An Inevitable Rivalry

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2023

An inevitable rivalry

On “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Manet Slash Degas. That’s the title of the double headliner now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.1 It might as well be a statement. A physical slash runs clear through the middle of the exhibition’s title wall, dividing the names of the two artists. Similar slashes appear in various corners of the show, digging beneath the paintings and even cutting openings into other galleries.

If “Manet/Degas” is a slasher show, another clue is one of the first works on display. Edgar Degas painted Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet (1868–69, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art) as a gift to his artist friend after one of their weekly salons. The portrait depicts Monsieur Manet reclining on a sofa as he listens to Madame at the piano. But what we see today is only a partial view of the pair. Unhappy with Degas’ depiction of his wife, Manet slashed the right side of the canvas. When Degas discovered the defacement, he took the painting back and returned his own gift from Manet, a small still life of a bowl of fruit, over the insult. Degas then displayed the damaged portrait in his home, eventually next to Manet’s The Ham (ca. 1875–80, Glasgow Life Museums); a carving knife rests prominently in the foreground of that still life. Manet Slash Degas.

Edgar Degas, Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, 1868–69, Oil on canvas, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.

More evidence can be found in the many prints that inform this extensive, penetrating exhibition on the creative—and cutting—relationship between Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917). Since about half of the one hundred sixty works on display come from the collections of the Metropolitan and the Musée d’Orsay, the two organizing institutions of “Manet/Degas,” the Met’s extensive collection of works on paper helps fill in around Orsay’s blockbuster loans.

Printmaking is itself a slashing art. To make an etching, a needle must dig into a copperplate coated with an acid-resistant ground. When the plate is then submerged in acid, the groove exposes the copper to the bath, incising a line beneath. With drypoint, another intaglio printmaking technique, a needle is directly slashed into the plate, leaving a burr of metal that results in a fuller, fuzzier line when inked and printed on paper. Manet and Degas used both methods, sometimes combining the two in a single print.

Edgar Degas, Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, 1868–69, Oil on canvas, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.

Manet first met Degas in a gallery of the Louvre as Degas was creating just such a printing plate based on a Portrait of Infanta Margarita Teresa, today attributed to the workshop of Diego Velázquez. Rather than printing from a preparatory study, as was customary, Degas was taking the radical step of drawing with his needle directly from observation, attacking the plate in a riot of zig-zagging lines. “How audacious of you to etch that way, without any preliminary drawing. I would not dare do the same,” Manet supposedly said to Degas.

The Irish novelist George Moore said the relationship between Manet and Degas—equally ambitious Parisian artists, nearly the same age, and from similarly wealthy and cultured backgrounds—was “jarred by an inevitable rivalry.” As they absorbed the history of art by copying in the public galleries of the Louvre, in particular the Spanish and Italian masters, their relationship first played out in print. Degas created drawings and prints of his friend, including a suite of portraits of Manet sitting, leaning, and brooding in two-thirds profile circa 1868. Their relationship on paper continued long after Manet’s untimely death at age fifty-one. As Degas outlived his friend by over thirty years, he became a foremost collector of his work, even amassing a near-complete run of Manet’s prints.

An illuminating arrangement of prints here from 1861–62 includes the very study by Degas of the infanta over which the artists met, with an impression now in the Metropolitan’s collection. Directly facing this print is Manet’s own version after Velázquez, also from the Met. The copperplate of Manet’s etching, on loan from Paris’s Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, is displayed between them. It is telling that the two artists’ versions are reflections of one another, literally and figuratively. Degas’ direct etching process resulted in a mirror image when printed. Manet, who made his prints from studies, maintained the orientation of the original in his impressions.

Edgar Degas, Scene of War in the Middle Ages, ca. 1865, Oil on paper mounted on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 

Through much of his career, Manet relied on printmaking to disseminate the images of his bold paintings and drawings. Degas, meanwhile, used the medium more as a space for experimentation. We can see the differences in these two infantas. Manet’s version looks like a reproduction, and a hasty one at that. Degas’ print goes off in its own unexpected direction. The free line of the needle takes on a life of its own. The lace of the infanta has been elaborated with an extra round of drypoint. That the Metropolitan has positioned the infantas on one of those slashed gallery walls underscores the central role of printmaking in the two artists’ relationship.

As the careers of the two artists developed in the 1860s, Degas had more to work through than Manet, who seems to have known what to do from the very start. Stephan Wolohojian, the Metropolitan’s John Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of the Department of European Paintings, has co-organized this exhibition’s stateside appearance along with Ashley E. Dunn, the museum’s Associate Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints. In their joint introduction to the exhibition catalogue, the two call Manet and Degas “friends, rivals, and, at times, antagonists” who “worked in conversation throughout their careers, from the time of their first meeting in the early 1860s.” On the exhibition’s opening morning, Wolohojian downplayed their competition, or at least our inclination to declare a victor of the rivalry, saying,

Many visitors will try to figure out which of these two is the better artist. But this is not a competition between two of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century. There is no game. There are no rules. So there can be no winner.

