Tag: Breakfast in the Atelier

Manet’s Breakfast in the Atelier is still fascinating me – and I got hold of another source with new insights.
So, The Balcony – which I planned for today – must wait until next time.

In the previous post on the “Enigma” of Breakfast, I distinguished between a content level and a design level. There are, obviously, many more levels of interpretation.

To acknowledge the complexity of this painting, I should complement the view of MyManet with additional levels or layers of meaning.

Figure 1: The viewer’s gaze moving over the Breakfast in the Atelier (1868)

Some layers are more connected to the design of the painting – the order of elements.
In Figure 1, I tried to indicate how Manet is directing the viewer’s gaze over the picture space – at least my gaze.
The gaze of other viewers may roam differently, but I think my reaction is not totally missing what Manet intended.

I return to Figure 1 shortly.

Some layers are created by the content associated with the figures and requisites shown.
Presumably, there are “hidden” meanings “betrayed” by what is depicted, such as an allegory of painting or an underlying “family drama”.

Let us return to Figure 1 and look at the design:

The painting is troubling for the viewer showing a lot of figures and things which seem to be quite arbitrarily assembled.
But there is some order – not the least by the way the viewer will try to “read” the painting (and Manet will lead the viewing):

Obviously, the boy on frontstage is capturing the viewer’s gaze first.
However, the boy is ignoring the viewer. This is not very polite and, additionally, he is almost stepping out of the painting violating the personal space of the viewer.
So, we might step back, and – in a second attempt – turn to the maid in the background.
After all, she is looking at us returning our gaze. We are invited to come closer again, but there still is that boy with that dominating black jacket. Avoiding his presence, we might step back again and look to the right to the brightly illuminated table with the breakfast. Instinctively, we step closer, since the lemon is almost dropping from the table – we have to catch it!
This way, we approach the man looking to the left side of the painting.

So, stepping back again – and easing our way around the boy – we look also to the left side.
Here the white flowerpot with its – somewhat “out of place” Japanese decoration – catches our attention. It is way in the background, but we don’t step closer because it is somehow looming large (“facing” us) keeping us at bay.
Trying to bridge the void in the middle ground, we focus on the still life on frontstage, and we are amazed and puzzled by this theatrical arrangement ad odds with the Japanese flowerpot.
Are we in an atelier or at a breakfast table?
Then, we discover the black cat – and we realize we are looking at a painting by Manet, the painter with the black cat!

O.K., now we know that this must be an allegory of Manet reflecting on painting.
Knowing that he loves citing painting traditions and his own works, we start the “treasure hunt” of the art historian, and we will find a lot of elements referring back to other paintings.

One of the observations I like very much is offered by Richardson (1982):
Behind the back of the boy, there is a diagonal connecting the Dutch looking maid and the still life in the Dutch tradition on the table (also citing an own painting). There is another diagonal leading from the romantic smoker (Richardson) to the assemble of theatrical requisites on the front left (again citing own still lives and the puppet theatre).
Richardson also points out that this retrospective painting is produced when Manet recovered from a period of “self-doubt and gloom” (p. 17). This explains the self-reflection in the painting.

Our view of the painting moved from a first, somewhat disoriented, impression of complexity (level 1) to reading more and more order into it – following the way our gaze is directed (level 2) – and, then, associating the meaning of elements with Manet’s work (level 3).
We also experienced – if you followed my experience – that not only roamed our eyes over the picture space. The eye movements even induced a “dance” stepping back and forth and sideways trying to engage with different elements.
A great example for how Manet is engaging the viewer!

On yet another level, the view of MyManet suggests seeing the painting as a variation on Manet’s scheme. This was the theme of the previous Post 18.

This level, I like to enrich with two insights gained from my new source, “moments of thought” which Werner Hofmann (1985) devoted to Breakfast in the Atelier.

