The potency of pure painting: Manet's still lifes.

On a visit to Venice, exasperated by the endless allegorical pictures and scenes from Gerusalemma Liberata and Orlando Furioso and "all that rubbish," Edouard Manet is supposed to have told an artist friend that "a painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds." It is a straightforward statement about art-making right up there with Caravaggio's reported assertion that "there was as much 'workmanship' in a still life as in a figure." These succinct observations collapse the passage of time, offering vivid evidence that despite the seemingly unbridgeable accumulation of years separating them from each other, both Manet and his seventeenth-century predecessor were concerned with the same pragmatic, formal, hands-on issues that have always engaged serious, working painters--even serious, working painters who also happened to have changed the course of art history.

This is not to wrench either artist out of context. Whether or not Caravaggio believed that in terms of sheer painterly engagement baskets of fruit and musical instruments required "as much workmanship" as any other part of a picture, the still lifes that he painted with such inventiveness and virtuosity are usually subservient in his canvases to the androgynous youths, beplumed bravi, and ambiguous saints who enact his tense dramas--which is to be expected in an era when an artist was judged by his ability to paint large-scale figures. Such hierarchical categories of worth were becoming less rigid by the 1860S when Manet began to exhibit, but at the beginning of his career, he, too, strove to establish his presence by means of large figure compositions. In some of these he included, as Caravaggio did before him, eloquently painted still life components crucial both to the structure of the picture and to the establishment of the moment and place. Think of the discarded clothing and the capsized basket of fruit in Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe or the remains of the meal and the pile of studio props in The Luncheon in the Studio, or even the bouquet carried by the servant in Olympia. The painter who can be described as the first great modernist can also be categorized, not inaccurately, as the last exponent of the great tradition of Western figure painting. No matter how absorbing or significant the still life inclusions in his pictures, Manet, from Olympia in 1863 to The Bar at the Folies Bergere almost two decades later, is so closely associated with large, assertively painted images of the figure that it comes as surprise to learn that he painted some eighty pictures of "fruit or flowers"--or fish or vegetables--during his all-too brief career (born in 1832, he died, presumably of syphilis, in 1883). This number, we are told, amounts to roughly one-fifth of Manet's lifetime's work.

In terms of public reception in his day, he might have done better to paint even more still lifes. Some critics who initially found Le Dejeuner or Olympia vulgar in subject and wanting in execution were receptive to Manet's treatment of inanimate objects, perhaps believing that such themes were more appropriate to his talents. One writer who had been particularly harsh even bought a small still life--"two flowers in a vase, a little nothing," according to Manet --causing the painter to hope briefly for a more sympathetic reception in print in the future, although, as it turned out, no such softening was forthcoming.

If you've ever been stopped in your tracks by the pure painterly brilliance of Manet's peonies in the Musee d'Orsay, by that opulent fish in Chicago, or that delectable basket of plums in Boston, it's easy to understand how even resistant critics might succumb to the allure of his still life paintings. These ravishing pictures confirm Manet's observation that "a painter can say all he wants to" with still life and confirm, too, the truth of another remark, made late in his life, that "still life is the touchstone of the painter." Yet learning that still lifes account for 20 percent of his oeuvre is startling. Startling, too, given this remarkable statistic, is that until this fall, when "Manet: The Still-Life Paintings," opened in Paris, no major exhibition of this aspect of his work had been organized. Fortunately, this delightful and informative exhibit of fifty or so examples can be seen this spring at the Walters Art Gallery, in Baltimore, its only American showing. It is a relatively modest exhibition, but as Michelin says, worth the journey.(1)

The curator, George Mauner, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Pennsylvania State University, has organized the exhibition to reflect his conception of the various ways Manet approached still life, so the show is divided into sections devoted to rather over-determined categories such as "The Still Life as Self-Portrait," "Still Life and the Figure: Objects as Emblems," and "The Portable Still Life"--this last dedicated to Spanish-derived images of boys carrying trays--along with the more general groupings of "Fruits and Vegetables" and "The Last Flowers." Since Manet painted still lifes, or pictures in which still life elements play an important role, throughout his career and since the show is generally arranged chronologically, the exhibit functions as a miniature retrospective. The generous selection at the Walters includes works--some familiar, some rarely seen--that catalogue almost the full spectrum of Manet's achievement.

The chronology begins with two very early, rather tentative canvases, Young Man with Cherries (1858, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon) and Woman with Pitcher, or Portrait of Mme. Manet Holding a Ewer (1858-60, Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen). A group of more accomplished works of almost the same period, including a charming homage to Velazquez, Spanish Cavaliers with Boy Carrying a Tray (1860, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), announces the young painter's fascination with Spanish art and Spanish motifs at the beginning of his career and offers evidence, as well, of the rapid development of the hallmarks of the early Manet: a highly individual, broad touch and an acute sensitivity to tonality and subtle, light-drenched color. The show ends with a group of flowers in vases from Manet's last year of life. Painted when he was desperately ill, the best of them are energetic and dazzling, with their rapidly evoked particularities of petals and the complexities of stems and leaves seen through water and crystal; an explosion of white lilacs from Berlin and a tight gathering of moss roses from the Clark Art Institute are among the show's standouts. What unites all of these assured, economical late pictures are their centralized compositions, as uncompromisingly frontal as the enigmatic barmaid in The Bar at the Folies Bergere (where still life elements also play an important role). Like this confrontational late masterpiece--with its irrational reflections, which simultaneously raise and defeat your expectations of the logic of what the eye perceives and all but overwhelm the image of a young woman behind a marble counter loaded with fruit and bottles--the late flower paintings are ultimately as much about seeing itself as they are about the delicacy and freshness of flowers, or the brilliance of water and crystal.

In between Manet's youthful and mature achievements are such marvels as Chicago's spiralling Fish and Oyster, or Still Life with Fish (1864), with its molten blacks and endlessly varied patches of gray, rose, and off-white, engagingly paired with a sparser, but no less visually sumptuous variation on the theme from the same year: the Musee d'Orsay's elegant, near monochrome Eel and Mullet, an improvisation on the contrast between angular knife and sinuous fish, rucked-up white linen and glittering scales. Boston's gorgeous pile of blue, green, and red plums is there and so are the d'Orsay's irresistible peony paintings--those miraculous transformations of paint into powerful equivalents for smooth, thick petals. In the little Peonies and Pruning Shears (1864), Manet manages to suggest moist, full-blown white blossoms with staccato strokes of pale yellow-green, pale pink, and cream set against luminous grays. In the picture's mate, Peony Stems and Pruning Shears, painted the same year, he turns a trio of pink, burgundy, and pale rose peonies propped upside down against a wall into a metaphorical tribute to Chardin; the spill of blossoms, the gray ledge, the luminous, neutral ground, all immediately recall the eighteenth-century master's hanging hares despite the acute differences in material presence, at the same time that the rosy palette and spreading triangular configuration call to mind his celebrated early tour de force of the spreading, gutted ray.