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- If anyone ever asked me

who was the most mysterious

and enigmatic painter I know,

the one who's hardest to pin down,

I know who my answer would be.

(rapid piano music)

The man who painted that.

Édouard Manet.

People say Manet invented modern art,

that he's the greatest
revolutionary of the 19th century.

And of course, I love his work.

I adore it.

But put me in a corner

and force me to tell you

exactly why

and I don't think I can.

I've looked and looked and
looked at his paintings.

Without being boastful,

I know an enormous amount about him,

and yet, I've never penetrated to his core

and really understood him.

Nor has anyone else.

This is Manet's most notorious picture,

Olympia, the most controversial
and provocative nude

of the 19th century.

When this was shown, at the Salon of 1865,

the gates of hell opened up

and their contents poured
down on Manet's head.

What a scandal.

What uproar.

What drama.

(rapid piano music)

This caused a rumpus, too.

And this.

And this.

And even this.

It's as if everything Manet painted

wasn't what you are supposed to paint.

He moved the goalposts

and rewrote the rules.

The man was a rebel through and through.

Though he never looked like one.

Now this can't go on.

We can't let a painter as revolutionary

and magnificent as the man who did that

slip through our grasp.

It's time to crack his code.

Time to break his secret.

Time to get to the
bottom of Édouard Manet.

(upbeat orchestral music)

The Île de la Cité,

that mysterious and
secretive gothic island

in the middle of the Seine,

where the hunchback of Notre Dame resided.

This was the original heart of the city.

It's surrounded by water, easy to protect,

the ancient epicenter of being French.

And it was also where
Manet's father worked,

over there at the Palais de Justice.

(regal orchestral music)

The Manets were lawyers and judges.

For eight generations,
they dispensed wisdom

and rules to their fellow Frenchmen.

Manet's father, Auguste, was a judge.

His father had been a judge, too.

And the grandfather before that.

So, not surprisingly,

they expected little Édouard,

born 23rd of January, 1832,

to become a judge as well.

(upbeat orchestral music)

The father was a really important figure

in the French judiciary.

He worked here in the Palais de Justice

as the head of the civil courts,

presiding over domestic disputes,

arguments over wills and copyright.

A thoroughly respectable figure

who would never, ever have wanted

his eldest son to become

one of those new-fangled artists.

(children's choral music)

The idea that a Manet
would one day to grow up

to paint this or this

would have been utterly
discombobulating to Auguste,

and I think it's worth suggesting,

right at the outset,

that one of the reasons
Manet did paint this

and this was because he knew

what they'd make of it
at the Palais de Justice.

And that only spurred him on.

(melancholy piano music)

Manet's mother, Eugénie-Desirée Fournier,

had a more inventive background.

Because she was the goddaughter
of the King of Sweden.

Eugénie was 20 when she
married Auguste Manet.

He was 34.

She brought with her a
generous Swedish dowry,

and, more importantly for Manet,

a rare passion for music.

She trained as a singer,

and was good enough to sing
at small, private concerts

and other people's soirees.

And this passion for music

was to be her most rewarding gift

to her eldest son.

Music was to play a critical role

in Manet's work and life.

(cheerful piano music)

(train rumbling)

Manet grew up in a changing city,

and flux was his inheritance.

The modern age was arriving
in Paris at a brutal lick,

and no one was ready for it.

The French emperor, Napoleon the Third,

nephew of the first Napoleon

had seized power in a
low-grade coup d'etat,

promising to make France great again.

As great as she had been
under the first Bonaparte.

A little man with a big name,

Napoleon the Third had one eye on history,

and the other on his legacy.

But everywhere Manet would
have looked as he grew up,

tradition and modernity
were tussling for the soul

of the new France.

This tussle continued in
Manet's own family as well.

His parents wanted him to study law

and keep up the family
tradition of producing judges.

But Manet's own heart was elsewhere.

(seagulls squawking)

There's a photo of him as a young boy,

the only one I've seen.

So alert, such a piercing gaze.

Too intelligent and questioning,
surely, to be a judge.

His first ambition was to join the Navy,

and when he was 17, he set
off on a long sea voyage

to Rio de Janeiro, which taught
him so much about the sea.

And perhaps a little
about Latin women, too.

When he came back, he
failed his Naval exams.

The only thing Manet was ever going to be

was an artist.

(regal orchestral music)

The chap with a walrus
mustache is Thomas Couture.

In his time, the most
appreciated painter in Paris.

Couture ran a workshop for young artists,

and after lots of badgering,

Manet Senior finally
agreed to let Manet Junior

study in Couture's workshop in 1850.

Manet stayed there for six years,

which, at 120 francs a year,

adds up to a very long, and
very expensive apprenticeship.

(regal orchestral music)

Couture had made his
own reputation in 1847

when he showed this grotesque,

flesh-laden monstrosity
at the Paris Salon.

It was called, Le Romains de la décadence,

the Roman orgy,

and that, alas, is exactly what it showed.

An enthusiastic Roman love-in

featuring a cast of hundreds.

Although he was responsible
for this monstrosity,

Couture would always advise his pupils

to paint the world around them.

The new Paris, the trains, the factories.

"Don't paint someone else's history,"

he would advise them,
hypocritically, "paint your own."

And that's exactly what Manet did.

(regal orchestral music)

You must have noticed that the French

harbor an interesting
and resilient compulsion

to make big, urban statements.

They all do it.

Mitaron with his grand (speaking
in French) at the Louvre

Pompidou with his
extraordinary and pipey center,

and all these ostentatious
building projects

can trace their origins back
to the dreams of one man,

that ruthless rebuilder
of Paris, Baron Haussmann.

Haussmann wasn't actually a Baron,

he was just Monsieur Haussmann,

but he called himself
Baron to give himself

some appropriate status.

And between 1853 when the Emperor made him

prefect of the Seine,

and 1870 when he was sacked
for being so unpopular,

Haussmann transformed Paris.

And I mean transformed.

(serious orchestral music)

Pretty much everything we
think of as Paris today

was Haussmann's doing.

These big Parisian vistas.

The huge, wide boulevards.

Haussmann did it all.

So what's all this got to do with Manet?

As it happens, rather a lot.

First off, it's important to recognize

that the Paris he was living in

for most of his adult
life was a city in flux.

A giant demolition site,
looking for its final shape.

Manet couldn't get away
from the smell of change.

Nor could anyone else.

But there's something
more, something crucial.

When Haussmann was knocking
down the old neighborhoods,

he was knocking down the
old certainties as well.

People's personal geographies
were being crushed.

The inner maps they'd inherited.

I was in Beijing just before the Olympics,

and the same thing was happening there.

The old cantons were being demolished.

All the undesirables moved
out into the suburbs.

An ancient city was being
forced to become a modern one.