First, Hofmann shows an x-ray of the painting which indicates some interesting changes made after the first draft.
Most commentators point out that the scene originally played out at his summer resort at the sea in an atelier with large windows in the background. Returned from the resort, Manet closed this background with a wall and with a painting (to the right) creating a more domestic ambience. This domestic flair is further supported by introducing the maid in the final version who may be serving some milk (in a can bearing the letter “M”).
More important in view of MyManet, with her, the role and position of the First looking at the viewer is entering the painting. Back home in Paris, we might say, he re-conceived the painting in terms of his scheme!

Another important change occurs to the smoker to the right.
In the draft, he is looking more at the back of the boy (and along the diagonal toward the weapon still life). Now his hand is moved somewhat between him and the boy and his gaze is directed across the middle ground to the left.
With the introduction of the First, the maid, in the background, and with the Third, the boy in the foreground, Manet now covers the middle ground with the gaze of the Second, the smoker.
These changes enhance the “dance” of figures over the “stage” and make the viewer “dance” in response!

Second, another observation by Hofmann concerns the gaze of the boy.

This insight, I like to relate to the interpretation of Nancy Locke (2001). She chooses a psychological reading of the painting starting with the fact that Leon is the illegitimate son of Manet (or of Manet’s father?). According to her, there is a “tone of estrangement” (p.131) in the painting. This estrangement gains momentum when we identify the man to the right with Manet himself and the maid with the mother, Suzanne, a Dutch woman! Then the boy will turn his back to a situation of illegitimate childhood and look into a yet indeterminate future adulthood.

This is certainly an own and important layer in the interpretation. She adds another layer by pointing out that Manet had himself a very problematic relationship to his father. Only after his father’s death in 1862, Manet – somehow liberated – had his breakthrough in painting. In this view, we might even see Manet’s parents looming behind the vision of Manet and Suzanne as suggested on the previous layer.
Locke is exploiting here the theme of the father-son relationship and its psychoanalytic significance.

And Locke takes still another turn with the theme of father-son relations. She connects the Breakfast with Manet’s religious paintings. According to her, Manet’s paintings of Christ are variations on his relation to his father: “Manet paints a gaze that expresses the difficulty of accepting the will of the Father” (p. 139).

In view of MyManet, this is a very interesting way of interpreting the gaze of the Third!
We suggested a similar interpretation for the gaze of Christ – the role of the Third – in Christ Mocked by Soldiers (see Post 14).

Locke proposes a psychological interpretation of the Third. She somewhat abruptly changes between paintings – from Breakfast to Christ Mocked, from Leon as Third looking at his “father” to Christ as Third looking at his “Father”. Leon is not looking at his “father” at the breakfast table, unless we follow the interpretation of Gisela Hopp (1968). She sees the boy daydreaming and imagining the very scene pictured behind him.
So, the connection is the more general theme of the internal conflicts of a father-son relation and the role of the “father” as an internalized authority.

Figure2: From “looking out” to “looking without seeing”
– Manet’s portraits of Leon and the “iconic barmaid”

Hofmann offers an interpretation which is less psychological and more rooted in the tradition of religious painting.
With the loss of religious convictions, the gaze toward a meaningful agent beyond all sensory experiences loses its “transcendental axis” (p.79). The gaze of “looking without seeing” does not express security in faith anymore but alienation and individual isolation. Hofmann sketches this development since the 15th century with some fascinating examples. With the loss of the (religious) narrative, the figures become “icons” of the human condition in modern society.

In Figure 2, we can see how Manet in his own work changes the view on Leon from the child posing in a “Spanish” painting to the realistic view of him in the drawing. Then – in Breakfast – we see the “turn to the icon” (Hofmann). The boy is not just depicted like we “see” him but shown as an “icon” representing how it is to “exist” in the situation of a boy on the threshold to adulthood.
To highlight his point, I have added the famous “icon” of Manet’s “looking without seeing” – the barmaid in his A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

In view of MyManet, I like this interpretation of Manet’s figures as “icons” of the human condition. It is a meaningful way of capturing Manet’s scheme as a “social form” assigning roles and positions. The Third “looking without seeing” is not focusing attention on “what one sees” but experiencing “what exists” (see Post 10 on Manet’s realism). Following Locke (and Sigmund Freud), we can agree that the realities of psychological conflicts in family relations are also exactly that: existing realities.

