I've Heard It Pronounced Both Ways

There is an old joke among art historians that I often use before launching into a section on linguistics in my work. The joke starts off walking into the Impressionist wing of a museum. Two little old ladies are chatting away in a corner, when one of them says to the other: “Monet, Manet. I've heard it pronounced both ways.”

The joke depends on your knowing that Monet and Manet are in fact different people. It is even funnier if you know they are different painters and how they were confused in their lifetimes as well. In 1865, Monet had several seascape paintings which were accepted for the Salon. Works were hung alphabetically in the Salon so Monet, who was still beginning his career, found his work near the scandalous work of Manet, who happened that year to be showing Olympia. Manet had caused a scene two years earlier at the Salon des Refusés with Le Bain, later to be retitled Dejeuner sur l'herbe, a pattern of infamy he embraced, one already established by Courbet who influenced both artists as well as so many others.

Monet was not interested in producing work whose notoriety was based in social outrage, though he did know that he wanted to paint a picture that was great enough to affect Paris, in size like Courbet's Burial at Ornans, and through a depiction of modernity as Manet's paintings had done. This, he knew, could not happen with pictures of the churning waters along the Normandy coast, like Le Pointe de la Have, though the critic Paul Mantz had written, in the important Gazette des Beaux Arts, of his desire to follow the career of this seascape painter. In the meantime, others were complimenting Manet on his seascapes. He is remembered saying, "Who is this Monet whose name sounds like mine and who is taking advantage of my celebrity?" A point, which, in passing, goes to show that many before today have used another's celebrity to get ahead.

The two painters are unlikely to be muddled any longer, though the joke for art historians points to the continuing confusion surrounding Impressionism. The art historians have a knowledge; the little old ladies do not. What I, however, particularly like about the joke is that it also shows how art audiences two centuries ago were no more attentive to details of the works on display than most audiences are today, a fact that is bemoaned but has an art history of its own.