And yet, out of the gate, Manet is the clear frontrunner. The exhibition’s lavender walls play to his brighter palette, while Degas’ subtleties get lost in the murk. Manet also pulls his paintings right to the surface, with public themes and shocking compositions, while Degas presents an interior world that requires deeper reflection. And Manet often went big when Degas kept it small. In some of the rooms, Manet comes across as having taken up nearly all the wall space, with Degas barely holding on to a corner.

Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

These differences are most pronounced in the display of their two entries into the Paris Salon of 1865. For Degas, it was Scene of War in the Middle Ages (ca. 1865, Musée d’Orsay), a strange concatenation of nude women, flowing hair, burning towns, and trampling horses. For the figures, Degas made studies of classical anatomy. This work may be an allegory of the American Civil War, in which members of Degas’ extended family fought for the Confederacy. Yet the whole does not equal the sum of its parts. With all the action off to the sides and even cut off by the edges, the composition is downright bizarre—a harbinger of Degas’ experimental inclinations. For the audiences of 1865, just as for those of us at the Metropolitan today, this work could not hope to compete for attention against Manet’s entry in that same salon: Olympia (1863–65).

That painting of a courtesan and her maid was a scandal when presented in 1865. With its fraught dynamics of sex and race, it still causes palpitations in 2023. That the astonishing work has now traveled beyond the walls of the Musée d’Orsay is itself nearly unprecedented; seeing it in person reveals just how much gets lost in reproduction. We can observe how Manet subtly accentuated the contrasts of skin tones, of bedding and background. Olympia’s red hair flows over her left shoulder in a way that tends to disappear into the background of copies. In person the forceful expression of the maid, presenting Olympia with a bouquet of flowers and a sideways glance, also reveals a deep cognizance of the dynamics of the situation. As if there were any doubt of another, unseen figure in the room, the hissing cat with its back arched, staring straight out, makes the viewer the complicit third person in the scene. (A cat’s curving tail, queue in French, is also a slang word for a part of the male anatomy.) Compared to Manet’s Reclining Nude, a preparatory study composed in red chalk (1862–63, Musée d’Orsay), with its figure rotating away, here Olympia is tumbling forward into our own space, practically sliding off her disheveled silk cushions. Her modeled hands are all that holds onto her bright flesh, while her spare jewelry ties her back to the picture plane. The work seems immediate and raw but was, in fact, carefully crafted as an homage to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (the pose, the bedspread, the maid, even the pet is there). Manet set up the scene with models in his studio, with Victorine Meurent as Olympia and Laure as her maid. Both models reappeared in his later compositions.

Édouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, 1864, Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Manet’s boldest paintings trafficked in this full-frontal treatment while tying his compositions to the masterpieces of art history. The figure in The Dead Toreador (probably 1864, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) lies in an abstract foreground, with his blood about to run off the dark canvas. Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola (1868, Musée d’Orsay) is practically collage, with the images on Zola’s wall—including a grisaille of Olympia—applied like stickers to the painting surface. For The Balcony (1868–69, Musée d’Orsay), a four-person portrait that includes Berthe Morisot and was inspired by Francisco Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, a green railing is all that holds the figures back from our own viewing space. Even Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, which scandalized Paris two years before Olympia (here represented by a copy on loan from The Courtauld Gallery, ca. 1863–68), was based on studies of Giorgione and, in particular, an engraving of the Judgment of Paris by Marcantonio Raimondi after a lost original by Raphael.

And where was Degas during all this time? Making his own studies of Raimondi, for one. He was also creating his own portraits, based off of his studies from the Louvre, but they were often compositionally skewed, such as that of James-Jacques-Joseph Tissot (ca. 1867–68, Metropolitan Museum of Art), who appears to be sinking into the middle of the picture. Degas was also painting false starts—or at least, The False Start (ca. 1869–72, Yale University Art Gallery), one of his many images from the racetrack. As Manet painted the explosive instance, Degas looked to the odd moment. When the artists went to the races, Manet depicted the horses head-on, in The Races at Longchamp (1866, Art Institute of Chicago), while Degas observed them from behind in Racehorses Before the Stands (1866–68, Musée d’Orsay).

Edgar Degas, Cotton Office in New York, 1873, Oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau, France.

