What More Can We Say About Édouard Manet? Part 1 of 2
The above photos of Edouard Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” from 1882, were taken by me a couple weeks ago at the Courtault Gallery in London, England.
(Click on the images if you wish to view them larger or individually.)
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What More Can We Say About Édouard Manet?
Édouard Manet is one of the greatest painters and artists in history. His life’s work was a tipping point, a catalyst for the Impressionist movement, and more broadly, the Western modern art movements after him. As regular readers can confirm, I rarely use terms such as “best” or “greatest” and I try to avoid using overstatement. But when discussing Manet’s work and influences, it’s tempting to use those kinds of terms. If Christ’s life and effects were significant enough to be a point on Western History’s timeline, from which all else can be measured “before” and “after,” B.C. and A.D., then for Western Art, a similar measure can exist: “Before Manet” or “After Manet.”
I don’t think a person can fully understand Manet’s importance and effects from simply reading his Wikipedia article, but it is a fine place to start. Manet is not as well-known as many other artists. His name, so similar to Monet’s, is often confused. And while his artworks are often recognized as archetypal or iconic, his name is not as memorable as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, or Bernini.
Lovers of the Impressionists may not even recognize his name as easily as Renoir, Cassatt, Cezanne, or Degas.
To begin to understand Manet, it is valuable to know:
- When did he come into the art world?
- What rules controlled the art world when he began his career?
- Who influenced him and who did he admire?
- Who did he influence?
- What political statements did he make, both within his profession, the broader art world, and politics in general?
- What artistic statements did he make?
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Manet’s story begins, as many similar stories begin: He was a member of an affluent family, where he was encouraged to go into law (or at least some other respectable line of work). Instead, he chose to create enduring imagery.
Before Manet, the worlds of art and art patronage were dominated by two primary financial driving forces: the church and the aristocracy. If you look in books about the history of Western Art, these trends, so dominant, can be a little nauseating. How many times are we going to see Jesus horribly crucified on a cross, with dark clouds behind him, and brilliant blue and red robes on those mourning or persecuting him? How many portraits of Kings, Queens, or other rich people, their faces not smiling, their posture uncomfortably erect?
Manet had traveled and seen these themes excessively and redundantly.
Manet had the audacity to suggest, through his art, that possibly the most beautiful things worth recording, using artistic mediums, might things that are: common and universal. To illustrate this emphasis, consider possibly his most famous work “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe”:
Before painting “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe”, he almost certainly had seen this 16th century painting (and others similar to it) at the Louvre:
In the older paintings (the most visually compelling art medium in an era long before photography or video), cultures and generations passed down entire mythologies, allegories, and ideologies. Paintings before Manet were largely “for the purpose of”, serving the King, the Pope, or the State. And toward those ends, as you can see excessively in the world’s most famous museums, paintings were financed and created primarily to support the existing local regime and status quo. In Manet’s lifetime, if an artist chose to deviate from those purposes, or to counter those purposes, they not only faced loss of financial support, but also imprisonment, fines, or even death. “Freedom of speech” wasn’t a civil right in 19th century France and Europe.
In “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe”, Manet suggests the people he has painted are not “of the past.” The painting and the people are not simply allegorical, mythological or didactic. They are absolutely not royalty, clergy, or aristocracy. The people portrayed in Manet’s version are common people, in modern attire, with imperfect figures, undressing and enjoying simple, pleasant foods in the outdoors. And for Manet, the portrayal of those things, was as high of a target as art could hope to aim.
Manet’s artworks went against vast, largely unassailed, and historically guarded Western Art definitions of “What is ideal?”and ”What is beautiful?” Manet’s artworks suggest beauty is not derived primarily from wealth, class status, ornateness, excessive detail, professional distinction, or religious approval. Instead, beauty may be found not simply in ”the eyes of the beholder,” but more so in a beholder’s abilities to see, interpret, and re-express beauty. The history of Western Art “After Manet” suggests his theories and priorities ended up on the winning side of most of those artistic debates.
