Tag: The Balcony

More on Diagrams and Paintings (P23)

On December 22, 2021

In the previous post, I raised the question what I have learned from submitting paintings with a strong diagrammatic element – applying concepts and ideas from MyManet – to the Annual Exhibition of my art society.
One conclusion was that I still have a lot to learn as an aspiring painter.

But I also learned from the experience more about Manet and how the diagrammatic element in his scheme results from the content, from the objects and relations depicted.
If diagrammatic structures are intimately related to the content of Manet’s painting, then “painting diagrams” is one way to understand his art.

Figure 1: Compairing two Group Portraits

How innovative Manet’s approach is can be understood better, perhaps, when we compare it with the tradition of group portraits in the Dutch painting tradition of Rembrandt and Frans Hals.
Two examples are shown in Figure 1.

Heike Baare (2009) has offered an inspiring analysis of Manet’s multi-figure paintings comparing them with those group portraits. (Actually, she refers especially to the art historian Alois Riegl who is cited also by other critics of Manet, e.g. Michael Lüthy and Richard Wollheim referred to in previous posts.)
Here, I will extract – irresponsibly simplifying her and Riegl’s arguments – only one interesting observation on the problem of group portraits:

Group portraits show a number of persons which are identifiable as particular individuals, for instance the participants of a lecture (Rembrandt) or of a board of an institution (Hals). The painter needs to arrange the portraits (or whole figures) in a composition and has two options,

either to arrange them in a formal composition distributing them somehow balanced in the picture space,
or to show the figures engaged in some activity which assigns each figure a meaningful position and provides a “story” about their relations.

Obviously, these are not alternatives but can be combined in varying degrees.

Rembrandt choses to provide an underlying “story” showing the participants of a lesson;
Hals arranges the portraits formally in the picture space just indicating a common physical space.

The more the painter refrains from offering an internal “story”, the more the viewer is put into the position to provide a unity to the group and will feel the need to invent an external story to make sense of the painting.
This is especially the case, because some of the figures – following the logic of portraits – may look at the viewer and engaging him or her.

In the case of Rembrandt, the figure in the upper centre is looking into the general direction of the viewer, but not engaging the viewer; in the case of Hals, two women appear to engage with the viewer, while the focus of the other three is unclear to the viewer just as in many portraits.

In as much as the viewer fails to detect some unifying relationships, the unity of the painting will rely solely on the formal composition.

Balancing the composition becomes a formidable issue, since all portrayed individuals want to be adequately represented. Nobody wants to play a side role – unless the role is grounded in the social position in the group, as in case of the lecturer in Rembrandt’s painting.

To solve the problem, Rembrandt finds a quite ingenious solution:
He shows all of the figures as being attentive to the lecture and five of them to the book in the foreground.
This way, everybody is sharing the same role, except for the lecturer who is obviously in a special position but not enhancing his role by engaging the viewer.

More radical is Rembrandt’s solution in The Syndics (Figure 2), where the figures are attentive to somebody next to the viewer outside the picture space and in front of the painting.

At the same time, Rembrandt is refraining from “telling a story” – like he did in The Anatomy Lesson. Instead, the gazes create a dynamic which, on the one hand, is much more compelling than the additive portraits by Hals, while, on the other hand, avoiding the impression of a genre painting telling a story about everyday life. And the viewer is assigned a very important role in the composition.
Rembrandt is quite daring in The Syndics, and the painting must have fascinated Manet on his visit to The Netherlands.

Figure 2: Rembrandt The Syndics of the Draper’s Guild (1662)

Rembrandt’s reaching out to the space of the viewer invites a comparison with Manet’s scheme:

The central figure might best be seen as thinking with a gaze beyond the painting – as a Third in Manet’s scheme.

The gazes of the three figures to the right and the figure on the edge to the left dominate the painting paying attention to an unrepresented “other” outside the painting. Their role in Manet’s scheme is comparable to the Second (Berthe Morisot) in The Balcony gazing outside of the picture space to the left (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Relating the gazes in Rembrandt’s The Syndics to the gazes in Manet’s The Balcony

Rembrandt shows three figures in this role accentuating this gaze. We can assume that this is partly due to the fact that he has to somehow accommodate six figures. Comparing it with Manet’s The Balcony (left side of Figure 3), we might, therefore, eliminate two of them as redundant.

