Reviewed by By Mathew Rose

Anyone who shrieked at Damien Hirst’s sliced up readymade shark (1), bull or calf sculptures floating in formaldehyde-filled tanks and exclaimed, “That’s not art,” might be interested to plunge into another massive cleaving: the 19th century revolution that tore apart that era’s contemporary art worlds and changed not only the direction of art, but also the direction of aesthetic perception.

Ross King, who chronicled the art historical Brunechelli’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, dissects the onset of Impression in his impressively researched The Judgment of Paris. Hundreds of footnotes, a dozen bibliographic pages and an index that covers everyone (and everything) from Abstract Expressionism to Hegel to Emile Zola, deftly paints a drama that yields up buckets of vivid color (and meaning) to anyone who has pinned up a postcard of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe on a college dorm room wall.

In the 1860s when America’s Civil War was raging, Paris was in the throes of another war, one that would tear apart the fabric of genteel highbrow Academic institutions and their aging standard bearers and the economic system supporting them: the growing European middle class.  The importance of the revolution that swept through Paris concerned not only how and where paint was applied, but what it depicted, for the mid-19th Century embodied the fast forwarding of technology that we accept as natural today.

As with all dramas of these sorts, there are winners and losers.  The loser turned out to be France’s leading painter, Edouard Meissonier, an artist whose wealth and talent derived from his ability to draw out the most minute detail of his historical scenes of bonhommes, musketeers and Napoleonic heroes as well as the tens of thousands of francs from the wealthiest of patrons willing to pony up.  His rival was the good-natured red-headed Edouard Manet, an artist whose first entry into the official Paris art world was no nobler than a street urchin, The Absinthe Drinker (1859) the sort of fellow Manet found regularly in his Paris neighborhood of Batignoles and in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.  (That work was promptly rejected from the Salon).

Ross’s Judgment itemizes the downfall of Meissonier’s vision – a comforting bourgeois specter of large-scale historical rhapsodies of costumes, swords and heroism while painting in counterpoint the rise of a more scientific, emotionally laden direct picture making that, in turn, would launch more than 150 years of ceaseless experimentation with art and art making. Messonier’s tirelessly posed men on horseback and episodic theatrical displays of armed victories are irrevocably discarded in this charged decade and replaced by the looser but hotter erotic gaze of Manet’s Olympia or his Déjeuner sur l’herbe (originally titled Le Bain, 1863). Ross shows us how Déjeuner was made – appropriating the figures from Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving, The Judgment of Paris (after Raphael) and updating it – a terribly 20th century strategy – to produce a contemporary scene of Parisians picnicking along the river. One should note that the famous painting was produced inside Manet’s studio, and in its ironic and erotic embrace of the new consciousness, was nothing less an intellectual assault on the good taste of the septuagenarians of the Academie to which it would be submitted for the 1863 salon.

By painstakingly plotting the decade of the 1860s, Ross implores the reader to ponder this shift towards viewer engagement (and the scandals it then involved) and emotional tension Manet provoked. We visit the famous Paris Salons of the 1860s (which dwarfed the crowds of our modern day FIACs, Art Basels and Frieze art fairs by the thousands), and how the world awoke to its own age of steam engines, electricity, photography and scientific advances in all quarters. It was a perfect storm of the first order for the ruling class at the time.

From Manet’s bold easel, tumbled dozens of 19th (and 20th) century art stars – Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse among others who sometimes violently unfolded the traditional rectangle and to portend what paint on canvas could and would mean to a world hell bent on deconstructing the past in the service of the present. From those contentious Paris salons not only did Impressionism, Pointillism, and other isms find context, like the brilliant intensity of Van Gogh’s sun-drenched willowing fields, but also the newspaper and wall paper collages of Picasso and Braque, the squares of Malevich, the ready-mades of Duchamp, and every art movement afterwards that attempted to redefine art, its purpose, its “language” and perception. From Manet and his offspring, one soon finds the Expressionists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. The ever reductive, exploitive, and increasing self-consciousness of art making had a pedigree which Ross pinpoints in the explosive decade of the 1860s in Paris.

In the end, Ross’s Judgment details the sorry demise of Meissonier’s vision, one anchored in the frothy past, his dire lack of irony and how history has abandoned him and his work for a brave new world, where anything (as we now know) is possible and sometimes embraced, diced sharks included.