However, we have to come back in a later post to the social dimension of the scheme.
For Manet, the human condition was not so clearly characterized by individualism and isolation as Hofmann and later expressionistic and existentialist visions of modernity would see it.
Manet still believed in tradition and institutions – submitting his paintings to the official Salon – and he infused his figures with the energy of a social existence and awareness (see previous post) that united them beyond their individual subjectivity.

Last comment: With all those reflections on the father-son relation, we seem to have lost the female perspective. In Breakfast, the female plays only an “assistive” role (Hofmann) in the background and is painted rather undefined.
That changes clearly in the next painting! In The Balcony, females are frontstage.

See you in two weeks!

Manet’s Enigma – Breakfast in the Atelier (P18)

By Richard Pieper

On September 25, 2021

In Edouard Manet

Most commentators agree, including the first reactions of critics in the Salon 1869: Breakfast in the Atelier (1968) is perhaps his most enigmatic painting.
It is puzzling to understand what is going on in the scene.
Already the changing titles of the painting in different sources reflect that we cannot even be sure if this scene is before or after a breakfast or rather a luncheon than a breakfast, taking place in a studio or at Manet’s home. We use the title above especially to distinguish it from the Luncheon on the Grass.
Manet submitted it together with The Balcony which left the visitors equally puzzled.

Figure 1: Breakfast in the Atelier (1968) and The Balcony (1968)

For the contemporary critic Castagnary, both paintings were arrangements “without reason or meaning”; for him, recording the appearances of modern life was not enough.
Manet demonstrated too much “fantasy” and too little “sincerity” and traditional finish (Hanson 1977, p. 30).

Looking at the two paintings next to each other (Figure 1), I find it especially astonishing how different the paintings are in their style and composition although Manet created them in the same year.

Michael Fried (1998) pointed out that the two paintings show a return to the multi-figure paintings after a “Spanish phase” with single-figure paintings following Manet’s travel to Spain.
Here he tried to recover from the harsh criticisms of Luncheon and Olympia by getting new inspirations from his admired Diego Velazquez.

As the art historian James Rubin (2010) suggests, the two paintings document a transition in Manet:
– from Charles Baudelaire to Berthe Morisot;
– from the romantic and naturalistic novelist who died the year before in 1967 to the young impressionist painter whom Manet first met in the summer of 1968.
Both were very close friends but had a very different influence on Manet.
Well, one was an old male friend deserving a memory in the most Baudelairian painting (Rubin), and the other a charming young lady who turned out to be one of the most important members of the impressionist movement.
Quite a transition of friendships!

Since the two paintings were presented in the same Salon exhibition in 1869, they are often compared.
But the first is somehow looking back to paintings in the Spanish and Dutch tradition, the second is moving forward integrating impressionist influences.
So, it is not surprising that The Balcony is getting usually more attention and is seen easier to understand as testifying to Manet’s modernity.

In view of MyManet, this is not doing full justice to either painting, because there is a focus on the differences marked by the transition, while the common aspects are neglected.
Both paintings – as the reactions confirm – are riddled:
– by the interpretation of the gazes and the (lack of) emotions shown by the figures, and
– by the logic of the composition.
In fact, the divergent gazes seem to seriously disrupt or endanger the composition.

In view of MyManet, let us consider both aspects.
In this post, we take a closer look at Breakfast, in the next post at The Balcony.

Developing Manet’s scheme in the previous posts, we have seen already how Manet varies the application of the scheme shifting the emphasis between the roles of the figures (First, Second, Third, Other, Big Other) and their position in the picture space (frontstage, middle ground, background, backstage).
In some cases, he might substitute a position by another figure (e.g. the cat for the Third in Olympia).
In some cases, he might omit a position, but implicate it by other means (e.g. omitting the “Other” by closing up the backstage in Olympia).
Additionally, basic emotions are indicated by gestures and postures depending on their relations to each other, to “unrepresented” agents outside the painting, or to the viewer (e.g. the empowered and defiant gaze of Olympia toward the viewer).

