Month: April 2021

Beyond the Viewer: Who is Looking? (P6)

On April 29, 2021

In the previous post, we distinguished 5 positions inside the painting.
(see Figure 1 in Post 5)
Now, we consider the positions outside the painting:
Who is looking?

Or as the question in Installation My Manet has it:

Question 4: What kind of social roles are involved outside the painting?

For the answer, we turn to Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877) :

Figure 1: Gustave Courbet The Painter’s Studio – A Real Allegory (1855)
(with red ellipses added)

Unlike Vermeer, who depicted only himself and the model (see Post 1), Courbet shows himself in a crowded studio with all the members of society relevant for his realistic painting – with himself in the centre!

In the centre, the nude model looks over his shoulder – although he is painting not her, but a scene from his home province. Well, a nude is always helpful to get (male) attention, and the nude signals serious painting.
The little boy with the cat is allowed to take a closer look, and seems to admire the artist more than the painting.

To the left, we see members of society – both poor and rich (the sitting man with the dogs may be Napoleon III).

To the right, members of the art community are gathered: friends, writers, artists, art lovers, critics, and financiers (at the right edge, reading a book and not interested: Baudelaire, the realist writer and Manet’s friend).

Notably, only two people – besides the inner (red) circle around Courbet – are really interested in the painting (marked with red ellipses).
To the right, there is a woman looking over her shoulder from behind;
to the left, and at the very edge, we find an old Rabbi or philosopher observing the scene.
The others, presumably, play a role in the allegory of Courbet’s life, but they seem to be present just to support the Grand Ego of the painter.
Thus, if we count only the interested persons, we find 5 positions and social roles outside the painting:

The painter
The painter is clearly shown as independent, creative and skilled to transform ideas with paint into a visual object. There is a personal life depicted leading Courbet from his rural provincial region to the centre of French culture and society.
Painting is shown in a social context, but the context is not really involved in the process. The painter is the centre of the activity.
With Manet, the painter is present and active, but not represented.

The model
In Courbet’s painting, the model has a curiously passive role standing behind the painter, while he is painting his own provincial background.
As we will find, the model has a crucial and active role for Manet. In Luncheon on the Grass, the model has direct eye contact not only with the viewer, but also with Manet, the painter.
Manet preferred models interested in his art (family members, friends, supporters) and artists like his favourite model Victorine Meurent (who not only modelled but painted herself) or his friend and painter Berthe Morisot.
We will return to the relationship of Manet and his models.

The viewer
Courbet clearly takes pride in collecting a large group of viewers around him – he was a great painter, but also a great marketer of his art and engaged in public life. Paintings are created to be seen! And for Courbet, the painting can and should talk to the viewer, even presenting an allegory of a painter’s life.
For Manet, the communication of ideas through painting is a much more subtle thing. The viewer has a role in understanding and interpreting the ideas of a painting, but Manet is not telling the viewer a “story”.
In the reflection on the “painting of painting”, the painter is his own first viewer. Other viewers may be present on a visit to the studio or are an anticipated audience (if only in the museum), but they do not enter the painting.
Still, their viewpoint in front of the painting plays an important role in the composition, and their view, their anticipated reaction, and their role as customers influence the painting process.

The critic or the “other”
Members of the art community, critical evaluators including the artist’s friends, are vital because they provide the examples, role models, and feedback for the painter.
Courbet sought independence in his Realism from traditional Romantic schools early in his career – perhaps, this is why the group of artists and critics in the painting is somewhat distanced to the side. Still, he was well aware of the importance of the art community for his work.
Manet – besides attending for six years the art school of Thomas Couture – also was an integrated member of the art community, although in his own circle. Artists and critics were frequently visiting in his studio and he visited them in return.
While a painter is foremost his own critic, “others” taking a different perspective “from the back” were not only a virtual, but an actual presence in his painting practice. Charles Baudelaire, for instance, is said to have visited Manet almost daily. In later years, Stephane Mallarmé was another friend, art critic, and regular visitor.