Manet’s figures tumble out of his compositions, while Degas draws us in. As his choice of subject matter turned from history and allegory to the realities of modern life, Degas’ work also became uniquely absorbing. His Cotton Office in New Orleans (1873) depicts both the dealings of the cotton trade and the family business. A descendant of the French diaspora, Degas was a Louisianian on his maternal side—his mother’s family had left Saint-Domingue after the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804)—while his father’s family owned the De Gas bank of Naples, Italy, having fled from France during the Reign of Terror. The New Orleans cotton office in the painting was his family’s own, observed firsthand when Degas himself left Paris in 1871 following the siege of that city in the Franco-Prussian War. (Both Degas and Manet had manned the artillery in its defense.)

Degas packed his New Orleans composition with a depth of mundane activity, accounting for the many facets of a busy cotton-factoring firm: counting the bales, manning the books, reviewing the operation. Cropped in the foreground, Michel Musson, Degas’ uncle, inspects the cotton’s fibers with his fingers. Meanwhile, sitting in a chair in the middle of the room, Degas’ brother René leans back and reads from The Daily Picayune. Good work if you can get it. It is appropriate that this painting of modern life became the first work by Degas to enter the collection of a French museum, when the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Pau acquired it in 1878. Degas had come into his own. (In an unexpected twist, the first museum to acquire a work by Manet was none other than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when it accepted Boy with a Sword [1861] and Young Lady in 1866 [1866] as gifts from the American collector Erwin Davis in 1889. At the time, the Metropolitan exhibited these two works as by an “eccentric realist of disputed merit; founder of the school of ‘Impressionistes.’”)

There is no doubt that, between the two, Manet always remained the painter of action. You can just about smell the gunpowder smoke in his maritime painting of The Battle of the “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama” (1864, Philadelphia Museum of Art), of an engagement of the American Civil War that was waged off the coast of Cherbourg, France. The firing of flintlocks still rattles the composition in The Execution of Maximilian (ca. 1867–68, The National Gallery, London). Manet never saw these scenes in person but rather combined eyewitness accounts with the precedents of art history to great effect. In the case of Maximilian, the Habsburg heir installed by Napoleon III to become emperor of Mexico but soon deposed by loyalists to Benito Juárez, Manet directly quoted Francisco Goya’s Third of May 1808.

Édouard Manet, The Battle of the USS “Kearsarge” and the CSS “Alabama,” 1864, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania.

All the while, Degas looked ever deeper to the inside of life—revealing interior spaces along with what seemed to be the inner thoughts of his figures. In The Dancing Class (ca. 1870, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the intimate assembly of young figures appears to interact only with themselves as they become lost in a turnout, fixing a shoe, or bending at the barre in fifth position. As Manet stayed sharp, Degas leaned into a sense of distraction and ill-focus. On the surfaces of his work, he took to pastels and an innovative handling of color and line to give his paintings a new impression, leading the way for the movement that took this name. Many of his most lasting innovations were still to come, including his experiments in wax sculpture and staged photography, which fall outside the timeframe of Manet’s life and are therefore not included in the exhibition. But in such gauzy works as The Singer in Green (ca. 1884), Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub (1885), and Woman Combing Her Hair (ca. 1888–90), all coming from the Metropolitan’s collection, we see the development of the same wavy line that first appeared in Degas’ print study of the infanta some two decades before.

Edgar Degas, The Singer in Green, ca. 1884, Pastel on light blue laid paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

This blurred, impressionistic vision gave the works of Degas a new intimacy. In this exhibition’s comparison between those two famous tippling figures, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (1875–76, Musée d’Orsay) by Degas and Plum Brandy (ca. 1877, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) by Manet, both of which relied on the same artist model, Ellen Andrée, it is the work by Degas that takes top prize. The off-kilter perspective, the drooping eyes, and the distracted male companion all present a sense of isolation that Manet’s more sentimental portrait never could.

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), 1875–76, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 

But this is not a competition, as the curator Stephan Wolohojian makes clear. Nor is it really a story of slash and burn. One of the final works here is Manet’s painting of Maximilian from The National Gallery, London. Like that portrait of Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet at the start of the exhibition, this too is fragmentary. After Manet’s death, the large composition was slashed apart and broken up into smaller works. It was Degas who tracked down the pieces and brought them together again. Much as Degas added a portion of canvas to the damaged right side of Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet, here he also dedicated himself after Manet’s death to his friend’s reparation. Whatever divide existed between them was also their bond. That slash was ultimately a stitch bringing these two masters ever closer together.

1.   “Manet/Degas” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on September 24, 2023, and remains on view through January 7, 2024. The exhibition was previously on view at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (March 28–July 23, 2023).

Italy Before Rome

THE NEW CRITERION, October 2023

Italy before Rome

On Greek colonies, Etruscan tombs & Italian origins.

The landing began eighty years ago at one minute past midnight. Loudspeakers on the American troopships approaching the coast of Italy gave the signal. In the first moments of September 9, 1943—an earlier D-Day of the Second World War, this one of Operation Avalanche—soldiers climbed over the gunwales and down the nets into their landing crafts. Their destination was the fortified beach at Paestum, a town in Campania along the sandy coast twenty-five miles south of Salerno.