Whether it wanted to or not.

Manet's Paris was like that as well.

And this alienation of the people,

the removal of their sense of place,

was being played out not just
in the streets of the city,

but in Manet's studio as well.

He was now in his late
20s, but looked older,

prematurely balding, bearded.

And the vagabonds, drunks, and gypsies

loitering in his earliest pictures

can, at first glance, seem
rather conservative too.

But only at first glance.

(dramatic string music)

I'm in Washington, D.C. at
the National Gallery of Art,

and I'm going to see a painting

that you won't have seen
if you visited the gallery

in the past two years or so

because it hasn't been
hanging on the walls.

And the reason it hasn't
been hanging on the walls

is because it's being restored.

It's one of Manet's most
celebrated early masterpieces,

The Old Musician.

And, is this the painting
that I remember seeing

two years ago, I don't think it is,

it's completely changed tonality.

It's like a different picture.

- It's a completely different picture.

It was covered with thick, yellow varnish,

and it made it very dark, very morose,

very somber and what we have now

is a painting with a great deal of light

and color,

and, as you said, very,
very different painting.

- And some spectacular
brushwork going on here.

I mean, look at this.

This could be a piece of
abstract expressionism

from the 1950s, couldn't it.

- [Anne] Absolutely.

- It's such brave and free paint work.

- When you remove the yellow veil

which sort of unifies everything,

all of a sudden you get
this wonderful sense

of depth because instead
of everything being sort of

flattened by a yellow layer,

you get the feeling of
figures in the foreground,

and a landscape in the background.

- I must say, for myself,
seeing something like this

close up for the first time,

I don't think I've ever been
this close to a Manet before,

certainly not a great one.

It does have this extraordinary
sort of variety to it.

If you look at this area here

and then compare it with that area here

or that area there.

It's more like a patchwork
of different effects.

- He could have hidden
all of these things,

but he chose not to do that.

One of the things we love about Manet

is that he actually intentionally abrades

his own paint sometimes.

He rubs through it to expose
the ground layer underneath.

And you get sort of a soft quality.

You can see it in the shoes right here.

You can see he's rubbed through the paint.

- Oh yes, yes.

- And taken away, either with a,

scraping with a dry tool or using a rag

but we know it's not damaged

because then he comes
over with this beautiful,

luscious area of paint--

- Don't know if you can see this,

he's deliberately taken
some of the surface off

to create this, it almost looks
like a digital spot pattern.

- Yeah, I mean you could--
- From a modern computer.

- Right, one could add white paint,

but you're not gonna get the same softness

and that sort of broken
quality of the paint

that rubbing through
where you get the texture

as well as the variety in paint.

- So what we're talking about is

extreme technical inventiveness.

- [Anne] Absolutely.

I mean he was truly a genius.

He could really handle paint.

(upbeat Spanish guitar music)

- Just as Manet was emerging
as an independent artist,

Paris was struck down by
a debilitating illness.

Indeed, the whole of France

seemed suddenly to succumb to it.

(Spanish guitar music)

The illness made you
twitchy and excitable.

It quickened the pulse
and sweated the brow.

Hispanomania, it was called,

a mad passion

for all things Spanish.

Spanish art, Spanish song,

Spanish dance, Spanish storylines,

Spanish tears, Spanish bloodlust.

The French were obsessed with all of them.

Napoleon the Third had a Spanish wife,

the beautiful empress Eugenie.

So that was definitely part of it.

Rumor had it that the empress

would sometimes go to fancy dress balls

in a matador's costume.

No hot-blooded French male could
resist the thought of that.

Spanish art was also being
rediscovered at the time.

Velázquez, Murillo,

Goya.

Their work was so dark and gutsy,

so tangible, so direct.

So utterly unlike the
billowing pink mythologies

favored by French art.

Manet had encountered
Spanish art at the Louvre

when he was in Couture's studio.

He was devoted to
Velázquez and had learned

much of his directness from him.

And that confrontational
air you get in his pictures,

the feeling that his art is
going mano a mano with you,

that was inherited from
Spanish art as well.

(singing in Spanish)

Spain may only have been just
across the border from France,

but emotionally it was another world.

And it spoke to something
deep inside Manet.

On the outside, he was notoriously dapper,

always impeccably turned out,

with his yellow gloves
and his walking stick.

And you can tell from the pictures of him

painted by his friends that
he gave very little away.

He was buttoned up,
secretive, elegant and proper.

But one of my suspicions about Manet

is that beneath this dapper exterior

he was surprisingly emotional and tender.

(Spanish guitar music)

And this emotional inner life of his

primed him to respond to Spanishness,

and led him to some peculiar
and fascinating early art.

The Spanish guitarist caught
open-mouthed in mid-song.

Manet's brother Gustave
as a snake-hipped majo,

with something of the wolf about him.

This curious female bullfighter pushed out

unconvincingly among the bulls,

in a strange clash of realities.

In 1862, an exuberant
troupe of Spanish singers

and dancers arrived in Paris from Madrid

to perform at the Hippodrome.

Their star was one Lola Malea,

who sang and danced under
the glorious stage name

of Lola de Valence.

(Spanish singing)

Lola, la la la Lola.

She drove the French mad.

Manet's friend, the poet Zacharie Astruc,

wrote a very bad song about her

and Manet himself painted her
on stage, so unexpectedly.

It's such a forlorn picture.

Lola de Valence, the crowd behind her,

dressed up to the nines in
her colorful Spanish costume,

with her fan, her mantilla.

(Spanish guitar music)

Only look at her face!

Instead of excitement or the energy

you'd expect to see there,

there's sadness instead,
and introspection.

Lola was to be the first of
Manet's forlorn modern heroines.

His thinking women.

Spanish art taught him
to mistrust appearances

and probe further.

Beneath the blur of the castanets

and the bang bang bang
of the dancing feet,

there was always
something deeper going on,

something more intense and pressing.

(Spanish guitar music and singing)

Have you heard of Zaltbommel in Holland?

Me neither, which is why I've come here

and tracked down the cathedral.

Because Zaltbommel is an
important location for Manet.

(organ music)

This church, the imposing
St. Martin's Kirk

had an excellent organist,

Carolus Antonious Leenhoff,

whose daughter, Suzanne Leenhoff

became Manet's piano teacher,

and then his lover,

possibly the mother of his son,

and finally, his wife.

(relaxed piano music)

Suzanne Leenhoff was plump,
placid, and musically talented.

The story in Zaltbommel is
that she was heard playing

by no less a figure than Franz Liszt,

who encouraged her to move to Paris

to progress her music.

In Paris, she started giving piano lessons

to make ends meet,

and when she was 19,

she was employed by the Manet family

to teach their sons.

We don't know exactly what happened next.

We can only speculate feverishly.