The “Authority” or Big Other
Courbet does not include a reference to art traditions or a gaze outside the painting to any authority, he paints himself as the authority.
Manet valued highly the tradition and institution of art, and sought the recognition by the Academy of Fine Arts – eventually to present his art in the Louvre Museum. He initiated a “revolution” in art, but only because he sincerely pursued his own way of painting, not respecting established norms just because they were established. Unlike his Impressionist friends, he always tried to mediate between tradition and innovation.
He never founded an own school but experimented with different styles and built bridges between schools, past and present. The Great Masters – like Diego Velazquez, Antoine Watteau, Titian, and Frans Hals – gave him guidance. But he did not follow them.
Perhaps most telling of his independent orientation toward a more abstract ideal or “authority” of painting is the fact that he never really joined the impressionists, although he kept close contact with their community.
And he never styled himself as a genius transgressing the achievements of his predecessors (like Courbet). But he created his personal style, and art historians to this day have problems with assigning him to any particular “-ism”.
Velasquez was his idol all through his career – that is why I chose to take the Master’s silhouette as an icon for the “authority” in the diagrams.
I also like the term “Big Other” for this external referent, because it eases the connections between the “other” – as a different perspective by others in the social context – and the “Big Other” – as an authoritative value reference in art.
Different Interpreters of Manet’s art invoke different “authorities” (e.g. philosophical, historical, psychoanalytical, political, or even ethical frames of reference) and propose their relevance for understanding his art.
At this point, we just introduce this distinction, and will discuss different interpretations when they become relevant for understanding Manet’s paintings.

Now we can combine the positions or roles in our scheme: (updating the version of Figure 4 in Post 2)

Figure 2: Positions and social roles inside and outside the “painting of painting”

The diagram shows again the painting with its “stage” between front space and back space. The triad takes a prominent role within the painting with the onlooking other (green) and the absorbed other (yellow) playing supportive roles. The gazes of the figures create a social space within and are reaching out to the agents outside the painting. They relate the represented social reality within the painting to an unrepresented social reality outside.

The diagram differs clearly from the scheme for Vermeer, because it distinguishes a plurality of positions beyond the painter, the model, and the unrepresented viewer.
It is also different from Courbet and Velazquez and their depiction of the “painting of painting”, since they represent the painter within the picture.
Courbet, moreover, does not include the First – the direct contact with the viewer – or the Third – the gaze to an authority, unlike Velazquez.
As we have seen in Music in the Tuileries and The Fishing (Post 3) , Manet does include in some cases himself in a painting, but not in a prominent role. He appears as part of the depicted theme: as member of the art community enjoying their time in the park, or: as member of the future family (since The Fishing has been interpreted as a promise and announcement of his marriage with Suzanne, the mother of his son Leon depicted on the other side of the river).

The diagram, obviously, anticipates the composition of Luncheon on the Grass. We just have to drop the absorbed figure from the scheme. This raises the question, whether the scheme is only an abstract model of this specific painting. The thesis of MyManet proposes more, namely,
that the diagram is a generic scheme for other paintings, too, and that

the Luncheon on the Grass should be read as a programmatic statement about the “painting of painting”.

To support this thesis, we will look at a painting that precedes the Luncheon, and which MyManet understands as a first attempt by Manet to combine insights from his study of Velazquez and Courbet (and other paintings) in a programmatic way.
The painting is The Old Musician (1862), created just a year before the Luncheon and considered by many art historians as basic for Manet’s art in the early 1860ies.

See you next week!

System of Faces and Gazes (P5)

By Richard Pieper

On April 22, 2021

In Edouard Manet

Velazquez has demonstrated for us (in the previous post) that there is a range of different directions the gazes of persons will take – and how these gazes structure the social space within the painting and with “unrepresented” persons outside.
Time to have a more systematic look at these gazes and their meaning.
In some cases, the proper classification may be disputed, but this is not relevant for the following.
Since not all faces or gazes appeared in all three examples and some appeared more than once, we might ask:

Question 3: How many gazes or persons are needed as a minimum?

Or to be more specific:
If the “painting of painting” is the theme, how many and what kind of gazes are needed within the painting to communicate with a certain number and kind of persons assumed outside the painting?
The answer to this question will lead us into some rather theoretical territory – so, I hope for your patience, and hold on tight!
In Figure 1 we find an overview of the faces in the diagrams (see Post 4):

Figure 1: Formal positions and faces in Velazquez’ paintings

Actually, the overview presents not all the cases we might like to distinguish in MyManet:

The triad of persons, which are at the centre of Luncheon on the Grass (Figure 2), is not an obvious element in Velazquez’ examples. The triad comprises a gaze (red) to the viewer (the nude), a gaze (blue) to the members of the group (man to the right), and this strange gaze (purple) directed outside the painting (second man).
All three gazes appear in each example of Velazquez, but not in a specific arrangement and they are combined with other gazes.
In MyManet, I want to identify the members of the triad with specific names and formal positions:

