In 1863 French Impressionist painter Edouard Manet-not to be confused with that lover of haystacks Claude Monet-shocked the art world with his painting Luncheon on the Grass. The French would love us to think they are an entire country made up of Bohemian lovers of peace and progressive art, but in reality the Paris at the time was only slightly less conservative than modern day Cincinnati. The painting caused ripples of outrage throughout middle class French society because of its daring depiction of nudity.
Nudity? We are talking about 1863, right? Hadn’t Rubens’ big fleshly sex symbols already been around by then? And what about Venus stepping off that seashell? Hasn’t nudity-especially nude women-always been a staple of art? So why was the portrait of one fully nude woman and one semi-nude woman causing such a firestorm of controversy in the country that would give up the bikini, Brigitte Bardot and the Cannes Film Festival? (Not to mention French-kissing.) Because Manet’s masterpiece dared to show figures who were quite obviously contemporary people, that’s why. That lady who was picnicking naked with two totally clothed male companions was a woman of the time.
Previous to the Impressionist revolution in art, nude figures were indeed quite a staple of paintings since the Renaissance. But these nude figures had historically been separated from their contemporary milieu by way of representation as mythological figures. It was one thing to present the goddess Athena naked, it’s another to present the girl who cleans houses for the rich naked. The problem was compounded for Manet by the fact that Luncheon on the Grass has all the hallmarks of one of those paintings that feature naked girls as spritely wood nymphs. The setting is a forest glen with a half-clothed woman dipping her goodies in a stream. It doesn’t take a massively imaginative person to displace the modern day couples with mythological figures. In a sense, Edouard Manet not only seemed to be purposely creating scandal, but also to be thumbing his nose at tradition.
The outrage at Manet’s painting stems from the still-current tradition of hypocrisy. Despite the fact that it was quite obvious that real life nude models were the inspiration for all those mythological creatures and Greek and Roman goddesses cavorting around naked in so many paintings, it was acceptable because they weren’t really naked women. Manet’s real crime, therefore, wasn’t in presenting all the naughty bits that had, after all, been on display in paintings for centuries, but rather that he was contributing to a blurring of the distinction between the real and the artifice. The fantasy nude women in paintings was, with just a few thousand brush strokes by one man, replaced by the ordinary. Oddly, a fully nude Greek goddess complete with exposed breasts and hairless pubes was preferable to the side view of one breast and no genitalia on the woman in Manet’s painting.
What was at the center of the scandal, whether the critics wanted to admit it or not, was that Manet’s nudity was attacked because it was ugly and degenerate. Strange, that. It was less degenerate to show a fully mature woman with no pubic hair than to cover up the crotch of another woman. The depth of the attack and the revelation that all of this was pure hypocrisy can be illustrated by virtue of the fact that some critics went so far as to disparage the body of the model in Manet’s painting. Oddly enough, one described her as not having a good figure. Can’t help but wonder what his opinion was of Rubens’ ladies of largess might have been.
Today, of course, one would look at the Manet painting and yawn. For its time, however, it was as controversial as anything by Robert Mapplethorpe and it bears repeating as a lesson in the hypocrisy that often surrounds censorship.