But on January the 29th, 1852,

Suzanne who was now 22,

gave birth to a son,

and named him Léon Édouard.

On the birth certificate the
father of this boy, Léon,

is named Koëlla.

No first name, just Koëlla.

Now this Koëlla has never been found.

No trace of him exists.

A few years later, however,

when Léon was baptized,

Édouard Manet served as his godfather.

And since Suzanne and Manet
ended up living together,

it's usually assumed
that young Édouard Manet,

who was only 17 when he met Suzanne,

must have been the father.

He certainly went on to put Léon into many

of his most mysterious pictures.

Recently, however,

the very uncomfortable
suggestion has been made

that Léon's father wasn't
actually Édouard Manet,

the painter, but his father,

Auguste Manet, the high court judge.

Some sort of cover-up was
definitely being orchestrated.

A deal between the Manets and Suzanne.

In public, she never admitted
that Léon was her son.

Instead, he would always be presented

as her younger brother,
or a visiting nephew.

Even at her funeral,

Léon was never officially accepted

as Suzanne's son.

All this would just be tittle tattle

and not worth our attention

if it had no impact on Manet's art.

But of course, it did.

A mysterious, secretive,
but powerful impact.

In Manet's first pictures of Suzanne,

she's such a vulnerable
and terrorized presence.

This bashful nude in Buenos Aires,

The Surprised Nymph,

is inspired by the Bible story

of Suzanne and the elders,

which describes how the
gentle Suzanne was bathing,

when a group of lecherous village elders

spied on her and demanded her favors.

Something personal is at stake here.

Was Manet's father Léon's father too?

Or was it Manet himself.

It's something we need
to decide in this film.

But one thing's certain,

beneath this polite,
elegant, traditional facade

that the Manets were
presenting to the world,

all sorts of powerful ruptures
and passions were stirring.

And that wasn't just true of the Manets.

It was true of the whole of Paris.

And of modern life itself.

(train rumbling)

(lilting string music)

The Manet family lands

were situated just to the north of Paris,

around Saint-Ouen, and Gennevillier.

They owned 150 acres of these

valuable northern suburbs by the river.

Manet's grandfather, and
his great-grandfather,

had both been mayors of Gennevillier,

and had streets named after them.

Manet would come up here for weekends

and short holidays.

The family still owned a large house

not far from the river.

Of course at that time, it
looked nothing like this.

Progress has been particularly cruel

to Saint-Ouen, and Gennevillier.

If you want to see how
the land actually looked

in Manet's time,

you need to turn to his art.

The Manet family lands

were the setting for several
of his most personal pictures.

Including a particularly secretive one

that was about to make Manet famous.

Though not in the way he wanted.

To succeed as an artist in Manet's Paris,

you needed first to succeed

at that monstrous, unwelcoming,
unhealthy art event,

the Paris Salon.

The Salon was the largest
exhibition in the world,

and had been for nearly 300 years.

Started in 1673

as a prestigious selection

of the best French art,

it took place once a year in
a gigantic exhibition hall

on the Champs-Elysées.

The Salon was a dog eats dog,
rat eats rat kind of event.

The art piled high from
floor to ceiling was selected

by a jury of France's
most conservative artists.

The trouble is everyone needed the Salon.

There was no network yet of art dealers

and private collections.

If you wanted to make your name in art,

and sell your pictures,

the Salon was the only way.

(uptempo orchestral music)

Getting in was always tough.

But even by the cruel
standards of the Salon,

the jury of 1863 was particularly harsh.

Of the 5,000 or so pictures sent in,

the Salon of 1863 rejected nearly half.

It was a massacre, but also

a big political mistake.

Because among the artists rejected

by this particularly arrogant French jury

was the emperor's
favorite landscape painter

who immediately complained to his sire.

Napoleon the Third rushed over
for a special Salon preview

and was appalled to find his taste

being questioned so brutally.

So he had one of the
unlikeliest brain waves

in the history of modern art

and decided to put on a
Salon of the rejected works.

The Salon des Refusés.

(birds chirping)

Housed in the same building
as the official Salon,

the rebel show quickly ammassed

a clutch of dismissive nicknames.

The Salon of the Banished.

The Salon of the Heretics.

The Salon of the Pariahs.

Manet showed three paintings,

arranged together like
a modern altar piece.

On either side, a Spanish subject.

And in the middle, a picture
that everyone noticed,

and which caused them
to jibber and giggle.

(giggling)
(ducks quacking)

Today it's one of the
most famous images in art,

but when it first appeared at
the Salon des Refusés of 1863,

the Déjeuner sur l'herbe,

or, as we rather clunkily call it,

The Luncheon on the Grass,

inspired huge amounts of raucous laughter.

(giggling)

"Some seek ideal beauty,"
smirked a typical critic.

"Monsieur Manet seeks ideal ugliness."

(uptempo orchestral music)

In later years, later centuries,

there would be many occasions

when the public would turn up in droves

to have a good laugh at modern art.

So it's important to remember that 1863,

the year they all laughed at Manet

was the start of that awful tradition.

(dramatic orchestral music)

Manet's most obvious
ambition in the Déjeuner

was to modernize a famous old master,

one of the Louvre's most
precious possessions,

the Concert champêtre,

attributed in those days to Giorgione.

Two fleshy Renaissance nymphs

loll around a classical landscape

with a pair of male musicians.

The boys have kept their clothes on.

The girls

haven't.

(upbeat orchestral music)

This idea that the men were dressed

and the women weren't

was what Manet took most
obviously from Giorgione.

It was also the chief
reason for all the giggles.

(dramatic orchestral music)

The girl, they guffawed,
was some common whore

from the (speaking in French).

The men were callow students, so uncouth

they hadn't even taken their
hats off in her presence.

The woman has the features of
Manet's favorite new model,

Victorine Meurent, who stares out at us

with that compelling directness,

that Manet seemed always to notice in her.

It's been suggested, though,

that the body in the painting

was actually modeled by Suzanne Leenhoff,

and that Manet added
Victorine's face later

to disguise Suzanne's presence.

And I'm rather inclined to believe that.

It's a bulky, fleshly, Rubensian body,

with generous rolls of
fat behind her neck,

and eminently graspable love
handles around her waist.

And those are Suzanne's
dimensions, not Victorine's.

The student in the middle,

the one with the gormless expression

was modeled by Suzanne's brother,

Ferdinand Leenhoff, a sculptor.

He's basically a cipher in the picture,

and doesn't really mean much.

But the other student, he was posed

by Manet's two brothers,
Eugene, and Gustave,

who took turns at being him.

Now the actual pose of the second student

was borrowed from a
famous painting by Rafael

of the judgment of Paris.

If you look in the lower right
hand corner of the Rafael,

you will see some river gods
arranged in the same way

as Manet's group.