The First
The First is making the essential contact with the viewer outside the painting.
As in The Drinkers, this may be more than one person. But then we may conclude that this is suggested by the theme – the joyful group – rather than needed in a more general scheme.
In The Little Cavaliers, we find also two Firsts (red) in the centre groups engaging the viewer. A third person to the right, looking towards the viewer, may be gazing toward the viewer accidentally, not really trying to engage the viewer.
In other paintings, we will find more of these “accidental Firsts”, especially, in paintings with larger groups. In some cases, the person looking toward the viewer will be so “distant” in the middle- or background that the engaging effect does not arise.
A special case is the viewer entering – as it were – the painting and appearing as a backfigure in the foreground (see Post 3). We might say that engaging the viewer is so effective that the viewer steps into the scene and takes the role of the First. An additional First is not needed to achieve the engagement.
In terms of Fried’s “facingness”, the picture as a whole has attracted full attention.
In a diagram we could depict the backfigure as a First (red) from the back (without eyes or face).
For reasons discussed below, I prefer to show the viewer as backfigure within the painting to keep the role of the First distinct. Manet does not use backfigures in his paintings. (With rare exceptions e.g. in the Masked Ball at the Opera with a Polichinelle from the back appearing on the left side.)

The Second
The Second has the role of creating the social space by looking at the other members of the group.
There may be more than one group, like in The Little Cavaliers, so we expect one of them in each group and social space. In some cases, the Second may be seen from the back (no eyes or face), but then we interpret the position to be “accidentally” turned away from the viewer. The position is not specifically calling for the identification of the viewer to take this position and look at the scene through the eyes of the Second.

The Third
The Third is acknowledging the existence of some external “authority” with his or her gaze.
The Third has a role that is crucial for Manet’s scheme – and it is, I think, one of the reasons why Manet is admiring Velazquez.
The best example, among the three paintings from Velazquez above, is Las Meninas with the Master himself (and some of the other figures) looking at the royal couple entering the scene. As indicated previously, all interpreters agree that the painting is celebrating the royal institution, not just the royal couple. And we should add that the dominant figure of the painter himself also aims to emphasize the importance of painting as a cultural institution, not only Velazquez’ personal success as royal painter.
This reference to an external “authority”, we see also in The Drinkers in the gaze of Bacchus; it is not so obvious in The Little Cavaliers, where the gazes (purple) out of the painting may be “accidental” to persons which just happen to be outside the picture frame.

The triad – First, Second and Third – is an essential element of MyManet, i.e. my view of the hidden meaning in Manet’s compositions.
It is not the only one, as we see shortly. But I like to remind you of the etching of the puppet theatre – shown already in Post 2 – where the triad is prominently on stage. (There is a fourth figure, perhaps Polichinelle subdued by the police officer? And there is the cat, which we meet again later!)
There is a painting by Velazquez focusing on just the triad (and a little monkey!) which is shown next to the Luncheon on the Grass in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The triad in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and in Velazquez’ Three Musicians (1618)

We return to this triad when we discuss the Luncheon in more detail.
Here, I want to point out that the triad can be understood in social theory as a basic social unit:
The first-person represents the subjective perspective of the focused individual, the second-person is the partner in a dialog acknowledging the mutual presence and communicating back to the first-person (and perhaps to others), and the third-person is a participant and/or observer depending on the nature of the interaction.
The sociologist Georg Simmel – mentioned before – was the first to analyse systematically the formal position of the “Third” and its different roles (e.g. as mediating referee or as dividing and dominating the others). He demonstrates that it is the triad which essentially constitutes the basic social unit, because it is the triadic relation in which we experience that a social interaction – like a dialogue – can happen without us as first-person!
There is an objective social reality in front of us which does not depend on our subjective view or any specific individual or viewer. Children learn this around the age of three years (Tomasello 2019).

In MyManet, we assume that Manet had at least an intuitive understanding of this social phenomenon.

That is why he chose three persons in the centre moving the fourth to the back. Moreover, Manet saw that this triad had to situate the activity of painting in a social context:

The First engages the viewer/painter, the Second establishes the social reality of the group in front of us, the Third acknowledges the wider institutional context, the society, or the “world” around the painting.

And Manet reflects in his painting on this reality in a distinctly modern way. He keeps a reflective distance putting this reality “on stage” where he can manipulate it as the painter-puppeteer.
We can understand now why Manet avoids the backfigure. Letting the viewer enter the “stage” as a backfigure would destroy this reflective distance and make it difficult to control the level and the kind of engagement between the First and the viewer.
The social and philosophical analysis of this social reality “on stage” is available only a generation after Manet.
But he experienced already the impact of modernity on his own life and his relations to others, and his literary friends (Baudelaire, Zola, Mallarmé) described it in their novels.