Breakfast in the Atelier shows – in this perspective – another variation of Manet’s scheme!

To start, let us look at the dominating figure of the boy (or young man) standing right in front of us (the viewer).
The undetermined age of the fellow gives rise to interpretations that we observe the transitional state of Leon (the model and Manet’s son) between childhood and adulthood.
The gaze of Leon is directed somewhat to the right of the viewer, not looking at the viewer or anything else specifically. He might be contemplating his future as an adult.
Gisela Hopp (1968) suggests that the painting itself shows a kind of dream world, so the boy may be looking at this dream presented to the viewer in the atelier behind him.

Hanson (1973) discusses the painting in her chapter on Manet’s “still lives”, since the boy seems to stand in an arrangement of “still lives”: the weapons in the left forefront, the breakfast on the table (if, indeed, it is a breakfast), and the flower in the left background.
Actually, the figures are also quite “still”: the maid holding the coffee pot, the man peacefully smoking, and the boy holding on to the table without any signs of intention to go anywhere.

The whole painting has a nostalgic or retrospective atmosphere, and as Hanson notes, it invites psychological interpretations: some reference to an underlying or hidden “drama” which the unfocused gazes are “hiding” and all those requisites are “betraying”.
And as Richard Wollheim (1987) has pointed out, this “drama” is not an effect of the portrayal of individual characters. The figures have presence and energy, but no clear personality or motivations to act, whether alone or together (see also Post 2 and his comparison with Edgar Degas).
Still, art historians like Wollheim (and Nancy Locke , among others) have tried to uncover a deeper psychological layer – a personal or family drama – by exploiting, for instance:
– the similarity of the Dutch looking maid with Manet’s Dutch wife Suzanne,
withdrawn in the background,
– the signature “M” on her coffee pot,
– the similarity of the man to the right with Manet himself,
not paying attention to the other figures, and
– the fact that the boy is modelled by their son Leon,
looking out of the painting into his own future.

These interpretations provide interesting contexts, although they do – in my view – not reckon enough with Manet’s inclination to stage an ironic and self-reflexive “theatre”,
and with his sincerity as a painter in designing the scene.
So, I like to pursue another suggestion about the meaning of the gazes in the painting offered by Charles Stuckley (cited in Fried 1998, p.592 in a footnote fn 205).

Stuckley argues that what realist painters like Manet “truthfully reveal are the necessarily artificial underpinnings of the activity of painting per se.” These underpinnings are the reality of the model’s work in the setting of the atelier. Stuckley suggests – in Fried’s words – “that the strangeness of Manet’s Breakfast in the Atelier was the work of Manet’s models, not the painter himself”. And citing Stuckley:
“As if irked by their model’s roles, Manet’s sitters seem to sabotage his efforts at Realism, for they refuse to remove their hats and they leave the table at which the artist had presumably instructed them to remain for as long as it took to complete the picture. Resigned to their lack of cooperation, Manet’s only option was to record people unwilling to hide their genuine impatience with a slow painter.”
(Fried wonders if Stuckley means this humorously, but I think he makes a serious point humorously.)

This imagery of models – coming to the setting of the painting process like to the set of a theatre performance – is also vividly described by Carol Armstrong (1998). In her case the setting is the Luncheon on the Grass, and she also sees Manet purposefully keeping the artificial and theatrical appearance of the scene alive in the painting. The models in her imagery are very cooperative. Nevertheless, their actual behaviour in the setting is reflected in the painting to enhance its Realism – not to “sabotage” it (Stuckley).

Models should – in Manet’s view – act and pose as natural as possible, that is like in everyday life. This is also reported in an often-cited anecdote from Manet’s time of studying in the studio of Thomas Couture. Here Manet is angry with a model striking a classical pose, and he ask him whether he would behave like that when buying his groceries down the street.

I suggest combining this imagery of somewhat detached models with another imagery evoked by the description of performance training in a practical guide for teachers, dancers, and actors.
The authors, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, describe their method in “The Viewpoints Book” (2005), a method developed in close interaction with postmodern painting and postdramatic theatre in the 1960ies.

