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!