Italy had surrendered to the Allies just a day before, but Nazi forces were dug in. The amphibious assault around the ankle of Italy was meant to free the boot of what was now German-occupied territory. Paestum was to serve as one of the beachheads for the American and British campaign north and west up the peninsula while isolating German troops to the south. By enabling the eventual capture of Naples and then Rome and beyond, the landing was another step in the liberation of Italy and the slow march on Germany; Operation Overlord and the Allied landing at Normandy were still nine months off.

At H-Hour—three-thirty in the morning—the landing crafts, or those that were able to find their way in the night, came together three miles out to sea. They then made their final approach towards the dark beach.

“Come on in and give up!” a German voice blared from loudspeakers on shore. “We have you covered.”

To achieve the element of surprise, the American generals had decided not to bomb the Tyrrhenian coastline leading up to the landing. A British diversionary assault then tried to draw German forces out of the area. The deceptions proved counterproductive. The waters were mined. The Paestum beach was defended with gun emplacements and wire. Eight divisions from the German Tenth Army, under the command of Heinrich von Vietinghoff, were stationed to counter the American assault. Against artillery, aerial, sniper, and machine gunfire, and a counterattack from the Sixteenth Panzer Division that nearly pushed them back into the sea, American forces stormed the beaches and fought to reach assembly points inland.

Photograph: Photographer unknown, National Archives, Washington D.C. 

As supplies and personnel began moving in from the beachheads, a Negro unit from Headquarters Company, 480th Port Battalion, established a temporary office in the ruins of a Greek temple just off the beach. These U.S. signal-corps soldiers unloaded their portable equipment and began their relay work among the ruins of what we now call the Temple of Hera II. They sat on wooden crates and rested their helmets and canteens atop their fold-out desks and typewriter boxes.

On September 22, an army photographer came upon their bivouac and recorded their field office. “A company of men has set up its office between the columns (Doric) of an ancient Greek temple of Neptune, built about 700 B.C.,” reads the caption on photograph 111-SC-181588, now in the National Archives. As the signal officers worked in a line at their makeshift desks on the temple platform, the scene of ancient and modern, of new arrivals communing with settled stones, became one of the more iconic photographs of the Second World War. Here were segregated American soldiers fighting the German Wehr-macht from a Greek temple on Italian soil. The uncanny confluence served as a reminder that the Apennine Peninsula has long been contested by waves of warring nations. There was even an Italy before Rome.

Twenty-five hundred years before, in this low tidal area near the mouth of the Sele River, ancient Greek mariners had created their own Italian beachhead at the same spot. They called their outpost Poseidonia, after the ocean god Poseidon. They carved out streets and houses and built a row of temples out of the local iron-rich stone, which, unlike their native Greek marble, turned red in the salt air.

Human settlement here dates back to the Stone Age. The nearby rivers, fed by steep mountains to the east, produce a fertile floodplain. The Greek colony was founded in the mid-seventh century B.C., one in that constellation of Hellenic settlements the Romans later called Magna Graecia. But this was still some fifty years before the village of Rome—then just a small settlement clinging to a handful of rises above the Tiber River—has drained the land for its Forum between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills.

At the time, the Etruscans, competitors and occasional overlords of the Latin tribes, were gaining power in the area. This Greek outpost, like the American beachhead, was intended to forestall enemy expansion and protect friendly settlements to the south. Over the next few hundred years after its founding, the town fell to the Italic Lucanians, then returned to the Greeks, then the Lucanians again. In 273 B.C. Poseidonia finally succumbed to the expanding dominion of Rome. The Romans renamed it Paestum. They built their forum, replacing the Greek agora or marketplace at the center of town, and laid down their Roman roads around the Greek constructions.

The Great Temple at Paestum, 1897. Photograph: Photographer unknown, New York Public Library.

The town lasted another thousand years, well into the Christian era, before malarial swamps finally reclaimed it. From the middle ages until the nineteenth century, when the Sele River was re-channeled and the area re-drained, the abandoned settlement remained overgrown, even dangerous to visit. The site was only excavated starting in 1907, a process that is still ongoing. Paestum’s long-abandoned state means that its two monumental temples dating from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., at first thought to honor Poseidon/Neptune but now believed to be dedicated to the goddess Hera/Juno, are some of the best preserved ancient Greek structures in the world. A smaller third temple, dedicated to Athena and dating from the same era, also stands today.

Acentury ago, in the late 1920s, D. H. Lawrence toured his own pre-Roman sites with his American friend Earl Brewster, a painter and a scholar of Buddhism. Lawrence then wrote a paean to the pre-Roman people in “Etruscan Places,” an essay first published along with his other Italian travel writing in 1932, two years after his death.