The “Other”
Another crucial element is the figure of the “other” (green) representing an outsider view.
The “other” is placed in parenthesis because it is a rather complex figure with many meanings in the literature, and often put into parenthesis in other texts.
Let us try to clarify its roles and meanings:

On a first level,
the “other” plays just a role within the painting. While the Second (blue) creates the social space by looking at other participants from within, the “other” confirms their social space from outside.
All three paintings by Velazquez show these figures. Especially in The Drinkers, we see the central group surrounded by onlookers. In The Little Cavaliers, the “other” is connecting the frontstage with the groups in the middle.
We could treat the “other” figure as a potential Second – like the figure in the back to the right in The Drinkers, who is communicating with the figure within the group and might be joining as the activity evolves.
Similarly, we could speak of the Second as being the “other” for the First and Third. Just consider how Manet – in Luncheon on the Grass – moves the Second to the right side of the painting looking onto the other two!
In a more general usage, the partners of a first-person in social interaction are often referred to as the “others”, no matter how close or distant the relationship.
In MyManet, I prefer to make a clear distinction between the members of a triad (or ingroup forming a social space) and outsiders.
In the case of The Drinkers, the onlooker to the right – presumably a beggar trying to get some coins or a drink – might even be a total stranger to the group. Again, Simmel has taught us to understand the special role of a “stranger”, especially in the context of modern urban life.
On this level, the “other” is characterized by a cultural role:
the individualism of modern urban life makes us partially “strangers” to each other. We must come back to this meaning of the “other”, when discussing Manet as a “painter of modern life”.

On another level,
the “other” is looking from outside of the picture frame, as it were. Discussing Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic painting, we saw that the viewer might – in a way – enter the painting from the front to the point that the backfigure appears within the painting.
Similarly, a person with a different perspective – say, a critic or the “alter ego” of the painter – may enter the painting from the back and appear in the role of an onlooker.
The “classical case”, as I pointed out, is the person in the background of Velazquez’ Las Meninas!

On yet another level,
the concept of “other” has a background in social philosophy (Sartre, Levinas) or psychoanalysis (Lacan). In this case, we have to consider a “deep structure” of social reality – either in society or in the personality – which confronts the self as the “other” – as a stranger to itself – with effects of alienation.
Some art historians apply this level in their interpretation, but they reach beyond the realism guiding Manet in his paradigm of a puppet theatre. (We will see a “depth” in Manet’s realism when we discuss the role of the “uncanny” in a later post.) The concept of “other” assumed in MyManet looks at painting as a social activity, where the participants and “others” are taking roles either within or around the painting as an installation in an imagined setting. We will say more on “deep structures” discussing other views on Manet.

Again, we should distinguish the role of “accidental other” from the “other” in a special compositional role related to the outside.
In The Little Cavaliers and in The Drinkers, the onlookers (green) support social spaces and the wider setting within the painting. The role and the number of onlookers is determined by the theme of the painting; they help to create unity in the composition.
In Las Meninas, however, the “other” in the background clearly communicates also with the outside of the painting. As I suggested in the previous post, the figure in the door in the background is about to “leave the painting through the coulisse”. He is in a double role: playing a role in the scene and representing an alternative view or perspective on the entire scene, including the space in front of the painting or the audience in terms of the puppet theatre.

A special case, again, is the “unrepresented other”. As we will see later, in some of Manet’s paintings the “other” is not depicted within the painting – as in Luncheon on the Grass – but rather implied and deliberately hidden “behind the coulisse”. The “classical” case is certainly Olympia, a painting he is already working on at the same time.

The Absorbed
Finally, we find figures (yellow) in the paintings who focus on something other than a person within the painting or whose direction of gaze is undetermined. Following Fried, we could say that all persons not directly engaging with the viewer are “absorbed” within the painting. Absorption would be the normal case (with the exception of portraits, where the sitter is typically looking at the viewer/painter). In MyManet, we distinguish more roles within the painting, because Manet uses their gazes to engage with different roles inside and outside.

Again, it is meaningful to distinguish between absorbed persons and “accidentally” absorbed persons.
In some cases, rather isolated persons are part of the theme; in other cases, it might simply be difficult to determine who a person is attending to. But in The Drinkers, the absorbed guy (yellow) in the centre plays an essential role.
In Figure 3, we see two persons absorbed in a book or in their own thoughts. Especially in religious themes, say, a praying monk, it might be more adequate to treat this absorbed figure as a Third, since the figure is obviously “looking beyond the painting”, perhaps with closed eyes as in Figure 4.

Figure 3: On the Beach – Suzanne and Eugene Manet at Berck (1873)

Figure 4: Monk at Prayer (1865)

As indicated in Figure 1 above, the persons in the painting will take their places either in a social space defined by their gazes and gestures or in a wider setting. The picture frame or the “stage” will delimit what part of the implied environment is actually visible.
Beyond this visible environment, we have to imagine the setting or installation of the painting with actors engaged in the experience of the work of art.
In MyManet, we assume that the borders between the setting, the stage or frame, the environment, and the installation of the painting can be quite fluid – just like in the reality of a puppet theatre performance.