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Here is a chart showing when Manet was born, in relation to other famous Impressionist painters:
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For regular readers and writers: Part 2 of this post series should appear soon.
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Thursday, June 14, 2012
Mark,
Quote :
“… beauty is found in not simply “the eyes of the beholder,” but more so in a beholder’s abilities to see, interpret, and re-express beauty.”
Ah, and there lies the rub. The irony lies in that Manet was just one of a few dozen or so major names of the 19th century who were in fact pivotal in raising the consciousness level of the public at large. (Well, you’ll get a debate even on this point; art “scholars” today-arguably an oxymoron-will say that “Impressionism”-called the “New Art” then-was a downward departure from “legitimate” art, not even a “movement”). Manet was not really an “Impressionist” in the same sense as we understand it by today’s terms. Some scholars would prefer to christen Cezanne as the “Father of” both “Impressionism” and “Modern Art”.
I’ll play the Devil’s Advocate on this point and insist that we should not forget the most “pivotal” of all art “movements” bar none was the never repeated Old Dutch Masters of the 16th and 17th centuries; no art movement since has rivaled the academic quality or quantity of the Dutch schools. And unless we venture into the contemporary prospects (“contemporary” as in the last 100 years) of cinema, no “movement” or group of artists will ever rival or exceed the Dutch on all fronts. And one could argue that the Dutch were the first “proto” Romantics.
Most of the Italian and German Renaissance artists were still held hostage by the church; any attempts to secularize were met with disdain and threats to their lives or at best, threats to what little livelihood they could glean from their artistic talents.
But the Dutch created secular works…landscapes, urbanscapes, interior/exterior genre…all with impunity and the public endorsement of the wealthy Dutch middleclass.
I like Manet. I don’t like Cezanne. I like Manet’s art not so much that he was “pivotal”, as he was certainly not the central gravitas of change, especially during the volatile decades of the last half of the 19th century, but that his art reflected BOTH the necessity of honoring long entrenched academic principles of creating art, and the necessity of a progressive vision that artists were denied in the preceding centuries.
An interesting side note: Both Degas and Renoir, in their later years, wondered if they could ever venture back into their “stodgy” academic skills. They found they could not ! (Well, Degas wasn’t that great an academic painter anyway, at least in his formative years).
As far as “movements”, it was the Romantic Movement that ended up ruling the day. Why? Because that Movement (as in capitol “M”) remains in charge today, regardless whether it is clearly expressed in “Neo-Impressionism” or Raymond Chandler or “Film Noir” or Giger’s “Bio-Mechanoids”.
Romanticism rules. Hemingway or Steinbeck or Sam Shepard (view “True West”) have been unable to stop it…not sure they really wished to at any event…
J.B.
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Mark: Thank you James. Wonderful to hear your thoughts. Before I jump into the waters with you, I’ll begin with: Hemingway? Not a romantic? Please. He was a doomed romantic til the end.
All your points may be right. I don’t know. But what a fun debate.
Maybe it is not accurate to suggest Manet was the pivotal influence, but we might agree that his efforts, trying to synthesize many merits of pre-existing art mores with the new visual flashes that would become “modern,” from the Impressionists to the filmmakers, to Lichtenstein, Rothko, and Warhol, to rock n’ roll – Manet’s efforts were in the right time period. Whatever the Dutch Masters did (including Pieter Bruegel the Elder and hundreds of other artists, whose works championed secular and humanist priorities long before Manet), as you suggest, those efforts weren’t historically repeated to such a degree, and they were way ahead of their time (nothing wrong with that). So, I think, as you might agree, the second half of the 19th century, with the political movements toward statehood and human rights, and the unstoppable forces of the merchantile class and industrialization, might be a “before and after point” on many timelines. Not an important debate.
Degas was a great “traditional” or “academic” painter in his younger days – or at least he had the ability when he chose. For example, “A Cotton Office In New Orleans” is hard to beat in the category of taking the best of traditional and new, more emotionally-filled-content painting techniques. Yes, early works like “Young Spartans Exercising” leave much to be desired in the realms of perspective (looks more like Gauguin), but Degas, later on, could do what he wanted to do.