The fate of Rome’s closest neighbors—who were among its earliest conquests—has long intrigued artists and perplexed historians. Michelangelo sketched the Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia. Piranesi composed an etching based on the Etruscan ruins at Chiusi. Robert Adam decorated the state dressing room of West London’s Osterley Park estate in Etruscan-style fresco. Johann Joachim Winckelmann made a study of Etruscan civilization along with the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Meanwhile the Society of the Dilettanti in London discussed the Etruscans’ lack of facial hair as compared to the Greeks—a habit of grooming, they surmised, that the Etruscans must have passed down to the Latins.

D.H. Lawrence beneath an olive tree at Villa Mirenda, San Polo Mosciano, ca. 1926–27. Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham. Photograph: Photographer unknown.

Veii, a southern town of Etruria just ten miles north of Rome, supposedly fell to the Roman Republic in 396 B.C. after a ten-year siege. Despite their proximity to Rome, the Etruscans spoke a language that was non-Indo-European, like Hungarian or Basque, and which today remains largely elusive. Their origins have been debated since ancient times; the eyewitness records of Rome’s own early interactions with Etruria’s hilltop settlements may have been destroyed in Brennus’s Gallic sack of Rome in 387 B.C. We do not know for certain how Etruria came to mix with its Latin neighbors to the south. Before the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C., three of Rome’s seven ancient kings—Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus—were supposedly Etruscan. The rape of Lucretia by Sextus Tarquinius, the Tarquin prince, precipitated the Roman overthrow of the Etruscan monarchy. As told by Livy and recounted by Ovid, the legend of Lucretia’s rape and suicide was used in ancient times to justify the Etruscans’ demise and has been widely depicted in Western art since the Renaissance, taken up by Shakespeare, Titian, and Benjamin Britten, among many others.

What mainly remains of Etruria itself are its tombs, which are open to exploration today much as D. H. Lawrence found them in the 1920s (I first visited the sites some thirty years ago as an undergraduate). These necropoli are indeed “cities of the dead.” The Etruscans carved, built, and painted their tumuli as second homes, hillside condominiums for the afterlife. To complicate the historical record, some of their decorations were Greek-inspired if not Greek-made—a reflection of Near Eastern influences under Etruria’s “orientalizing” period, which reached a high point in the seventh century B.C. While it was long thought that these tombs depicting the characters of Greek myth revealed the Greek ancestry of the Etruscans, archaeological consensus now links the Etruscans to Italy’s Iron Age Villanovans. Here are central Italy’s aborigines—ab origine, Latin for “from the beginning.”

In “Etruscan Places,” Lawrence took up the history of these ancient people in part to slight their Roman successors—and, by extension, the Italian fascists drawing their authority at the time from classical antiquity, following Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.

Lawrence was not the only writer of his time to use Etruria’s ancient backdrops for modern commentary. In “Roman Fever,” her sensational short story first published in Liberty magazine in 1934, Edith Wharton alludes to Italian aviators flying two American daughters from Rome to Tarquinia for a fraught moonlit tour of the site. What distinguishes Lawrence’s writing is his first-person account of the Etruscan tombs of Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Vulci, and Volterra, intermixed with grand pronouncements and often absurd speculation. As Lawrence began:

The Etruscans, as everyone knows, were the people who occupied the middle of Italy in early Roman days, and whom the Romans, in their usual neighborly fashion, wiped out entirely in order to make room for Rome with a very big R. They couldn’t have wiped them all out, there were too many of them. But they did wipe out the Etruscan existence as a nation and a people. However, this seems to be the inevitable result of expansion with a big E, which is the sole raison d’être of people like the Romans.

In a certain way, Lawrence’s literary achievement was his ability to write, even in his twilight years, like a petulant adolescent. His analysis may be overblown. He also committed the sin of reading contemporary politics into historical events. His rhetorical deployment of the “Etruscans” could be just as facile as Il Duce’s “Romans.” At the same time, what makes his Italian travel writing compelling is the often inadvertent humor of this celebrity-radical raiding tombs among the poor paesani. “Impossible to leave an unlocked small hold-all at the station,” he bemoans at one point, when the local station attendant at Palo refuses to hold on to his luggage for him. “B. and I are two very quiet-mannered harmless men,” he elsewhere laments, when a fourteen-year-old child declines to take these two strangers to the tombs at Cerveteri: “But that first boy could not have borne to go alone with us. Not alone!” “The Etruscans had a passion for music, and an inner carelessness the modern Italians have lost,” he gathers upon seeing the painted tombs of Tarquinia. “It is different now. The drab peasants, muffled in ugly clothing, straggle in across the waste bit of space, and trail home, songless and meaningless.”