But there's something else to notice

about this student with the hat.

Something that's often overlooked.

His actual pose is a mirror image

of Michelangelo's Adam
from the Sistine ceiling.

He's in exactly the same pose.

So Manet's brother is a
kind of Adam in reverse.

Now what about her,
the figure at the back.

When the painting was first shown,

she was the subject of much merriment.

People complained that
her scale was wrong,

she was much too large.

But worse than that,
what's she actually doing?

She seems to be douching herself,

washing her privates intimately.

Now, when do French women do that?

Manet himself enjoyed referring
to this outrageous image

of contemporary sexual frolics,

as (speaking in French).

What we would call a foursome,

and much ink has been spilt in the search

for the real meaning of
Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

It could just have been
a scene from modern life.

A bunch of naughty students
having some outdoor fun.

But would that have been worth
all this pictorial effort.

It could be a sex scene, pure and simple,

but it feels much too loaded for that.

Or, most intriguingly of all,

it could be some veiled rumination

upon Manet's family situation.

Just before the picture
was finished, in 1862,

Manet's father, the
respectable high court judge,

died from what we now know
was tertiary syphilis.

And the Manet family set about ensuring

that his reputation would remain spotless,

and that the subject of his
possible fathering of Léon

was never aired.

Unless that is, you study
the paintings of his son,

where the sins of the father

sound a mysterious but insistent echo.

Déjeuner sur l'herbe was a
deliberate act of provocation.

Public bathing in the nude
was illegal at the time

and so was mixed bathing.

Everyone in that picture
could have been brought here

to the Palais de Justice
before Manet's father

and prosecuted for immoral behavior.

A subject with which
Auguste Manet was of course

personally conversant.

(somber orchestral music)

There are telling but secretive
details to the Déjeuner.

Hovering in the foliage,
its wings outspread,

is a bird, a bullfinch.

In Renaissance art, a hovering bird

invariably represented the Holy Ghost

disguised as a dove, arriving
with grace, at a baptism.

Next to Victorine's discarded clothes,

down in the corner, is a frog.

In religious art, frogs, toads,
and other creepy crawlies,

were miniature embodiments of Satan,

slithery stand-ins for the wicked snake

that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden,

and led to our downfall.

So is the Déjeuner sur
l'herbe a disguised portrayal

of Adam and Eve, a painting
about the fall of man?

Nearly.

But Manet's never that explicit.

That's not how he works.

He's a suggester of possibilities,

an implier, a hinter.

But I do think he had his
father's lapses in mind

when he painted this.

(opera music)

Old master sins are
being cleverly reimagined

for the modern age, by a
brazen Eve from the boulevards,

and a foppish studenty Adam,

lounging provocatively, around
a cut price modern paradise

that's been lost for the same
old Garden of Eden reasons.

Because a man couldn't
keep his hands off a woman.

Because a high court
judge died of syphilis

a few months before this
picture was finished.

(opera music)

(sirens whining)

There are various stories
about how and where

Manet met Victorine Meurent.

She became his greatest model,

but also a very juicy mystery.

According to one version of the story,

which I must say I would love to believe,

he actually bumped into her
outside his father's law courts.

She had been brought before the judge

for illegal street singing.

Manet was on the way to meet his father.

He noticed her, he liked her,

and he put her in his art.

Wouldn't that be glorious if it were true.

(singing in a foreign language)

Another version is that he
saw her coming out of a cafe

in (speaking in French)

where she'd been performing that evening,

her guitar tucked quickly under her arm

on the way to another gig.

And that's certainly how he painted her

in a delicious early portrayal.

She's in a hurry, she's
hitched up her skirts,

and she's nibbling so
enticingly at some cherries,

the fruits of paradise.

But the most likely scenario

is that he came across
her modeling somewhere.

She modeled for Couture, for instance,

so he could have seen her there.

And something about her captivated him.

You could see it in all the
paintings he made of her.

And it doesn't surprise me at all,

because she is on the evidence of his art

a strangely captivating woman.

(sorrowful vocal music)

(crow calling)

In October 1863, Manet set
off once again for Holland.

He'd been before to
look at Dutch painting,

but this trip was different.

This time, he was getting married.

(mysterious orchestral music)

No one in Paris had been told about it.

Baudelaire only found
out about the wedding

on the day Manet left.

They'd been together for a decade or more,

but none of Manet's
friends had met Suzanne

or knew anything about her.

So we're dealing here with
an exceptionally discrete

and secretive individual, a
man who gave nothing away.

No wonder his art is so hard to grasp.

I'm reminded of something the
painter Mark Rothko once said,

"There's more power in telling
little, than in telling all."

Suzanne remains a shadowy figure.

We know she was plump,
she played the piano,

and that's about it.

Manet kept her away from his friends,

and seemed almost to segregate her

in a separate compartment of his life.

(opera music)

The wedding was a glum affair.

Manet arrived in early October,
and stayed for three weeks,

which was the time needed

for the bands to be
published in the town hall.

No friends were invited, no family.

Léon wasn't here because he'd been sent,

temporarily, to boarding school.

And so on the 28th of October,

two days before Suzanne's 34th birthday,

they were married in a civil
ceremony in this town hall.

(opera music)

What the good people of Zaltbommel made

of this elegant French dandy's marriage

to their plump and dowdy
kingswoman isn't recorded,

but I imagine it surprised them too.

Just before he left for
Holland, Manet, who was now 32,

had managed to finish the second

of his most infamous nudes.

And this time, the irresistible siren

with the flower in her hair,

was definitely not Suzanne Leenhoff.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

(announcer speaking in French)

Paris in the 1860s was the place to be.

Modern life in all its busy shades

was crowding in on the city.

(crowds cheering and whistling)

Manet's Paris was so fashionable.

There was plenty of money around,

and plenty of new, urban
pleasures on which to spend it.

Trains, race courses, dance halls,

and an elegant new breed of city dweller

had emerged to partake of
these new urban pleasures.

The poet Baudelaire christened
this new type of city dweller

the flâneur.

(slinky string music)

What's a flâneur?

Well I'm definitely not one.

I'm too slobbish.

The flâneur is the most
elegant chap at the races,

the one in the best clothes,

who moves exquisitely through the crowd,

with his gloves and his cane.

Manet who was always very
careful about his appearance,

and famous for his jaunty
cravats and his yellow gloves,

was the flâneur's flâneur,

an impeccable example of the breed.

(lilting string music)

Flâneurs had lots of leisure time,

which they spent going to the opera,

or taking in the races at Longchamps.

On a summer's day, they
might go boating on the Seine

with a new female acquaintance

they'd recently made at one
of the fashionable dance halls

that were springing up all over Paris.

(lilting string music)

Unless of course, monsieur
already had a mistress,

which most monsieurs did.