A Cotton Office in New Orleans
I think Rembrandt would have admired that painting for capturing the feeling of the environment, without excessive embellishment or romanticism. And Rembrandt, the lover of real, limited, and low light, probably would have admired Degas’ 1868 “Interior”, often referred to as “The Rape.”
I hear you about Cezanne and I don’t dispute many critics point to his general influence. But I don’t think it’s fair for a person to suggest he was a leading influence on the Impressionists – I think he was a contemporary in time, more influential on later artists such as Picasso, Braque, even Matisse, or the Fauvists. The painting “Homage to Cezanne” at Musee d’Orsay, by Maurice Denis, has none of the classic Impressionists in it. And the painters pictured in that painting generally don’t move me: Edouard Vuillard, Vollard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson, Ker-Xavier Roussel, Pierre Bonnard, and Marthe Denis.
Homage to Cezanne
It may be difficult for an apprentice, who only aspires toward Cezanne’s qualities, to impress me when the bar is that low.
Compratively, Manet is pictured at the Musee d’Orsay’s “Homage to Delacroix.” If you aim for Delacroix and fall short, then you probably still have something worthwhile to show.
Homage to Delacroix
And Henri Fantin-Latour’s famous “A Studio in the Batignolles (Homage to Manet)” at Musee d’Orsay clearly suggests the major Impressionists, at least at some point in time, were willing to tip their hats in deference to the elder Manet. Cezanne is not referenced in that circle – as a member or leader.
Homage to Manet
I know I’m probably not informing you of anything. My intent is more to inform others listening in to our playful discussion, others who might be intent on knowing more about these players on art’s grand stage.
Thank you for taking so much time and care to respond – the devil’s advocates are often the most provocative.
By the way, do you want to know the most disappointing museum I visited in Europe? The Vatican Museum. There is no excuse for why such an obscenely wealthy financial institution should have such a comparatively low quality selection of art (especially if you don’t count their resident ceiling mural painter and the thousands of Egyptian and Mesopotamian relics they pillaged in one way or another.)
Friday, June 15, 2012
Mark,
Quote :
“My intent is more to inform others…”
My intent as well. So grand, is it not, that we are so wise and world weary; no doubt in our descent from the mountain top we are at risk of blending with the eternal banal. Well. Physicists say that in but a few trillion years, certainly a blink in our eyes, the universe will slow to a stop, cool down and disintegrate into nothing. The laws of thermodynamics will have become null and void in a universe without memory, without time. This will happen, they say, trillions of years AFTER anything that could be recognizable as having life, that could be organic, or that could resemble the slightest evidence that life ever existed. Any hope of salvation will solely lie in the remote possibility that a sentient species could escape to one or more multi-dimensions, except those prospects are apparently dimmed by the current math (well beyond my scope) that posits there is very little chance that anything resembling life could exist in any of the dimensions theorized.
But I digress…
On Hemingway.
Quote :
“Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative.”
Hemingway wrote in a style that was antithetical to classic Romantic fiction; the paradox in the reality of his writing style lies in the fact that his life stood out as an archetypal “Romantic” hero in the face of his modernist early mentors, Stein and Pound, who can hardly be called Romantic as they were, in their time, considered “modernist” avant-garde. Closest Hemingway got to “Romantic” writing was James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Great Gatsby notwithstanding, both Fitzgerald’s and Joyce’s writing style is nevertheless light-years apart from Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters, Mary Shelly, Keats or Byron). Only in the event that you neglect 19th century Romantic literature could you call Hemmingway a “romantic”.
From Wiki (The final refuge of the wretched) :
“Henry Louis Gates believes Hemingway’s style was fundamentally shaped “in reaction to [his] experience of world war”. After World War I, he and other modernists “lost faith in the central institutions of Western civilization,” by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style “in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action, and silences—a fiction in which nothing crucial—or at least very little—is stated explicitly.”