Then, Rembrandt applies the strategy of The Anatomy Lesson of creating dynamic tension by a common focus of these gazes. But there, he captured their gazes by the book within the painting (see Figure 2), now their gazes reach out of the picture space. But the three gazes are crossing the picture space meeting the gaze of the fourth figure at the position of the unrepresented “other”. Thus, they are more contributing to the unity of composition than the disrupting gaze to the left in The Balcony. Re-arranging the gazes in Rembrandt following the composition of The Balcony (see the left side of Figure 3) demonstrates the disruptive effect. Manet is anchoring the composition with the gaze of the First (the lady to the right engaging the viewer).

This role of the First has no direct counterpart in Rembrandt’s composition. However, there is another interesting feature: The second figure in Rembrandt (from the left) might imply another unrepresented “other” to the right of the viewer. Thus, the viewer finds herself or himself between two other persons in front of the painting which has a similar engaging effect as Manet’s First.

In Manet’s scheme, this figure would occupy the role of the “other” completing the social space by a perspective on the group from the back (see left of Figure 3) rather than – like Rembrandt – populating the space in front of the painting with another viewer. With Michael Fried, we might say that Rembrandt produces a “facingness” of the whole painting without implying one viewer at a specific position in front of the painting. Still, the painting is showing a unity arising from the gazes within the painting, which is missing in the “additive” faces in Frans Hals’ composition.

Manet’s approach is even more disruptive by confronting the viewer with very diverging gazes which appear not to be harmonized by a unifying interaction with the space of the viewer. Worse still, the space of the viewer itself is ambiguously defined, since in front of the picture space the viewer seems to be hanging in mid-air (or standing at an opposite window?) and in the background the viewer is confronted with an almost totally black space which only indicates that someone is or could be looking out toward the group and the viewer.

In view of MyManet, comparing the paintings by Hals, Rembrandt and Manet, we see that

Hals presupposes that the viewer – guided by the formal composition – will be coordinating the group of portraits into the unity of a painting.
Rembrandt creates a dynamic of gazes within the painting producing a unity which engages the viewer in front of the painting.
Manet creates a complex social space through gazes relating the figures within the painting to unrepresented “others” – including the viewer – outside the painting and risking the unity of the painting in the process.

As pointed out in Post 20 discussing The Balcony, Manet supports the unity of the composition with a very strong frame in bright green colour. However, standing in front of the painting (as I had the opportunity a few months ago) one cannot help but realizing the tension created by the divergence of the social space of gazes that is only tamed by the physical space of a railed balcony.

The problem of the traditional Dutch group portrait, as sketched out above, was to decide (and to solve by composition) which role the viewer had to assume. The viewer could be enlisted to coordinate externally the portraits of the group by an interpretation, or the activities and relationships of the figures within the painting would internally provide a unity (“story”) which the viewer could readily engage with. The latter strategy ran the risk that the internal relations would assign roles to the portrayed persons which they would not readily accept.

This problem is, obviously, also important in Manet’s multi-figure paintings. Although his problem is not so much that the individuals want to have a fair place in the painting. Manet’s figures are identifiable, but not intended as a group portrait. They are typically family members, friends or professional models who will accept their assigned role (Fanny Claus, the second woman next to Berthe Morisot in The Balcony was apparently not so happy with her role.)

However, the basic problem applies also in Manet’s case. Since he aims to reduce the “story” regulating the relationships among the group and with the viewer, the issue of the “unity” within the painting shifts to the formal composition and/or to the unifying role of the viewer. The problem is enhanced by the fact that Manet deliberately violates the rules of perspective breaking up the physical space within the painting and, thus, not extending the picture space into the space of the viewer. The viewer finds herself or himself in a rather insecure position in front of the painting, or – as MyManet suggests – as viewing a scene “on stage”. Manet’s paintings show not the unified space of naturalism, his realism is a re-construction of “what is seen” and “what exists”.

The interpretation of Manet’s paintings is, therefore, often driven by an alternative between

focusing on the formal composition providing a unity with painterly means, and
focusing on the “story behind” the illegible gestures and activities of the figures.

Thus, the “modernity” of Manet’s painting is interpreted either as revealed in his first steps away from naturalism and toward abstraction in modern art (in the following generation of painters), or in Manet’s representation of the fragmented and socially alienated life of contemporary Paris with painterly means.

Regarding the first alternative,
with the loss or avoidance of a narrative, the “facingness” or expression of the painting becomes important, but the viewer is losing a “face” because he or she is addressed as an increasingly anonymous viewer (if not customer) who is as alienated as the portrayed figures.