So far, we have identified 5 positions within the painting,
although the absorbed persons seem to depend on the specific theme and will be only “additional” elements in a more general scheme.
The next step is to take a closer look at the formal positions populating the environment of the painting.

So, meet you next week!

Faces in Velasquez and Manet (P4)

By Richard Pieper

On April 15, 2021

In Edouard Manet

In this post, we take a closer look at gazes and faces in Velasquez’ painting.
But first, I like to make a comment:
In the previous posts, I have managed to take a critical position regarding at least four prominent experts on Manet – Fried, Locke, Wollheim, and Greenberg.
That sounds overly ambitious, and I like to clarify my aims again.
I am no expert. MyManet can be understood in different ways:

MyManet is my personal view which sometimes does not correspond to views of others (experts or not).
I keep learning by reading and re-reading the contribution by others, including those cited above.
I will change my views as we go along. MyManet is just reflecting the state of my journey.
It is fun, but it is still an open adventure.
MyManet does propose a way of “reading” Manet – the puppet theatre model – which may turn out to be more than a personal exploration. But this is up to discussion – with Your Manet.
MyManet is an inspiration for my own projects of painting. Whether it is productive, I have to explore by painting – there is no other way.
I will document this in My Gallery.

So, I will report my sources as we travel along, and sometimes I will be inspired and sometimes I will disagree.
But I will always be very selective, not trying to do justice to the rich content of my sources.

Now, let us take the next step in our journey.
I have to explain more about gazes and social space, and we will first have a closer look at the figures and space inside the painting.

Manet was fascinated by the paintings of Diego Velazquez (1599-1660).
(A rich source on Velazquez and Manet is Tinterow & Lacambre 2003).
The Spaniard was, in Manet’s view, the greatest painter, and he copied his works and borrowed themes for his own paintings.
So, we have a look at three of Velazquez’ paintings.
We focus on the gazes of figures within the painting, and I suggest reducing them to diagrams with their faces.
(The idea of the diagrams I owe to Todd Oakley 2009)

The case of Manet’s copy (1859) of Velazquez Conversing Gentlemen is shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1: The Little Cavaliers – Manet’s copy (1859)
of Velazquez’ Conversing Gentlemen

What must have intrigued Manet, is the variety of gazes. The gentlemen look outward to the viewer or viewers (red) or at each other (blue) forming little subgroups. There is a group in the foreground to the left and one person (green) is looking over to the group in the middle ground. At least two gentlemen (purple) appear to be looking outside the painting to “unrepresented” persons (white), but not to the viewer. We might see them also as looking onto persons accidentally out of the painting’s frame (in which case, they should be coloured green; see below). One person in the middle (yellow) appears to be rather unfocused (or “absorbed”).
We should also note that there is no background, and the scene might as well be on a stage. The scene is “theatrical”, to be sure, and rather distant from viewer and painter. But the group to the left does not play the role of a backfigure asking the viewer to identify and drawing the viewer in. Rather, the picture space is divided into social spaces, the space to the right being closer and kind of marking the “frontstage”.

So, we take another example “zooming in” to a more optimal scale of communication.

Figure 2: The Drinkers or The Triumph of Bacchus (Velazquez 1629)

The Drinkers (or The Triumph of Bacchus) are obviously having a good time and are intensively communicating with each other (blue) and with the viewer/painter (red). (Manet must have liked the painting, since he reproduced it within his portrait of Emile Zola.)
Again, we have a figure in the foreground (green) looking onto the group. In this case, there are also two figures (green) looking from the side or even from the back (green) onto the central group. On of the group (green) on the right is exchanging the gaze (green) with the figure in the back. In the centre, we find one person clearly “absorbed” in the ceremony (if not drunk).

A special case is the figure in the centre (purple) looking outward to the front, but not to the viewer/painter. He is a somewhat mystical figure (Bacchus) and his gaze is intensively connecting to someone important outside.
He clearly is not looking accidentally out of the frame. The figure outside is not an “unrepresented” viewer in the usual sense, since we feel that the figure is outside in a more fundamental way. The figure, it seems, would not be appearing within the painting, if only the viewer would retreat a few steps (“zooming out”).
For lack of a clear identification of this external agent – at this point – I have assigned to it an icon for the Master Velazquez himself, placing Manet, as his greatest fan, in the position of the painter.

