palpable conviction.
Suzon herself is handled with absolute authority, by a seasoned painter who knew precisely how to render her flushed cheeks, the velvet ribbon curving round her blanched neck, and the petals erupting so provocatively from her lace-trimmed bosom. Nobody ever painted black as sumptuously as Manet, and the barmaid's bodice is a triumph of visceral mark- making. But the overall mood is as disconcerting as The Luncheon. And so Manet's final great achievement hints at the underlying sadness of a born boulevardier who knew that, all too soon, he would be bidding farewell to the world he painted with such subtlety, understanding and verve.
"Manet Face to Face" is at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London WC2 (020 7848 2777) until 9 January
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