Writing an appreciation of the book for The Washington Post two years ago, Walter Nicklin maintained that Lawrence “seamlessly mixes closely observed, naturalistic details with the kind of inward reflections found in essays and memoirs. Adding spice to the mix, he never feared to offend with his sharp historical analysis sprinkled with cultural and social criticisms.”

At Cerveteri, for example, with its cylindrical mausolea carved out of the bedrock, Lawrence wrote of “the natural beauty of proportion of the phallic consciousness, contrasted with the more studied or ecstatic proportion of the mental and spiritual Consciousness we are accustomed to.” The Romans, meanwhile, “hated the phallus and the ark [womb], because they wanted empire and dominion and, above all, riches: social gain. You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.”

Achilles ambushing Troilus (on horseback) Etruscan fresco, Tomb of the Bulls, Tarquinia. Photograph: Mary Harrsch.

Encountering the tomb figures of Tarquinia, Lawence likened the “sun painted” Etruscans to “Red Indians” and remarked on the visceral effect of vermillion among animistic people: “They know the gods in their very finger-tips.” It was Greek skepticism and Greek rationalism, Lawrence deduced, that “more or less took the place of the old Etruscan symbolic thought.” Finally, under Roman rule, the “Etruscan princes became fat and inert. . . . The Etruscan people became expressionless and meaningless.” He concluded: “For all of the Italian people that ever lived, the Etruscans were surely the least Roman. Just as, of all the people that ever rose up in Italy, the Romans of ancient Rome were surely the most un-Italian, judging from the natives of to-day.”

What is perhaps most telling about Etruscan tombs is how varied they could be from town to town, something Lawrence rightly noted. Some were carved into the hillside. Others were constructed in mushroom-shaped mounds. Inhumation was practiced in one place while cremation was common in another. Lawrence observed how

the Etruscans carried out perfectly what seems to be the Italian instinct: to have single, independent cities, with a certain surrounding territory, each district speaking its own dialect and feeling at home in its own little capital, yet the whole confederacy of city-states loosely linked together by a common religion and a more-or-less common interest.

To follow on Lawrence’s point, it was this regional variation that ran counter to the Roman mindset, which went on to express its astonishing power by laying down the same roads and aqueducts and temples from Africa to Judea to Britain to the Caspian Sea. Latin legend has long held that the Romans emerged from something beyond the native Italic. This was the story most famously expressed in the twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid, connecting Aeneas’s escape from the destruction of Troy to the founding of Rome and even to the ancestry of the Caesars.

As it happens, clay figurines depicting the story of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises on his back out of Troy have been discovered in Veii. Whether these figures date from before or after Rome’s conquest of the town in 396 B.C. remains an open question. It could be that the Aeneas myth reached Rome through Etruria, or that both the Latins and the Etruscans received it from Greek sources, or that the story in fact reveals some ancestral Hellenic connection between one group or another. It could also be that the origin myth of the Latins was just that, a myth, and that the Latin stock was just as proto-Villanovan as that of the Etruscans.

What matters is that the descendants of one of these Latin settlements managed to dominate the others, and in short order the rest of the Western world. Here is a story so extraordinary that it might as well have started with the twins Romulus and Remus suckling a she-wolf in a cave after they were cast out of the town of Alba Longa. For all of the interest in Italy before Rome, Rome’s remaking of Italy remains the defining story of the peninsula. The Etruscans and Greeks and everyone else serve as supporting characters to this main event. The Etruscans may have been “dancing in their colored wraps with massive yet exuberant naked limbs,” as Lawrence enthused, “ruddy from the air and the sea-light, dancing and fluting along through the little olive trees, out in the fresh day.” Meanwhile, the Romans just down the block were out to make history.

Spanish Lessons

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2023

Spanish lessons

On “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” & “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” at the Hispanic Museum & Library.

The Hispanic Society of America was founded over a century ago to reflect a gilded vision of Spain and the Iberian peoples. Since 1904, this institution on Broadway and 155th Street has faced much harsher realities. The small independent entity—one of scholarly and artistic significance—has struggled so far removed from the limelight of New York’s Museum Mile. To this day the Hispanic Society remains the greatest New York collection few have ever heard of. Now, after a six-year closure to address its aging infrastructure, the museum and library have partially reopened with a renewed vision for the future. Just how much this vision aligns with the foresight of its remarkable founder, Archer Milton Huntington, is a picture still coming into view.

Archer Huntington was the stepson, and most likely illegitimate offspring, of Collis Huntington, one of the Big Four founders of the western railroad. Even more remarkable was his mother, Arabella, a significant collector of European art and a social outcast whose marriage to Huntington scandalized New York society. Arabella’s sense of independence encouraged her only child in his intense cultural pursuits. In 1882, while embarking on a Grand Tour at age twelve, Archer purchased a copy of The Zincali, George Borrow’s 1841 “Account of the Gypsies of Spain,” in a Liverpool bookshop. The book was one of several famous stories that informed the century’s Romantic affinities for primitive Spain—joining Victor Hugo’s Hernani of 1830, Théophile Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne and Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain, both of 1845, and Georges Bizet’s Carmen of 1875.