And it was to her boudoir
that he would repair

at the end of the day, for
a few extramarital thrills,

an added (speaking in French).

Of all Manet's pointed
evocations of modern life,

the one that seemed to
annoy the most people,

was this one, Olympia,

the most notorious courtesan
in Napoleon the Third's Paris.

Olympia was unveiled at
the Paris Salon of 1865,

and the sight of her did to the
19th century French audience

more or less what stepping
on the tail of a cat

does to a cat.

It made them very angry.

Manet was used to bad reviews.

His Déjeuner sur l'herbe
had already been mauled

by the critics.

But nothing could have prepared him

for the onslaught of hatred and mockery

that accompanied the unveiling of Olympia.

"A sort of female gorilla,"

complained Le Moniteur Universel.

"The putrefying body recalls
the horrors of the morgue,"

spat Victor de Yankowitz.

"Manet has made himself
the apostle of the ugly,"

decided Felix Jahyes.

Now either I'm blind,
or people in the 1860s

had completely different eyesight from me.

Because however much I look at Olympia,

I can't see anything ugly
or repulsive about her.

I suppose she's quite
short, but a gorilla?

And is this enticing paleness of hers

really the coloring of the morgue?

Isn't she rather tender and beautiful

and a touch nervous about being examined

so frankly by us?

Manet based her on Titian's celebrated

Venus of Urbino.

And one of the things he was trying to do

was to paint a modern Venus
for Paris in the 1860s,

a working equivalent of a goddess.

But the name Olympia
had other connotations,

naughty ones.

Not only was it the kind of stage name

used by high class
prostitutes at the time,

who loved to call themselves Octavia

or Artemisia or Aspasia.

Olympia was also the
name of one of the most

rapacious courtesans in history,

the notorious Olympia Maldachini.

Olympia Maldachini was the
mistress of Innocent the 10th,

that seemingly formidable Baroque Pope,

who'd been painted by
Manet's great hero Velázquez.

Velázquez gave us an Innocent the 10th

who seems so stern and fierce.

But in real life, Olympia Maldachini

had Innocent the 10th
in the palm of her hand.

They called her la papesa, the lady pope.

And for more than a decade,
in the 17th century,

Olympia Maldachini ruled
the Catholic church.

So this Olympia, Manet's Olympia,

arrived on the Salon stage
with a dangerous reputation

already in place.

He shows her stretched out on a bed.

There's a flower in her hair,

a little black lace around her neck,

and on her wrist, a bracelet.

The bracelet contained an
actual lock of Manet's hair,

cut off when he was a boy,

and carried around by his mum.

Make of that what you will.

(mysterious orchestral music)

So Olympia presents
herself to us on her bed,

and her servant girl, who's
quite difficult to see

in the dark, is bringing
in a bunch of flowers.

Who are they from?

(mysterious orchestral music)

Well this is where the action
gets really interesting

and problematic,

the way Olympia is looking out at us,

and the way the servant girl
is showing her the flowers,

makes it impossible to
avoid the conclusion

that we out here, the
picture's spectators,

are the clients she's waiting for.

We're the ones who sent her the flowers.

We're the next volunteers for her bed.

(mellow string music)

This was what was so
annoying about the picture.

Every man at the Salon

was being accused of
being Olympia's client,

of visiting brothels
and having mistresses.

Of paying for love, and since all of them

were doing exactly that,

Olympia hit a very uncomfortable nail

right on the head.

The detail that
particularly annoyed people,

and caused the most giggles,

was the black cat at
the bottom of the bed.

In Titian's original, it
had been a curled up dog

representing fidelity.

But in Manet's outrageous reimagining,

the loyal dog is replaced
by an angry black pussy

with its tail stuck
provocatively in the air.

See how cattily it turns in our direction.

"Stay away from my mistress,"
it seems to be hissing.

"You cad."

(playful orchestral music)

(tapping)

(car honks)

For many years, no one was quite sure

where Manet had painted some
of his most important pictures.

And then, Juliet began
to research these matters

and finally tracked down
this important studio.

Juliet, tell us about this
place where we're standing.

Strikes me as rather
different from most of the

Haussmann period architecture
you see around here.

- Well yes because this was really

when Paris was beginning to be developed,

and this area where we are now

was in the middle of nowhere.

I mean, it was open countryside,

and there was a great plain of
sort of bare, derelict ground

between here and the (speaking
French), for example.

And so Manet moved into this new building

and he found this very splendid studio.

(knocking)

Hello?

(speaking in French)

- (speaking in French)

- Merci.
- Merci.

Ah.

(speaking in French)

So Juliet, this is the space
as Manet would have known it.

- More or less.
- It has changed a lot.

- Yes, I mean I suspect
that it wouldn't have had

a staircase and as big a balcony,

and I think he just had a cube, basically.

- So I'm imagining now that we're in

a kind of tall, light-filled space,

and three deep on the walls

are some of Manet's greatest pictures.

- Canvases, and we know,
unlike many artists,

we know that Manet's studio was

as it were like it had a

monastery feel to it.

There was nothing in
it that wasn't useful.

There were probably a couch or two,

some chairs, a table,

and he would have had
pictures stacked in racks

and with their face to the wall.

- So Olympia may have been--
- Yes, I mean--

- [Waldemar] And Déjeuner
sur l'herbe over here.

- [Juliet] Exactly.

- [Waldemar] The Old Musician over here.

- Yes, I mean, one thing
that one has to remember is,

paintings were not painted
in the twinkling of an eye.

And we know for example that Olympia

must have been begun perhaps
even as early as the late 50s

or certainly 1860 onwards.

And I'm sure he goes on adding bits.

I think he added the black cat to Olympia

just before it went into the Salon.

- [Waldemar] The final touch.

- [Juliet] The final touch.

(cat meows)

- The museum in Manheim, Germany.

A big statement of a building.

It dates from 1907.

And because it's so stern, and bossy,

I've always thought it's a
particularly suitable location

for one of Manet's most
important pictures.

(door slamming)

(ominous orchestral music)

One of the hardest
things a painter can do,

any painter, is to
capture a resonant moment

of their own history.

To make great art out of great politics.

I mean, no one's managed to make

an image of the Iraq War for instance

that will really speak to
subsequent generations.

And in the annals of modern art,

I can only think of two great paintings

that address the history
of their own times

with appropriate power and resonance.

One is Picasso's Guernica of course,

the ultimate 20th century reflection

upon the barbarism of war.

And the other

is in here.

Manet's Execution

of Maximilian.

(trumpets playing "La Marseillaise")

It shows the climax of
Napoleon the Third's

most inglorious foreign adventure,

his Iraq, his Vietnam.

We're actually in Mexico.

What on earth are the French doing here?

A good question.

The French didn't like the Americans.

They still don't.