Now I dare you to take issue you with Wiki…Wiki rules on a “free” Internet where we get to say anything crazy !…Of course, we’re the exception, right ?”
Hemingway’s naivete has often been washed over as being romantic.
Hemingway :
“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you … Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you.”
If I may suggest, this encapsulates not only the end of Hemmingway’s “romantic” inclinations but also reflects the 20th Century’s reactionary hostility toward all the academic arts of the 19th century.
If Hemingway had a “Romantic” spark in him, it was lost after WW I; keeping in mind the contradiction does persist throughout succeeding generations : Yesterday’s “Romantics” become today’s “Realists”, and the “Radical Revolutionaries” of the past evolve, by attrition, into today’s dull, mass-consuming norm. Once “radical” is accepted in public, can we still call it “romantic” ? Or “revolutionary”?
Hemingway lived his life likened to the “Romantic” hero, but did not write like the illusionary, poetically charged emotional mindset that characterized the “Romantics”. Unlike the Romantics, the 20th century and the accumulative cultural ethos of the Industrial Revolution imposed a distinct “separation of mind versus body”, not seriously recognized until C.P. Snow came into the picture mid-century. (Cambridge : “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution-The Rede Lecture”, 1959…An astounding prophetic lecture that should be required reading in every University).
So glad we touched on this, because herein lies one of my beefs with the century of our birth : The corrosive disintegration of all the transcendental object lessons we inherited from the 19th century.
You can argue the Industrial Revolution. Or the two world wars of the 20th century. Either point is moot for our purposes here, because the 20th century writers who resisted the most their romantic impulses lived out lives that would have been fertile ground for the Romantic writers of the 19th century.
Therein lies the paradox I address.
That’s only one reason why the Romantic Movement, far and above the more “minor movements”, rules to this day. Both the “Impressionist Movement/Period”, or even the “Aesthetic Movement” itself (“Art for art’s sake”), pale by comparison. Other reasons are for another blog.
I’m going to abridge my own initial intent so I can address the great pics of Part II, and of course I would never pass up the chance to re-visit the wonderful, arguably the greatest (and, perhaps, more importantly), the last “traditionally” Romantic novel of the 20th century.
Yes and BTW, on the Vatican, a disappointment, certainly, but surprise? No. Even the ceiling I’m sure was a “disappointment” of sorts, despite the immensity of both talent and labor : Michelangelo did not regard himself as a great painter, and he was not. He knew himself well. And from the recent conservation accounts I’ve read, Michelangelo had but seven colors to paint with; the images as they were originally painted were cartoonish and decorative, as they appear now. The restoration put many “art scholars” all in a titter, inclined to be defensive, because unfortunately many “scholars” failed to take into account the preceding centuries of BAD restorations on which many occasions these same “scholars” based their dated and misguided “critiques” on; unbelievable and inexcusable, I know, but that is a common reality of art “scholarship”.
I regret that you and I both missed out on the great John Everett Millais exhibition at the Tate a few years back.
J.B.
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Mark: It is a great privilege to converse with you. I appreciate your ideas, even if I don’t always fully understand them. I try to limit my discussions to a few thousand years before me and maybe a couple hundred after me. Beyond that, and into other dimensions, is beyond both my scope and understanding.
Yes, “romantic” has several, sometimes conflicting, definitions. When discussing “Romanticisim” and “Romantics”, each party may be envisioning apples and oranges.
I generally don’t like Hemingway or his perscpective. He too often threw the baby out with the bathwather, but kept some of the residue in his repertoire. He kept his machismo and self-focus until his end. And for all his Oedipal loathing of a son toward his father, he, as is often the case in such tales, continued some of his father’s bad patterns. His characters in one of his last and unfinished novels “The Garden of Eden” are wealthy and self-involved – without much care for the well-being of others around them. So, it doesn’t surprise me those characters are generally uninteresting to each other and most readers. When Hemingway’s characters lost their noble willingness toward self-sacrifice, they lost some of their universal appeal.