View of the entrance to the Hispanic Society Museum & Library. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

As Huntington continued on to London and Paris, he was already envisioning an art collection along the lines of Sir Richard Wallace’s, paired with a library akin to the National Gallery’s, dedicated to the cultures of Spain and the Spanish diaspora. In 1891, to understand better the history of Al-Andalus, he even hired a tutor to teach him Arabic, at a time when no American institution offered classes in the language. On tours through Spain in 1892, 1896, and 1898, he purchased trunks of Spanish photographs while studying the country’s art and culture (the society now has 175,000 such images). In 1902 he acquired the bibliographic collection of Manuel Pérez de Guzmán y Boza, Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros, who was his mentor. Soon Huntington had the most important collection of Spanish books and manuscripts outside of Spain, a collection growing to two hundred thousand manuscripts and more than three hundred thousand printed books, including over fifteen thousand volumes from before 1700. He paired this collection with paintings by Spanish masters—Velázquez, Goya, Zurbarán, El Greco—which he was determined to purchase only from the international market, so as not to deplete the country’s own cultural patrimony.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry” with Sorolla’s Visions of Spain (1913–19) above. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

In 1908 Huntington opened his collection to the public in a Beaux-Arts building on Audubon Terrace, so named for being at one time part of John James Audubon’s estate. The building was nearly contemporaneous with Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Venetian vision in Boston’s Back Bay and equally novel, though less flamboyant. As the capstone to the collection, in 1911 Huntington commissioned Joaquín Sorolla to paint a mural of multiple “panneaux” of various Spanish regions, which he installed in its own purpose-built octagon-shaped wing. This impressionistic cyclorama of traditional Spanish culture was called, appropriately, Vision of Spain (1913–19), reflecting Huntington’s own dreamy vision for his new institution.

After Huntington’s death in 1955, there were times when it seemed the lid to his jewel box was bolted shut. When it wasn’t being shouted down as “racista”—as happened to one of its directors in the 1990s while he was chased across Audubon Terrace—the Hispanic Society put little of its energies into its own forward-facing persona. Part of this was an extension of Huntington’s own self-effacing style. “To place one’s name on a donation be it a building or subscription is an artificial and flimsy door to fame,” he once said. “The human race is full of creators, but it is their acts . . . which are interesting.”

Instead, the society continued to focus on scholarship and filling out its permanent collection of books, art, artifacts, and sculpture, in particular from the Spanish New World and Spain’s onetime Pacific colonies. Today the collection has grown to include four-thousand-year-old ceramics from the Bell Beaker culture of the Tagus river estuary, Roman statuary from Seville, Islamic pottery and Alhambra silk, Hebrew manuscripts, a map by Giovanni Vespucci, and Renaissance and Baroque ironwork on up through the Symbolist paintings of Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa. Last year, as its main building remained shuttered, two temporary exhibitions revealed the great depth of this collection: “Gilded Figures: Wood and Clay Made Flesh,” an exhibition curated by Patrick Lenaghan with his Hispanic Society colleague Hélène Fontoira Marzin, on the history of Spanish polychrome sculpture; and a display at the Grolier Club of highlights from the society’s library, organized by the society’s former director Mitchell A. Codding and the curator John O’Neill. (See “Visions of Spain” in The New Criterion of January 2022.)

Joaquin Sorolla, Detail from Visions of Spain, 1913–19, Oil on canvas, Hispanic Society Museum, New York. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

By some stroke of historical luck, the venerable but heavy hinges of the Hispanic Society were never forced open against the will of its founder. One could easily imagine the society’s takeover by a larger institution, the breaking of its indenture of trust along the lines of the Barnes Foundation, or, at the very least, a relocation downtown. Many such options were considered at various times in its existence, which in part may account for the deferred maintenance on its Audubon Terrace infrastructure.

Under the leadership of Philippe de Montebello, who was elected chairman of the society’s board in 2015, the institution has instead decided to double down on its Audubon campus. This has first meant upgrading the building’s aging envelope, designed by Charles Pratt Huntington, and bringing its systems, in particular its climate control, up to modern standards. The museum has also developed a strategic plan with Selldorf Architects to renovate the campus with the executive architects Beyer Blinder Belle and the landscape architects Reed Hilderbrand. An adjoining building to the east, originally the headquarters of the Museum of the American Indian, is being incorporated into the Hispanic Society campus, allowing for ada access to the Main Court galleries while introducing a new conservation studio, a wheelchair entrance, and spaces for special exhibitions and education. This longer phase of the project is still tens of millions of dollars and several years away.