Like Manet’s models, a group of dancers or actors enters the stage. Then they are asked to focus their awareness as much as possible on the immediate situation and their position in relation to the other persons on stage.
They are asked not to focus on the others, but rather to keep them in “soft focus”, i.e. in their peripheral vision and in their perceptual and bodily awareness of each other including all the senses.
In this state of “soft focusing” on the “between” of their relations in space and time and embedded in the architectural setting of the stage, they are then instructed to move in different patterns. They are asked to take their impulse to move or to shape their body from the others rather than from their own impulses.
Obviously, it takes training to create in this way coordinated and harmonized group movements on stage.
It is, actually, quite astounding that it works at all! (Visit the examples on Youtube!)

Now imagine Manet’s models taking their places under the guidance of the painter in this spirit.
They got a general introduction into the theme (e.g. scene after a breakfast) but no great “story”. They are assigned their position, but they have to find a posture, gaze, and gesture with which they are comfortable. They know that they have to keep the pose for a while to allow for the painting process.
But as long as their relations are harmonized by their mutual awareness of each other, Manet is not intervening.
This way the models have a certain freedom to “interpret” their gaze, role, and position.

As Struckley correctly observes, this exactly allows for the realism of the scene, and this is what Manet wants to paint!
It is also clear that with a “soft focus” on their relations rather than on their individual mental states and emotions the models will not “strike a pose and keep it” but adjust within a frame of relations with all others.
Their pose will appear somehow “arrested” – if you are looking for “meaningful” activities – but not lifeless!
I think, Stuckley is wrong when seeing “genuine impatience” in their faces and postures, there is something relaxed but intensive about them.

The authors of “Viewpoints” use the metaphor of an act of shooting an arrow with a bow to a target.
The most intensity rests in the moment when the arrow is pulled back, the bow is under pressure, the whole body of the shooter is lining up with the target, but the arrow is not yet released.
The eventual act of releasing and shooting might carry most of the purposeful meaning, but this moment displays the potential energy.

Now looking at Breakfast with this imagery in mind, the three figures show a presence and energy which flows from their awareness of the presence of the others, including the viewer/painter, without directly gazing at them.
This is the reality Manet tries to capture!

To be able to achieve this, Manet is relying on models with whom he has personal and trusting relationships and who engage with his practice – family, friends, or models like Victorine Meurent.
This may also be a reason why Manet preferred multi-figure compositions to portraits, because in this case he himself has to perform in the double role of the “Other” and the painter.
And, obviously, that becomes especially complicated when the person portrayed is an adorable woman like Berthe Morisot…

Certainly, the models cannot just do what they please.
Manet is communicating with them to create the situation he wants – there is a programmatic dimension in the arrangement, and everybody has to take their position and role.
And in each modelling session his vision has to be communicated again, most likely with some changes.
After all, Manet is likely to have scraped off the sketch from the last session – as his models report – and for a reason!
In view of MyManet, an important part of this programmatic dimension is Manet’s scheme.

In Breakfast, Leon has to take the position and role of the Third in the scheme, as I show below.
This implies that his posture cannot be simply “natural”.
In Figure 2, we confront the painting with a sketch of the boy from the same year in preparation of the painting:

Figure 2: Breakfast in the Atelier and Drawing of Leon (both 1868)

The sketch demonstrates that Manet is perfectly able to make a lively and “naturalistic” drawing of his son.
But in the painting, he is asked to take his hands out of the pockets and to look out of the painting. He also has to lean slightly back to rest on the table connecting with the man behind him resting his elbow on the same table, while the maid is arresting her approaching them.

The energy of dancers with a “soft focus” on their spatial relations to the others permeates the atelier!
This is less than the dynamics of a “good story” or a “family drama” but capturing the reality before Manet’s eyes.

This brings us to the second riddle of Breakfast, the logic of its composition.