So they decided to interfere
in the affairs of Mexico

and to install a puppet emperor

loyal to the French on
the American doorstep.

The Mexicans, however, already had a ruler

they voted for themselves.

So in 1863, Napoleon the Third,

engineered what we now
call some regime change.

He sent in his troops and forcibly imposed

an Austrian Archduke,
Ferdinand Maximilian,

on the Mexican people.

Maximilian was well-meaning and naive.

But he wasn't Mexican.

And he shouldn't have been here.

It didn't last long.

The French soon learned that
keeping a large army in Mexico

was impossibly costly.

So after a couple of disgruntled years,

they pulled out and abandoned
their puppet emperor.

And Maximilian, loathed by the people,

was overthrown, hunted down,

and, as we can see, executed

on June the 19th, 1867,

with a couple of his
loyal, Mexican generals.

Reports of the execution
quickly reached Paris,

and Manet, the staunch Republican,

who needed little encouragement to despise

Napoleon the Third, began work immediately

on a war picture that
would powerfully indict

the behavior of the French.

His first version, based on
sketchy newspaper reports,

is a wispy, Impressionistic thing.

Some men in sombreros
shooting into the mists

as the smoke swirls doomily.

As more and more information
about the execution

got back to Paris,

Manet kept returning,
doggedly, to the image,

and starting again.

This painting in the
National Gallery in London,

which was cut up after his
death, was his second attempt.

By now he'd learned that
the Mexican firing squad

was dressed in uniforms very similar

to the ones worn by the French.

So the Mexican firing squad

becomes a surrogate French firing squad.

And Maximilian is being
killed by his own side.

The National Gallery
picture was set outside

in a dry and scrubby Mexican landscape

that wasn't claustrophobic
enough for Manet,

not intense enough.

So for this, the final
and greatest version,

the culmination, the masterpiece.

Manet puts his firing squad

in front of a blank and immovable wall,

that seems somehow to
concentrate the violence,

and which brings to the scene

some of that pent up ceremonial intensity

of a bullfight.

(darkly dramatic string music)

That's Maximilian in his saintly sombrero,

flanked by the two Mexican generals

who stayed loyal to him,

Tomás Mejía and Miguel Miramón.

The firing squad really was that close.

They were lousy shots, and
that's how it was done.

But in reality, there
were three firing squads,

one for each victim.

But Manet crowds them all
together in one deadly block

to focus the tragedy.

(singing in Spanish)

The whole thing seems to be taking place

in the slowest of slow motions,

a constant playing and
replaying of the scene

that seems never to finish,

like an irredeemable sin that
can never be scrubbed away.

This figure here, fiddling
with his gun, is crucial.

He's the soldier who will actually deliver

the coup de grâce that
finally kills Maximilian.

Because of course, the
execution was bungled.

Most of the shots missed,

and he had to go over
to the struggling body,

place his gun against Maximilian's chest,

and shoot him point blank.

The face of this final soldier

is actually a lightly disguised portrait

of Napoleon the Third himself.

Manet is accusing his emperor

of being personally
responsible for all this.

Even more brilliantly,

you see this shadow here.

Who's casting that,
where does it come from?

The only possible answer is from out here.

We're the ones that are casting it.

And that's the point.

Whoever looks at this scene

is being accused of being
there and doing nothing.

This act of immense pictorial daring

lifts this great war
painting into the realms

of an historical masterpiece.

Manet's Death of Maximilian is
apportioning universal blame.

And this deliberate entanglement
of the man in the street

with a faraway moment of history

was new and modern.

Perversely, the only place the
painting was actually shown

was America where it went
on a rather desultory tour

in the 1870s.

In France, it was never exhibited
because it was censored.

So it was only after Manet's death

that we finally found
out what he'd been up to.

(lilting string music)

History didn't like Napoleon
the Third much either,

or so it seemed,

because in 1870 it arranged for him

to go to war with the Prussians.

And that was a battle the little emperor

was never going to win.

The Franco-Prussian War didn't last long.

The French, with Napoleon at their head,

were no match for
Bismarck and the Germans.

The fighting was quickly over.

Here in Paris, though,

the Prussians decided to starve
the enemy into submission.

And that took much longer.

Bismarck had predicted that
eight days with cafe au lait

would break the Parisians.

But he was wrong.

Paris held out for months.

Manet sent Suzanne off to the Pyrenees,

while he stayed behind bravely

as a gunner in the artillery.

And this place, the Jardin des Plantes,

was to prove an invaluable resource

for the besieged Parisians.

Because pretty much everything in here

could be cooked and then eaten.

(rousing string music)

On the 99th day of the siege,

the Christmas menu began
with stuffed donkey's heads

and elephant consomme,

and progressed to roast camel,

kangaroo stew, and wolf
haunch in antelope sauce.

(upbeat orchestral music)

Bonjour.

(speaking in French)

The Manet family cat was eaten.

And the writer Théophile Gautier

describes a delicious new recipe

that everyone in Paris was trying.

Rat pâté.

(playful orchestral music)

Although the siege of Paris
was historically crucial,

because it led at last

to the overthrow of Napoleon the Third,

aesthetically it triggered
nothing much in Manet's art.

All he had time to scribble down

was this grubby snow scene
of Paris during the siege.

To keep in contact with the outside world,

the French began using hot air balloons.

And the other great invention of the times

was the pigeon post.

Now Manet's pigeon post letters
to Suzanne have survived,

and they are, I suggest,
the most important things

to come out of the siege.

(mellow orchestral music)

They're astonishingly tender.

"I've put pictures of you
all round the bedroom,"

he writes, "so every day you're the first

"and the last thing I see."

On New Year's Day 1871,

the pigeons carried a
letter from him to her

regretting that for the
first time since they met,

he couldn't give her a New Year's kiss.

Manet is always presented
as a cool, elegant,

well-dressed Parisian flâneur,

and most of the time, that's what he was.

But among the secrets that he kept

so fiercely hidden from the world,

was the secret of his own tenderness.

This deep and warm love
he had for his wife.

This sentimentality he was capable of.

(elegant piano music)

It's an important insight
because it helps us to notice

how so many of the women in his art

are having their vulnerability noted

by a caring and besotted male gaze.

These are looks that are
often described as blank.

But there's nothing
blank about them at all.

Many beautiful women
passed through Manet's art.

He was a notorious charmer.

Witty, handsome, clever.

Women liked him, and he
repaid their interest

by putting them in his pictures

and making them irresistible.

This dark beauty here, Berthe Morisot,

was particularly taken with him,

and he, with her.

He painted her 11 times,

and never failed to respond to
her dark, smoldering beauty.

The Morisots were the same
social class as the Manets.

Well-to-do upper bourgeoisie.

And just as I would send my
daughters to have music lessons,

so they sent their daughters
to have art lessons.

