Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser’, Manet’s ‘Tuileries’, and the Birth of Modernism

Abstract

In the spring and summer of 2011, an exhibition entitled ‘Manet, Inventor of the Modern’ brought tens of thousands of visitors into the halls of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Collecting together in one building the most celebrated works by Manet, including Olympia , Un bar aux Folies Bergère , and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe , the show also provided rich contextual material drawn from the intellectual and aesthetic circles in which Manet travelled, especially concerning such literary figures as Charles Baudelaire and his influence across international borders. The accompanying catalogue preserves much that was visually and aesthetically splendid about organizer Stéphane Guégan’s exhibition, but it also reveals a surprising absence: Richard Wagner. A considerable body of anecdotal evidence suggests that Wagner’s ideas and works permeated French culture in general and Manet’s social and aesthetic circles in particular during the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite our contemporary near obsession with interdisciplinarity, however, Wagner’s name does not even appear in the index—and this is by no means a lacuna unique to Guégan’s catalogue. In 2010, James Rubin’s stunning coffee-table book Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye (Flammarion), referred only three times to Wagner in the index, pointing us to the piano repertory of Madame Suzanne Manet, a snippet from Baudelaire’s letter to Manet after the critical firestorm surrounding Olympia in 1865, and finally a footnote expanding briefly on the latter. The catalogue emanating from ‘Manet: Portraying Life’, a 2012–13 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (travelling also to Toledo, Ohio), has only two references to Wagner, both in the context of Madame Manet’s taste for German music.