Finally, there is no way to discuss Velazquez and Manet without having a look at Las Meninas – here only a detail with the group of people (there is a vast space toward the ceiling in the upper part showing how Velasquez puts the scene on a “royal stage”). Now, this painting is perhaps the most complex depiction of the process of painting and the role of gazes in the history of art, according to most experts. So, we do not want to be too ambitious, we reduce the masterpiece to our little diagram (we will return to it, no doubt, since it is central for the interpretation of Manet’s work).

Figure 3: Las Meninas (detail) (Velazquez 1656)

Let us focus on a few interesting elements. A first impression for most viewers is probably that the girl in the centre (red) – Infanta Margerita, the royal daughter – is looking at them, the viewer. The maid (blue) is looking at her, enforcing the viewers tendency to look at the girl.
But then it gets complicated.
Looking to the left, the viewer sees the Master Velazquez himself towering over the scene, and the viewer starts wondering if the Master is looking at the viewer – or rather at the “unrepresented” person entering the scene and obviously making everybody pause in their activities. The viewer, then, may discover (although everybody looking at the painting in the Prado in Madrid already knows) that the royal couple is entering the scene as shown in the mirror on the opposite wall.

In our diagram, this event creates a lot of gazes directed outward to the royalties or somewhat unfocused.
Actually, the royalties appear to be the only persons to gaze (through the mirror) onto the painting – the viewer is left to guess what is on the painting (as are generations of art historians). The royal couple may be as well the model being painted, since the daughter is, at the moment, not posing for Velazquez. The Master may – moreover- winking at his colleagues, painters looking at his (activity of) painting…

For our purposes, we don’t even aspire to solve all the mysteries and games Velazquez has been hiding in the painting. We just observe that the painting is highly “theatrical” engaging the viewer, creating a social space reaching outside the painting, and, in fact, creating a rather crowded situation in front of the painting.
However, by placing himself into the picture, he is not supporting the imagery of a “stage” in front of an audience. We find us all in that large hall without a specific figure – represented or unrepresented – to identify with.
What is not so obvious, perhaps, are the subtle ways that Velazquez not only draws the viewer into the scene, but also induces effects of distancing. Part of these effects is due to the diverting gazes of some of the figures, and to the interruption of their interaction putting them “on hold”.
We have seen this effect already in Luncheon on the Grass.
Part of it may be, because we as viewers feel somewhat uneasy being crowded there next to the royalties.

The interpretations are endless.
Of special interest for us – for MyManet – is the figure in the back looking from the back onto the scene.
From the point of view of the puppet theatre, he is about to leave the “stage through the coulisse”, and, therefore, he is the paradigm case for the “Other” as represented within the painting. The figure is having his own rather independent view on the scene from “behind” – much like the second woman in Luncheon on the Grass!
Again, as in the case of Bacchus in The Drinkers, we feel that there is more to the figure than looking onto the scene (or toward an external agent as in The Drinkers). The painter Velazquez in front of the painting seems to communicate with himself within the painting and with an external “Other” (or alter ego) ”behind” the painting.
Manet must have been fascinated by the games the Master is playing!
Manet saw the original – rather than prints – only after he painted his Luncheon on the Grass on his trip to Madrid in 1865, but he must have felt confirmed in his own approach to the “painting of painting”.

The study of gazes in Velazquez’ paintings has furnished us with a range of different figures in diagrams, not all of them appeared in all three examples and some appeared more than once.
The next step has to be to characterize the figures and their function in more detail.
Then, we will be able to ask the obvious next question, namely, which figures or how many are necessary in a “painting of painting”?

See you next week!

On “Facingness” and Social Scale in Manet (P3)

By Richard Pieper

On April 8, 2021

In Edouard Manet

In the previous blog, we introduced the puppet theatre as Manet’s model for visualizing the performance of painting. The model included not only the puppet actors on stage – figures within the painting – but also other persons engaged in the performance – the painter, the model, the viewer, and perhaps other persons participating in the event like a friend or critic.

As the puppeteer, Manet has to manage the communication between all those people – actual and virtual.
Thus, we take up the next question in Installation My Manet:

Question 2: How can I show views communicating into and out of the painting?

Manet tries to achieve this communication with the means of painting, more specifically,
by a composition which puts the scene of the painting “on stage” and
by relating persons by their gazes, gestures and postures.

Let us recall two crucial features of the puppet theatre model:

First, the puppet theatre is more like installation and performance art.
It is not a flat canvas, and – in my view – Manet is not primarily aiming at “flattening” the picture space which is considered to be a feature of modern painting.
Rather, the space has to fit the stage and that determines the activities.

Figure 1 shows again the stage limited by a front plane to the audience and the back plane of the coulisse.
The puppets have to move within this space to be visible.