Regarding the second alternative,
Baare refers especially to the sociologist Georg Simmel – cited often by other critics as mentioned in previous posts. Baare misses, however, an essential feature of Simmel’s sociology. A generation after Manet, Simmel is not only the analyst of modern urban life and culture, he is also the founder of a “formal sociology” and social network analysis. Today’s diagrams of social relations or “sociometry” is heavily indebted to Simmel. Just like Manet – in view of MyManet – tries to establish the internal and external unity of his group paintings not through a “story” but through an underlying model of social relations in social space within and around the picture space, Simmel is looking for the infrastructure of social relations which is carrying the diversity of cultural lifestyles. (Interestingly, Simmel sides with Rembrandt’s internal vitality in his view on art, while the focus on external form is characteristic of his sociology; see Georg Simmel, Rembrandt, 1917).

In the Post on Manet’s Realism, I have suggested that Manet’s realism is inspired by “reasoned images” – by drawings of scientific objects like the human body or animals and plants. In case of Manet’s scheme, the “scientific object” is the human group and the structure of basic human relations as constituted by the gazes within the picture space and to agents not represented in the painting.
Formal or compositional aspects are closely interrelated with aspects of content.

Unlike Rembrandt, however, Manet is not trying to engage the viewer by the imposing vitality and subjectivity of the figures. The content of social space – created by the gazes and gestures – retains in Manet an objective formal character. The role of the viewer is more complex, the viewer is asked to reconstruct the social space within and around the picture space, not just to “face” the painting.

In “Seeing Being Seen”, I tried to capture the role of the viewer in reconstructing a social space by “walking around” the group. The painting assumes the character of an “installation” as pointed out in the first post.
“Seeing Being Seen” addresses directly the content of Luncheon on the Grass – the way gazes structure the social scene depicted.

In the next post, I will take a closer look at the different meanings of “Seeing” and “Being Seen”.

See You in two weeks – in 2022!

On Manet’s Balcony (20)

By Richard Pieper

On October 22, 2021

In Edouard Manet

Enter Berthe Morisot!
In The Balcony, she is painted by Manet for the first time and certainly “frontstage”.
And I was able to see her last week visiting the Museum D’Orsay in Paris!
As expected, the original was much more impressive than any of the reproductions.

Manet took his inspiration from a painting by Goya (or from engravings made from the painting).
But again, there are interesting deviations making the painting a variation of Manet’s scheme!

Figure 1: Manet The Balcony (1868) and Goya Majas on a Balcony (1800)

Discussions of the painting typically focus on two aspects imposing themselves on the viewer on first glance, as I can confirm:
the strong composition with contrasts of colours and the presence of Berthe Morisot.

The composition balances different forces:

Like Breakfast in the Atelier (see Post 18 and 19), the viewer is somewhat disoriented by the divergent gazes of the figures directed out of the painting and almost tearing the picture apart.

This is what Lüthy (2003) called the “situative incoherence”; the figures seem to be in no transparent relationship to each other and not involved in some common activity.

But the painting displays a clear geometrical order with a triangle of three figures framed by the intrusive green colour of the railing and the shades on either side cutting out an almost square “picture in the picture” in the upper half.

This strict order might have motivated Magritte to place four coffins on the balcony:

Figure 2: Manet The Balcony (1868) and René Magritte The Balcony (1950)

Although, the “gazes” and “bodies” of Magritte’s coffins seem to form a rather social group turning toward each other. Magritte apparently suggests that Manet’s figures are even more isolated than coffins.
Actually, the coffins remind me of the group in Luncheon on the Grass – perhaps another hint by Magritte?

Concerning the composition, Sandblad (1954) proposes a strong influence of Japanese woodcuts creating a “decorative unity” of the elements. In the previous year 1867, Japanese art was presented to the French public in the World Exhibition, and Manet was surely motivated to compete with this style which he admired, and which was consonant with his own ambitions.

But, obviously, Goya and the Spanish tradition also inspired the painting.
And, typical for Manet, we find allusions to own paintings, especially, with the boy in the dark background reminding of previous appearances of his son Leon (interestingly, at a much younger age in the painting than in Breakfast of the same year).

Most striking is the way Manet has placed the figures in the foreground, almost before the picture space. The figures literally sit or stand “out on the balcony”. We don’t see the anchoring of the railing in the floor, the figures float in space, and the black background further pushes the figures toward the viewer.

In Goya’s painting this effect is not so pronounced, because the railing is moored to the floor and the woman’s foot is resting on a beam fixing the railing.

Additionally, the three figures are highlighted by colourful accessories: a red fan, a green umbrella and a blue tie which stand out much more in the original than in any reproduction I have seen.