And Berthe decided to become a painter,

which was unusual for a
young woman at the time.

She met Manet sometime
at the end of the 1860s,

and he promptly put her into his art.

This famous painting Le balcon
has been invented twice.

Once, by Goya in the 18th century,

and again by Manet a century later.

In both their cases,

the balcony above the street

houses an unreachable beauty,

a femme fatale who's too high to touch.

Something about Berthe Morisot

reminded Manet of the Goya woman,

dark-eyed, sexy.

So he recreated Goya's painting

and put her up here where
we just can't reach her.

It's obvious that she got to him.

But he was married,
and considerably older.

So art historians have tied themselves

into exquisite knots trying to decide

whether they actually had an affair.

It's clear from her letters,

that she hero-worshiped Manet.

She fell into depressions
when he wasn't there,

and went through intense anorexic phases.

When you look at his pictures of her,

you feel you're intruding
on a private relationship.

Berthe Morisot went on to
marry Manet's brother Eugene,

so she could finally sign
herself Mrs. E. Manet.

My own view is that theirs
was an unconsummated passion

full of frustrated desire on both sides.

In real life, it must
have been rather painful.

But in artistic terms,

it brought such a sizzle
to his portrayals of her.

(melancholy piano music)

Morisot did something else for Manet.

As a painter herself, she
was soon to be involved

with the Impressionists.

And her example was to
have a delicate impact

on Manet's touch.

He never became a proper
Impressionist himself,

as we'll see,

but he came close and that was due

in some part to her.

(sirens whining)

(bus rumbling)

You see those big red windows

up on the first and second floor?

Something exceptionally important
in art happened up there

because that's where
Impressionism was born.

In April 1874, a group
of disaffected artists

decided they'd had
enough of being rejected

by the Paris Salon,

so they organized their own exhibition.

It was a chaotic affair.

The photographer Nadar

had been using the space as a studio,

but it had got too expensive for him,

and Nadar was moving on.

In the meantime, he was happy to let

the disaffected artists
put on a show in there.

(quiet orchestral music)

The artists gave themselves

an impressive-sounding name.

Le Société anonyme

des artistes, peintres, sculpteurs.

And on April the 15th, 1874,

they opened the doors of Nadar's studio

to the paying public.

There were 30 artists in the show.

10 of the pictures were
by someone called Degas.

There was another nine
by a man called Monet.

Three by a certain Cezanne,

and five by Pissarro.

The entrance fee was one franc,

and by the end of the day 175 people

could be bothered to climb up there

and see what was inside.

No one liked it much.

The reviews were coruscating.

A particularly cynical
reviewer, Louis Leroy,

picked out a moody picture by Monet,

painted of Le Havre at dawn,

and called Impression, Sunrise.

This bunch, he chuckled,
are just Impressionists.

The name stuck, and from now on

the bunch would be known
as the Impressionists.

Manet wasn't in the show.

The others kept badgering
him to join, but he refused.

Altogether the Impressionists
had eight exhibitions

and Manet wasn't in any of them.

"I will never exhibit
in the shack next door,"

he explained to Degas haughtily.

I enter the Salon through the front door.

(mellow string music)

But the Salon didn't want him, as usual.

Half his pictures were rejected.

And the attentions of
this new gang of admirers

began to seem rather appealing.

Manet usually spent the summer by the sea,

but in 1874 he decided to stay in Paris,

painting in and around his family lands.

With that Impressionist chap, Monet.

(mellow string music)

Manet had known Monet for several years,

and you know that confusion
that people still feel today

between Monet and Manet,

will it was always there.

The first time the Monet
showed at the Paris Salon

in the same room as Manet in 1865,

Manet was appalled and accused Monet

of deliberately using the
similarity between their names

to get himself noticed.

But after this shaky beginning,

their friendship flourished.

"Monet," said Manet, "is
the Rafael of water."

Their relationship was
based on two things.

Mutual respect and money.

Manet was forever lending cash
to the impoverished Monet.

And Monet was forever asking for it.

(lively orchestral music)

In the fine summer of 1874,

Manet and Monet explored
the river together.

Monet had rigged up this
floating studio for himself,

a rowing boat with a makeshift
tarpaulin for a cabin.

Manet painted him at work there,

while Madame Monet sat
fretfully at the back,

avoiding the sun.

(lively orchestral music)

Manet had worked outdoors before,

on the beach, by the sea,

but never as keenly as he did

during this great
Impressionist summer of his

on the banks of the Seine.

(lively orchestral music)

It was as if he was taking
the Impressionists on

at their own game,

showing them all how it should be done.

(lively orchestral music)

The most ambitious painting he did

was a view from here,

with Argenteuil on the
other side of the river.

It shows one of his wife's brothers,

Rudolph Leenhoff, flirting
on the river bank,

with a local floozy he'd
picked up at a dance.

We don't know her name.

We just know that she
was a femme de plaisir,

and a frequent visitor
to the local dance halls.

When Manet showed his view of
Argenteuil at the next Salon,

the critics rounded on him again,

and had a particularly good laugh

at the Mediterranean blue

with which he'd painted the Seine.

And it's true, there's not
much blue out there today.

But get the sun in the right place,

and turn up here at the right time of day,

and you'll see that Manet
was painting the truth.

And you'll see all this coming to life.

(woodwind music)

It isn't really the
weather that interests him,

or the play of light on the water.

Surely what interests Manet more

is the relationship between the couples.

The picture they paint
of the modern world,

and its impact on the friendship
between men and women.

I came across an amusing
cartoon the other day

on the front cover of
a satirical magazine.

And it showed Manet wearing a wobbly crown

and holding a vivid palette in his hand,

and the headline was, "The
King of Impressionism."

Because that's what
everybody thought he was.

(woodwind music)

But he wasn't really.

The modern life that Manet painted

wasn't carefree enough
to be Impressionist.

That summer, he'd begun
feeling pains in his legs.

Walking had begun to hurt.

And although he didn't know it yet,

the terrible truth was,

that just like his father,
he'd contracted syphilis.

- Well it's extremely prevalent of course,

in the 19th century it was
an incurable condition.

It was a major cause of
nervous system problems.

It was a major cause of
skin problems in France.

There were whole hospitals dedicated

to the treatment of syphilis.

- [Waldemar] So people
were aware, were they,

of what they were dealing with.

They knew it was a sexually
transmitted disease.

- [Doctor] They did.

It was like a physical manifestation of

a kind of moral problem.

So it had a mythology
that grew up around it

that almost was a punishment for behavior

that was considered to be
inappropriate at the time.

- [Waldemar] With Manet
the initial symptoms were

that he just felt pains in his legs.

- That's right, it sounds
very much like he had

a condition called tabes dorsalis,

which is where syphilis affects the spine,

particularly the back part of the spine

which controls movement in the legs.