Figure 1 The structure of social space “on stage” in Manet

Now, this view creates a conflict with interpretations of Manet’s “revolution” by prominent art historians like Clemence Greenberg. In his view, flattening the picture space is a crucial first step by Manet toward modern art. Additionally, elements of other art disciplines – performance, theatre, music, opera, or 3-dimensional sculptures – are eliminated in the development toward modern art, in his view, now representing art as a discipline of its own.
Thus, the model of a puppet theatre is certainly not helpful in placing Manet in this progression toward modernity.

Fortunately, another prominent art historian and expert on Manet’s art, Michael Fried, has already intervened and claimed that it is “facingness” what Manet is creating – “flatness” only being a side effect. “Facingness” refers to Manet’s way of addressing and engaging the viewer, especially by the gaze of figures in the painting looking at the viewer.
In Figure 1, we can imagine the figure outlooking to front moving toward the frontstage facing the viewer. And, in Luncheon on the Grass we already noted how the second woman inlooking from back is pressing forward narrowing the space. For Fried, the impression of flatness arises with such effects capturing the attention of the viewer, not only through the gaze of the central figure. Actually, the painting as a whole is turned into a “face”.

Fried uses as a central concept the “theatricality” in Manet’s paintings (and in other painters). The opposite of “theatricality” is “absorption”, i.e. the creation of a certain autonomy of the painting by eliminating all (or most) effects that would imply the viewer or the painter. A typical aspect of absorption is that figures are not looking out, but are absorbed by some activity or attraction within the picture space. In Figure 1, we see such “absorbed” figures to the left.

“Theatricality” is different from the effect that Richard Wollheim was demonstrating for Caspar David Friedrich and applying in Manet (see previous Post 2). In Figure 1, we see the “unrepresented” viewer (purple) in a “Romantic” picture approaching the painting, then virtually entering the painting as a backfigure in some cases (like Caspar David Friedrich), and perhaps moving way into the picture looking out from the back to the horizon. There is no “stage”, the viewer is sort of carrying the perceptual space with him or her into the painting. Not surprisingly, since Wollheim applies the model of perceptual psychology!

Greenberg and Fried take, in a sense, the opposite view in Figure 1 . They look from the painting toward the viewer. Modern art – and here Greenberg and Fried agree – does not (or should not) step forward on a stage; it asserts the painting as an “autonomous” object of art.
In the metaphor of the puppet theatre, we might say that Impressionism made a first move by painting directly on the front plane showing how the light played colourfully on the surface. Then, with Cezanne and further with Cubism and Fauvism, modern art retreated to the back and painted objects of colour and form on the coulisse. With abstract modern art, everything “on stage” which appeared to be representing a “content” is thrown into the audience, as it were. Now the viewer had to interpret the art object with whatever he/she could find and would fit completing the art experience.

Contemporary art – to complete my reckless rush through art history – insists that there is no essential link between the quality of art and its abstractness. There never was. Only, we still are left with the question about the criteria of art and quality in art. Especially, since installation art, performance art, and New Media have completely diffused the boundaries.
Manet did not see this coming. In my view, the puppet theatre was an intriguing model for him.
And puppetry and material performance re-emerge as instructive models in the discussion on contemporary art today
(see Sources: Posner/Orenstein/Bell 2014).

Again, a conflict of MyManet with an expert arises, because for Fried “theatricality” is a feature of painting which is rather problematic from the perspective of modern art. It is not an asset of Manet’s art, but an aspect of his shortcomings as an unambiguously modern painter.
In my view, the theatricality in Manet is an essential element of those paintings considered to be his masterpieces.
Let us see if I can make a convincing argument for MyManet.

Second, the puppet theatre model introduces the social space outside and around the painting as an essential feature. This feature of the model depends on the theatricality of the painting. This means that I have to make a convincing case for the social space of painting created by the persons inside and outside the painting to defend theatricality.

There is an obvious problem with this venture:
The social space will depend on the communication of persons whether virtual outside or presented inside the painting.
That would limit the model to figurative paintings which engage the viewer. Fortunately, Manet is famous exactly for this kind of paintings.
But not all of his paintings seem to fit the model.

One way to cope with this issue is to state the obvious, namely, that a great painter like Manet does not employ just one model or scheme. In fact, Manet is famous for experimenting with different themes, styles and techniques, borrowing from Old Masters, and playing with the styles of his contemporary painters, especially the impressionists. So, I could limit the model to selected paintings – if there would be a clear criterium for the selection.
More promising is the strategy to demonstrate that the model fits a central, “programmatic” painting of Manet’s work – Luncheon on the Grass – and, then, follow the influence of the model onto other important works, even it will not fit totally in each case.
Still, to get started, we need a convincing argument for our model in this programmatic case: Luncheon on the Grass.