View from Audubon Terrace. Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

Fortunately, even with the introduction of a new entrance in the east building, the society says the door of the Main Court will remain unlocked. Since the society is, and has always been, a free institution, Audubon Terrace is well suited to be an open campus with outdoor seating and concessions—and access to its other remaining cultural institution, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, just up the courtyard. “If you are a regular, and you have a ten-minute lunch break,” says Guillaume Kientz, the society’s new director, “and you want to see the Duchess of Alba, you can do that.” The terrace’s program of Spanish-themed statuary—depictions of Don Quixote and El Cid created by Huntington’s remarkable wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington—is also an integral part of the society’s cultural program and best observed from the Main Court landing.

This past summer, the Hispanic Society reopened its Main Court after its six-year restoration, the first phase of the renovation project. While the treasures of its collection are still on tour through the summer, the museum dedicated its main gallery to the centennials of two artists: Sorolla (1863–1923) and the Venezuelan sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto (1923–2005), born in the year of Sorolla’s death.1 Through the fall, visitors to the terrace will continue to encounter Soto’s Penetrable (1990), a large cube of steel, aluminum, and plastic hoses on long-term loan from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros—a work that trades Soto’s usual optical delicacy for crowd-pleasing interactivity. While Sorolla’s portraits of Spanish life and the genre scenes of his Vision of Spain have little to do with Soto’s kinetic abstractions, the assembly spoke to the breadth of the society’s mandate while also allowing us to open the lid, after a painfully long wait, of the institution.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable, 1990, Steel, aluminum & plastic hoses, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Photo: Courtesy of the Hispanic Society Museum.

Yet those of us expecting a full return to form will have to sit tight. What are described as essential repairs to the roof have now covered over the skylights in the Main Court and Sorolla galleries. The darkened result, interspersed with retina-burning spotlights, is heartbreaking for those of us who recall these formerly dreamy spaces. This is especially true when trying to appreciate the Main Court’s intricate terracotta walls and its imagined sense of a sunlit medieval cloister. While the society maintains that plans are in place to install artificial laylight behind the skylight glass, the remediation could not come soon enough. A public-spirited philanthropist could do worse than to underwrite the improvement of gallery lighting. As the Old Masters were almost all painted under natural light, their happy viewing calls out for equivalent illumination.

Installation view of “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The inclusion of modern and contemporary work also suggests something of a change in the priorities of the institution. While it is true that Huntington for a time embraced the contemporary Spanish art of his day—collecting Sorolla, Ramon Casas, Joaquin Mir Trinxet, Santiago Rusiñol, and Ignacio Zuloaga—he came to distance his Hispanic Society from the art of his own time. “Modern art is not our intention to show in exhibitions,” he declared. “That is a dealer’s affair and not, in my opinion, one for museums.”

Starting September 15, the treasures of the society’s collection are finally returning to its walls, but the installation will no longer be a fixed display of highlights as we experienced in the past. Certainly, with a collection of three-quarters of a million objects, there is a lot to show here. Some shuffling around would be welcome and refreshing. Yet as with most every other museum—including the venerable Frick Collection—today there seems to be an urge to put historic collections in “dialogue” with contemporary art. These interventions are often forced and merely there to serve some political or commercial end—a “dealer’s affair,” in Huntington’s choice words.

Installation view of “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino and Jewelry.” Photo: Alfonso Lozano.

The society’s summer display of contemporary jewelry by Luz Camino was one such letdown.2 Filled with loans from a Who’s Who of rich collectors, the exhibition was no doubt designed to stimulate the philanthropic glands of the society’s major donors. Even worse, the exhibition’s gaudy displays were all positioned directly in front of the panels of Sorolla’s Vision of Spain. The cases obscured their view and fully blocked their labels. Despite its wide embrace of Spain and Spanish culture, the Hispanic Society shouldn’t need to include Las Vegas in its purview.

Acentury ago, Archer Huntington set out not to record the Spanish world of the present but to preserve a vision of its past, one that was already fast disappearing. His interest may have been based on a Romantic fiction, but there was a time when we could embrace the power of fiction to triumph over everyday fact. “We can only be grateful to the boy who discovered Spain in a Liverpool bookshop,” says the Hispanic Society curator Patrick Lenaghan, “and, thus inspired, created this extraordinary museum and library.” Even today, we should be able to dream the impossible dream that is the Hispanic Society of America.

1.   “1923–2023 Sorolla / Soto Centennials” was on view at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, from May 25 through July 15, 2023.

2.   “Jewels in a Gem: Luz Camino at the Hispanic Society Museum” opened at the Hispanic Society of America, New York, on May 25 and remains on view through September 3, 2023.