Headline aside, I actually respect a good deal of what’s in The American Conservative, but this is just such a wrongheaded piece, that I felt compelled to spend entirely too much time on it.

High Art of the Bourgeoisie by Matthew Taylor is just full of… it.

Taylor is presenting some supposedly radical views of Edouard Manet that will just

Primed to see a parade of characters memorialized for posterity by a realist master, a visitor may be struck by how brief and sketchy the characterizations are and wonder at how this limitation only improves their aesthetic.

Who goes to see a Manet exhibition expecting to see realism and who is surprised to find the ‘brief and sketchy characterizations’ that were taken to another level by Monet and the Impressionists? This sounds more like a Matthew Taylor problem than something experienced by anyone who has ever read anything about western art ever in their life. Frankly, I am having trouble picturing what Taylor’s teachers taught him about the birth of Impressionism or European art in the nineteenth century that he would think that Manet is your go to guy for bourgeois realism.

What a betrayal then, of the militants of modernism, that Manet was by turns surprised and despondent at his repeated rejections at the hands of the academy, the critics, and the public.

Who are these militants that are offended that Manet wanted to traditional critical success which was, generally, necessary for, you know, monetary success, i.e., selling your paintings. It’s hard to find an artist, but that artist ever so avant-garde, to take joy in being rejected, not just by the academy and critics, but also by the public that artists depend on to give him or her money in return for the sale of artwork. Oh, and it should be noted he followed that remark up by quoting from a epistolary exchange between Manet and his friend, Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire, the iconoclastic rebel who wrote a poem about cutting a woman and having sex with the wound as a means of giving her syphilis. Taylor, your non-iconoclastic, bourgeois, middle class man does not ask a man like Baudelaire advice on handle approbation without being just teensiest bit avant-garde.

There is an admirable humility in Manet’s corpus that separates him from his contemporaries. He turned down an invitation to join a dissident art exhibition held by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, and other budding impressionists. He preserved that artistic integrity in which art must flow from the soul of the painter, and without which art is merely brittle canvas splashed with resin and oils, without succumbing to the self-satisfied pleasure at the contempt of the ignorant that characterizes the soldiers of the avant-garde.

Okay. Nice straw man there to describe the entirety of every avant-garde movement ever. And Manet didn’t turn down the dissident art exhibition out of humility. Rather the opposite. He wanted to wider acclaim that came with recognition and respect in the official Salon. Also, the Impressionists were the brash, new kids on the block. Manet was from an earlier generation. I don’t go partying with twenty-somethings, but it’s not out of humility.

Taylor even ends his essay with ammunition for the opposite argument he is attempting to make, by quoting Manet: ‘Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?’

‘My notoriety,’ Manet said. He was friends with the radical poets Baudelaire and Mallarme. He supported a female painter, Berthe Morisot. And, of course, he was friends with Monet, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, etc.

No. Manet wanted acceptance and acclaim from the main tastemakers of his time. But he was not a bourgeois painter. He was a radical and did set the stage and tone for modernism in the visual arts.