In this confrontation of the viewer, the painting reminds of modern advertisement strategies. Viewers at the time were not so used to this “pushing” design. As Dombrowski (2010) suggests, Manet might quite deliberately have chosen this composition to make the painting stand out, in case it would end up in an unfavourable place high up on the exhibition wall.

The presence of Berthe Morisot is the other striking feature.

Her gaze is responsible for “the deep secret behind this picture – the beauty and intensity of life itself” (Georges Bataille 1955, p.85).

The Balcony was the first of a series of paintings and sketches Manet made of Berthe Morisot over the next six years until she married his brother Eugène in 1974.

In Figure 3, we see her famous portrait by Manet (1872) and the detail of a portrait by Marcello (1975). (Marcello was actually the pseudonym of Adèle d’Affry, an acclaimed female sculptor and painter and friend of Morisot, who chose a male artist name to be accepted in the male art community. Today, you can admire her sculptures in the Museum D’Orsay next to works by Manet and Morisot. Pino Balsone made me aware of this portrait – thank you!)

Figure 3:
Manet Berthe Morisot (1872) and Adèle d´’Affry (1875) Portrait of Berthe Morisot (detail)

Morisot was a founding member of the impressionist movement and an artist in her own right, but in books about Manet she features especially as his muse, model, and – possibly – lover.
Art historians are still not sure whether the two had an affair or not, but I agree with Beth Archer Brombert (1991) that this is really irrelevant.

What we know is that the two were loving friends and – looking at the two portraits – we understand why Manet would love her and feel that she looks lovingly back.

In view of MyManet, two things are more important:
that Morisot influenced Manet (more than he influenced her) to try a more impressionistic style of painting, and that this apparently had an impact on his pursuing Manet’s scheme.
Until December 1874 – her marriage with his brother – she was Manet’s favourite model; in 1875 he made his last impressionistic painting (The Laundry). During this period, Manet produced a great variety of paintings including non-impressionistic works, but nothing clearly following MyManet.
Why?

Afterwards he painted Parisian life (trying to suppress his feelings for Berthe Morisot?). The painting of a demi-monde woman – Nana (1977) modelled by an actress – was the next painting following more readily Manet’s scheme.
(There are two other famous paintings – The Railway (1873) and Argentuille (1874) – one featuring as model Victorine Meurent (!) and the other an unknown “loose” woman – which show elements of the scheme; we look at them later.)

To understand what happened in view of MyManet, let us take a closer look at The Balcony.

In a first step, we recognize Manet’s strategy to choose an example from the art tradition, in this case, Goya Majas on a Balcony (Figure 1).
Comparing these figures with his group in The Balcony, we see that Manet again rearranges the gazes and positions. In Goya, the women lean toward each other forming a couple with one woman looking down into the street, the other gazing upward and somewhere out of the picture. Behind them we identify two men “looking from the back”.

Figure 4: Manet’s Scheme applied to The Balcony

comparing with Breakfast in the Atelier

In The Balcony (Figure 4), we find a triad – like in Luncheon – only that now the woman to the right is looking at the viewer (First), the man is looking upward and out of the picture (Third), and the woman to the left, Berthe Morisot, directs her gaze to the left out of the picture into the street.

In view of Manet’s scheme, we would expect her to take the position of the integrating person (Second) looking at the others. However, Manet has placed her on frontstage (and to the left) where she cannot make eye contact with the other two.
Comparing the Breakfast in the Atelier with The Balcony (Figure 4), we see that Manet tries a variation by moving the Second (the smoker in Breakfast) up front and moving the Third (the boy) in the middle ground. The effect is that now all gazes are oriented in different directions out of the picture.
This creates a great tension which is then tamed and contained by the geometrical order of the railing, the shades, and the black square.
To complete the scheme in The Balcony, the boy is looking as the “Other” from the back, although the dark background makes him almost invisible (easier to see in the original than in most reproductions). The flowerpot and the dog stand in for the “still life” (Lemon) in the foreground.

There are now (at least) two different interpretations on what is happening here:

One interpretation, for instance by Dombrowski (2010), argues that the underlying theme is the dynamic between private and public sphere.

The figures are stepping out into the public sphere – on the balcony – and keep their private sphere literally in the dark – the room behind them. They step out to participate, but they also protect their private life.

The relationship between individual privacy and influences of the public market and state was ardently debated at the time, as Dombrowski shows. Visualizing the precarious situation between private and public spheres by floating the figures in a semi-public space on a balcony might, in fact, have motivated Manet who was politically very engaged if not active.