- [Waldemar] Is that why he
had to use a cane all the time?

- [Doctor] Absolutely,
and one of the kind of

characteristic problems that
people with syphilis get,

when it starts affecting the legs

is that you're unable to balance

without using visual cues.

You become very unsteady on your feet,

and more likely to fall.

- [Waldemar] Manet seems to have been in,

well I suppose the
modern phrase, in denial

about what he had because,

I mean right to the very end
he just refused to accept that

his condition was incurable.

- Absolutely, and, you know, up until

penicillin came along it was incurable.

(somber piano music)

- We don't know where he got it.

We don't know who he got it from, or when.

But we do know how grimly
it began to affect him

now that he was in his 40s.

(melancholy operatic singing)

Manet was too ill now to get out much.

He stopped frequenting the cafes

where he'd gone to gossip about art.

The range of new urban
pleasures still open to him

was whittled down to two.

The first of these was the company

of beautiful, young women,

who passed through his
studio, and whom he'd paint

in a series of delightful,
Impressionistic renderings

of the perfect Parisian girl-about-town.

And when he wasn't enjoying the spectacle

of beautiful women, Manet began painting

a series of gorgeous little still lives.

Just a few flowers in a vase.

Quick fire evocations of
an imperishable spring.

What Manet's friends
could never have suspected

was that against all the odds,

this man who was having such trouble

painting little flower studies,

still had one huge statement in him.

Manet surprised everyone,

by somehow finding the
strength and the ambition

to produce one final masterpiece.

(melancholy piano music)

In 1869, a new night club opened in Paris.

It was where everyone
went, the new place to be.

Its original name was
the Folies de Trévise,

but the Duke de Trévise objected

so the name was changed
to the Folies Bergère.

Why did the Duke object?

Because of what went on at
the Folies in those days.

The flirting, the
drinking, the prostitution.

Everyone paid two francs to get in.

Young girls, old girls,
and those in between.

So the decadence here was democratic.

Manet was a regular visitor.

He could lose himself in the smoke

and forget his illness.

At the Folies Bergère no one noticed

that he needed a cane now to walk with.

One night, he encountered
a particular barmaid.

Her name was Suzon,
not Suzanne, but Suzon,

which was close enough for Manet.

So he asked her to pose for him,

and painted her so memorably.

(sentimental string music)

The result is perhaps his most involving

and thought-provoking picture.

It hangs now, at the
Courtauld Institute in London.

And ever since it was painted,

in the winter of 1882,

people have puzzled over it.

Suzon stands at the bar
and gazes sadly into space.

At least, I think she's sad.

Others disagree, and this
elusive look on her face

has been described as blank, bored,

over made up, and even under made up.

There's no consensus.

She's dressed in the typical
bar maid uniform of the Folies.

Black bodice, frilly neckline,

except for these flowers
across her decolletage.

Those, are unusual.

At the Folies-Bergère the
barmaids generally displayed

a little more of themselves.

There's even a naughty
cartoon on the subject.

(sentimental orchestral music)

So she's at the bar, and
she's serving a customer

who's out here, where I am.

But as you can see, if I'm here,

and the cameraman's behind me,

then the three of us
form a horribly confusing

and ugly reflection.

Overlapping, and messy.

So Manet, in a brilliant

and fearless bit of modern picture-making

has actually moved the reflection

from behind Suzon, where you can't see it,

to over here where you can.

Book loads of speculation

have been published about
this mysterious reflection.

But the simple truth is,

if it had stayed where it should be,

we couldn't have seen it.

In the reflection, Suzon is serving

a top-hatted chap with a mustache,

rather blurred and insubstantial.

He's been described as sinister,

but shadowy is a better word.

And of course, he is you,
in your belle epoque form.

There are other details to note as well.

Up in the corner, a pair of dangling legs,

a trapeze artiste is
performing for the crowd.

Among the bottles, some Bass beer.

The Folies-Bergère was now
popular with English tourists.

What were they here for?

What can it all mean?

What are we being told?

(haunting orchestral music)

The fact that so many
people have so many views

about the Folies-Bergère is
proof of the painting's potency.

This is one of the greatest
masterpieces in London,

and it never fails to
set the emotions whirling

and the mind ticking.

My own view is that
it's a simpler painting

than we usually admit.

Manet is showing us his tender side again,

that remarkable empathy
he had with modern women.

The shifted reflection has become

the barmaid's outer
reality, the world out here.

She, meanwhile, stands and
dreams in her inner reality,

cut off from us in a world of her own.

Suzon is another of his Suzannes,

a female victim of the male
gaze, a casualty of the city.

And art historians can twist themselves

into as many compositional
knots as they want

but they can't change the fact

that this is a painting about a girl

lost in her own thoughts, sad,

exposed, vulnerable, and therefore,

so very modern.

(melancholy string music)

The Folies-Bergère was to be
Manet's final masterpiece.

He'd saved his greatest
fireworks till last.

The illness had now gotten so fierce,

he could no longer stand up to paint.

The curtain was falling.

The play was done.

By the winter of 1882,
he could no longer move,

and his leg had swollen up
into a giant, black mess.

Gangrene had set in.

And when the doctors touched his toes,

his nails fell off.

The only hope left was amputation.

So they cut his leg off,
just below the knee,

but it was too late, and it was clear

he only had days to live.

(mournful string music)

Manet wrote a hasty will,

leaving everything to Suzanne,

and adding the firm
instruction that on her death,

Léon was to inherit his estate.

It's the kind of thing you'd
do for a son, isn't it.

And although we'll never know for sure

if Léon was fathered by Manet,

or by Manet's father, or
by someone else entirely,

in the end, this relationship

between a secretive painter,

and the young man he painted so often,

is surely a paternal one.

(mournful string music)

At least that's what I thought yesterday.

Today, I'm not so sure.

Tomorrow, I'll go back to thinking

it's the father again.

That's Manet for you.

Slippery as an eel.

As for his position as an artist,

I can't think of any painter

who was further ahead of
his own times than Manet.

Did he invent modern art?

No of course not.

One man could never do that.

Did he punch a hole in the wall though,

through which modernity could pour?

Oh yes, he did that alright.

(mournful string music)

The end came quietly, in
the middle of the evening.

He wasn't religious,

so he waved away the Archbishop of Paris,

who waited until Manet was comatose

before going against his wishes

and administering the last rites.

He died at seven o'clock,

on April the 30th, 1883,

aged just 51.

And was buried here at Passy Cemetery,

near Berthe Morisot's house.

His coffin was carried proudly

by Claude Monet and Emile Zola.

Degas, who was too old to
help, walked behind them,

and could be heard to
mutter, (speaking in French).

"He was greater than we thought."

(mournful piano music)