Comments on the painting agree that the painting shows an arrangement of somewhat arbitrary figures and other elements in a rather strict composition. The elements seem all related to Manet’s biography and previous paintings, but the logic of their composition appears non-transparent.
Lüthy describes it as “situative incoherence” bound by a “planimetric order” (2003, p.35).
It is as if Manet is taming the diverging forces on the social content level – produced for the viewer by the uncoordinated gazes and the unrelated meanings of the requisites (still lives) – by a compositional order.
This order creates a unity for the viewer on the design level of shapes, colours, and spatial relations. Lüthy sees the logic of the composition in these dynamics of incoherence and order between the elements of the picture and the relationship to the viewer.
In view of MyManet, these dynamics capture an important aspect of the composition. However, there is more structure in the dynamics as the opposition of inner “incoherence” and stabilizing order for the viewer suggests.

Above, I have already argued that the inner “incoherence” might better be understood as “unfocused” unity created by the figures being aware of each other. This compositional unity is supported by the hidden order of Manet’s scheme: the figures have a position and are aware of their roles.

This hidden order becomes apparent when we apply the scheme to the painting as in Figure 3:

Figure 3: Manet’s scheme applied to The Breakfast in the Atelier (1968)

The most striking variation in the scheme is clearly that Leon in the position of the Third is moved onto the frontstage.
This creates a dominant position and role for him. We have indicated already that interpretations see the boy looking “at his future”, his future role in society. In view of the daring position he occupies almost encroaching onto the viewer and breaking the “fourth wall” separating the stage from the audience, we should interpret his role also as challenging painterly traditions of composition.

Comparing the position of the boy as the Third with the positioning of Christ as the Third in Christ Mocked by Soldiers, we see how dramatically the Third is moved against all rules to the front (see Post 14).
Thus, the boy’s gaze is directed at the Big Other in Manet’s scheme.

The maid is taking the position of First engaging the viewer.
However, she is doing that from a position in the background. Nancy Locke (2001, p.130) rightly observes that the triangle of the Luncheon – with the nude (First) in front and the man (Third) behind her – is here reversed.
This position provides some depth to the triad, although the effect is more to push the Third even more to the front, since behind her is only the wall (or painted coulisse) sealing off the back. (In an earlier draft, there was a larger window behind the triad which Manet has painted over hanging a small painting on the dark wall.)

The Second, the man to the right, also shows a striking variation of the scheme.
He is moved far to the right, even cut off by the frame. From this position, he is looking not at the others but straight across the picture space to the left. He is focusing on nothing in particular, may be even lost in his own thoughts.
But he is establishing the middle ground of the painting – occupied by him and the table – as an own layer between the boy in the foreground and the maid in the background.

This distinct distribution of the three figures over three different layers of the painting must have been an essential element in Manet’s experiment with the scheme!

The dominant role of the figure frontstage must have been a compositional challenge which Manet balanced with a prominent still life in the front:
the theatrical arrangement of weapons and, again, the black cat, his signature animal from the Olympia (orange circle). Additionally, he lets the bright yellow lemon almost drop from the table to the right (orange circle).
So, this scene of the “puppet theatre” is clearly talking to the audience from the frontstage.

Finally, the white flowerpot to the left plays an interesting role in the composition.
On the one hand, it is placed somewhat behind the figure of the maid; on the other hand, it is painted surprisingly bright and colourful, even with Japanese motifs. It is pushing forward from the back – and in this feature – the pot is reminding of the second woman in Luncheon on the Grass looking from the back! The pot is also somehow “too large”, not a face but clearly “facing” the scene and the viewer.
Indirectly, it is accentuating the void space between the pot and the weapons supporting the independence of the middle ground across the composition.
Thus, we may see the position and role of the “Other” taken by a flowerpot!

We see an inversion of the scheme from Luncheon on the Grass and, as I would like to show in the next post, the painting The Balcony is displaying yet another variation of the scheme!

See you in two weeks again!

Explorations of Edouard Manet's paintings with diagrams

Tag: Breakfast in the Atelier

More on Manet’s Enigma – Breakfast in the Atelier (P19)

Manet’s Enigma – Breakfast in the Atelier (P18)