The theme of the public sphere, especially the marketplace out there in the street, was introduced into Manet’s scheme already in connection with the different types of gazes (Post 16: Manet and Emotions). Berthe Morisot is clearly fascinated by some public event in the street.
I will come back to this interpretation in the next post.

Another interpretation keeps the focus on the relation of Manet and Morisot.

As indicated in Figure 3, there is a strong attraction between Manet, the painter, and Morisot, the model. (Brombert is seeing a small smile on Morisot’s face reminding us of the knowing smile of the model Victorine in the Luncheon.)

Manet is placing Morisot on frontstage for very personal reasons, and, tellingly, he paints the faces of the other two persons less defined. (Fanny Clauss, modelling the other woman, apparently was somewhat irritated by that.) He even turns Morisot’s face a little more toward the front – toward him – as would be afforded by the scheme.

Manet is interested in Morisot not only as a painter who indifferently organizes elements of composition in pictorial space, as Georges Bataille points out. Or in his words: he is not only composing the “underlying unity of insignificant things” (p.91). Manet realizes already in this first encounter with Berthe that he is looking not only at an object of his gaze as a painter, but at a person he desires and values; and he is looking at a subject that is gazing back as a person who is attracted to him.
Or in the words of Nancy Locke (2001, p.154)):
Manet sees “Berthe’s gaze as an artist rather than an object”, and as a “distinctive subjectival presence”. So, in the portraits of Berthe in the following years:

“Manet explored the very nature of subjecthood, of what might constitute ‘self’ and ‘other’.”

We see in the portrait of Morisot by another female artist (Figure 3) that Morisot is claiming in her gaze to be recognized as a person – and not only as a woman by an attractive male painter.

The problem is that this loving interaction between painter and model does not fair well with applying a formal scheme to the object of painting.
Locke cites Sartre: “By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgement on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other” (p.171).
In Manet’s scheme the Other is already included as the alternative view (“Other”) on the object of painting and as a reflective view on himself positioning him as painter in the art tradition (“Big Other”). Now Manet becomes aware that the object looking back as a subject on him as a subject adds another level or depth to his understanding of self and other.
Berthe’s view is not just like any other view, it is a view privileged by their mutual recognition as persons with an own identity to be respected and reflected in the painting.
Painting his view of her requires a reflection of her view of him.
Painting with sincerity means not to arrange “insignificant things” (Bataille) anymore, but to do justice to a very significant relationship with implications for the conception of the painter’s own self.

Locke identifies the problem specifically between Manet and Morisot and explicitly not with Victorine Meurent. But we encountered already a similar problem in Olympia.
In that case, MyManet assumed that the strong gaze of Olympia – insisting on her dignity – was partly enforced by the attitude of the model Victorine opposing her perception as a prostitute.
As a counterweight, Manet introduced the black cat.
On the level of design, this saved the balance of the picture and realized Manet’s scheme;
on the level of content, the expressive cat served to unsettle the viewer making him or her aware of the underlying dynamics between painter and model, painted figures and viewer.

Thus, the depth of reflection can be integrated into Manet’s scheme and handled with painterly means. But the complexity of the painter-model relationship certainly increases the complexity of any solution aspiring to sincerity.
In The Balcony, the problem is demonstrated by the strong geometrical frame taming the tensions and by the reaction of the other model, Fanny Clauss, who did not appreciate her role in the painting.

It seems – to avoid the issue – Manet decided to paint Morisot without the scheme in a series of portraits, to explore seeing the world through her impressionist eyes without her in the picture, and – looking at her looking back – to develop a “feminine gaze” (Locke) on other women and himself.

Besides, he chose other topics outside the scheme (portraits, still lives, sea views, landscapes) waiting for the occasion to apply his scheme again.
And we should not forget that in 1870/71 France was at war with Germany – but more on that in the next post.
After Morisot’s marriage, the issue was solved – at least, their relationship was recast in an entirely different set of social norms which prevented Morisot from modelling for him – and Manet started another phase in his painting.

I promised to return to the first interpretation, the theme of private versus public sphere in The Balcony.
For this purpose, we will take a closer look at the most political painting among Manet’s major works, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (1867). It is – like Olympia – not a clear case for Manet’s scheme, but it demonstrates how Manet confronts the problem of power in his work.

And Yes! Visiting the Museum D’Orsay I certainly also saw the Luncheon on the Grass again!!!

See you in two weeks again!