Important for the model is the fact that communication in social space happens typically on a certain scale.
In Figure 2, we see a selection of Manet’s painting.

Figure 2 : Paintings of Manet with increasing scale

The still life of a lemon does not show much of a “face”, although it has been argued that Manet was able to render a “face” even to a little Bouquet of Violets (Barbara Wittmann 2004). We will use it in our model as the icon for a variety of still lives with which Manet characteristically marks the foreground. The lemon re-appears in a number of paintings (e.g. The Breakfast, Portrait of Zacharie Astruc, Young Lady with a Parrot, and Portrait of Theodore Duret).

In a portrait, we see only a face or at most the whole figure without interaction with others. We will return to them in a later blog. Note here that Victorine is coming so close to the viewer that she seems to flatten her nose on the front plane. Similarly, Manet in his self-portrait appears to touch the mirror plane with his painting hand. Manet makes us aware of the front plane.

Small groupings – like Luncheon on the Grass – are obviously ideal for a place “on stage”.
Larger groups or crowds pose a problem, because we might not be able to follow the gazes and to interpret the postures anymore.
In Music in the Tuileries Manet appears to be testing this issue. To the left, the figures mostly are outlooking to the front; in the centre, the persons including the children are “absorbed”; to the right we find a dominant figure looking out to the right, and (rather remarkably, but to my knowledge never mentioned) an obviously oversized gentleman with a grey top hat looking outward from the back – a rare backfigure in Manet! It is reminding us of the oversized woman looking inward from the back in Luncheon on the Grass with the effect of closing the stage with a back plane (previous post).

In a landscape, persons typically are too small to engage the viewer and often too many for all to engage with each other. In The Fishing, we see how Manet is spreading smaller scenes across the canvas (or a coulisse). The model of a puppet theatre is not really working on this scale.
Although, Manet is playing with it and us:

The thematic focus of the painting is not really the “absorbed” crew in the boat, but rather on frontstage (!) in the lower right corner. Here, we would expect the moderator of the play: Manet himself with his soon-to-be wife and the dog forming a closely engaged group. Manet is pointing the dog with his hand to the little boy fishing on the left side. This nice compositional trick of linking across to the left scene with a gaze does not really work, because Manet is looking at the dog and the dog does not follow the pointing finger! Dogs cannot do that, and Manet painted quite a few dogs, so I am sure he was aware of that.
Or does it work?
Because, humans do follow the gaze or pointing gestures of others with their gaze. The tendency is so intensive and inborne (more on that later) that art historian Nancy Locke is seeing that “the dog looks intently across the water, apparently at Leon”, the fishing son on the left. The dog does not, she does!
Manet is playing games again.

Focusing on the gazes of figures, rather than the deep psychology of “Manet and the Family Romance” (book title; Locke 2001, p.72), we might ask what the sitting figure in the boat is looking at. He seems to be looking to the upper right corner where two persons – perhaps undressing women? – are sitting between trees at the river resembling the scene of Luncheon on the Grass, only that the gentlemen have politely stepped behind the bushes. We know that both paintings are based on sketches of the family’s estate outside Paris.
Again, a gaze is structuring the composition. But Manet seems to be aware that he is combining scenes in a collage which do not fit on his preferred “stage”.

Manet is not a painter of landscapes; he is interested in social relations, even when he ventures into depicting larger environments like at the sea side. The engagement of an “unrepresented” viewer in a large “romantic” scene creating a mysterious human touch is possible, as we have seen with Caspar David Friedrich. But this is not Manet’s thing. Another option is the “facingness” of the painting as a whole (with or without a direct gaze) capturing the attention of the viewer, as Fried shows. But in as much as Manet follows the model of the puppet theatre, he needs just the right scale, not necessarily of the canvas, but of distinct actors showing their faces.
Interestingly, Fried does not – to my knowledge – address this issue, because his model (and Greenberg’s) assumes one viewer in front of the painting as a whole. Whether individual figures are able – depending on the scale – to effectively communicate inside and outside the painting, is not their concern. But it is for the performance in a puppet theatre! And it is if the painting is (part of) an installation!

We will return to the problem of “facingness” and scale, when we consider other paintings of Manet.
But next, we have to take a closer look at the way Manet is structuring the gazes and gestures within his paintings, as it emerged in the two paintings above – Tuileries and Fishing – preceding and developing the model for Luncheon on the Grass.
To do that, we study three paintings of Diego Velasquez, the Master himself – in Manet’s view!

See you next week!