Figure 1\u00a0 \u00a0 Etching, 1861<\/p>\n
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Figure 2\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Luncheon on the Grass, 1863<\/p>\n
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Looking at Luncheon in the Grass<\/em> in that perspective, we sense that the three central figures are sitting on a kind of stage (in the studio), and we can almost see the background as a painted coulisse <\/em>fencing off the backstage. The figures are somewhat crowded together. The man to the right is leaning out to the right, since he has no other direction to move. Manet is playing games with us, though. But on the left side of the painting, Manet shows a realistic view into the far depth creating an inconsistency for our perception \u2013 we have to look back and forth – which further enhances the impression that all is just put on stage. Thus, the pictorial space is full of \u201ctricks\u201d, but basically, we have a rather narrow space for the \u201caction\u201d and a frontstage and a backstage supporting, but also delimiting the pictorial space. Now, I like to point out another feature of this \u201cstage\u201d.<\/p>\n We have three actors on this stage, or four, if we count the \u201cvirtual\u201d person painted on the coulisse. This impression has puzzled many interpreters of Manet, but \u2013 in my view \u2013 nobody has proposed a convincing interpretation. The philosopher of art, Richard Wollheim, proposed a somewhat similar interpretation: Not all painters strive to achieve this specific type of active engagement of the viewer. To some extent, we encounter the viewer we already met looking at Vermeer’s painting, although now not in the corset of a perspective system. But not quite. Looking at the Degas, I agree with Wollheim that the figures in Degas are just lined up to be portrayed. In my view, there is a crucial difference. But there is a difference. To understand, why I consider this difference important, we go back to the distinction of the space inside the painting and the space outside the painting. Figure 4 The viewer is not fixed by perspectives in a certain position or in the privileged position of an \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer. We are not invited into the perceptual space<\/em> of the painter\/viewer, but rather into a social event<\/em>. Figure 5:\u00a0 \u00a0Edouard Manet,\u00a0 Lola de Valencia<\/em>\u00a0 (1862)<\/p>\n Besides, the painting is an example of the great interest of Manet in theatre, opera and circus, not only the puppet theatre, documented in paintings over his entire career.<\/p>\n We will return to the position of the \u201cother\u201d in the next post. In a later post, we also have to pick up the way Manet is avoiding any great \u201cstory\u201d \u2013 unlike Caspar David Friedrich above or his \u201cromantic\u201d precursors and teachers Delacroix and Thomas Couture. He literally starts a \u201cpostdramatic\u201d painting which makes us jump right into 20th<\/sup> century discussions on art and theatre!<\/p>\n For now, I like to emphasize two things:<\/p>\n On the one hand, the puppet theatre<\/i><\/b> provides us \u2013 and, I argue, also Manet \u2013 with a model for real and virtual<\/i> spaces<\/em> inside and outside the painting or the pictorial space. These spaces form an installation<\/em> <\/b>inviting us to enter and walk around \u2013 much like installations in modern art over a hundred years later!<\/p>\n On the other hand, we realize that the spaces are constituted essentially by gazes and gestures of persons inside and outside the painting and between those inside and those outside. These spaces are social spaces<\/em> <\/b>and, therefore, we will take a closer look at how Manet paints the communication<\/em> between the persons involved in the painting process. See you next week!<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The puppet theatre as a model for Manet’s composition in “Luncheon on the Grass”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":199326225,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[225364],"tags":[410816,4885002,1783203,214311],"class_list":["post-755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-manet","tag-installation-art","tag-luncheon-on-the-grass","tag-puppet-theatre","tag-social-space"],"yoast_head":"\n
\nEspecially telling is the flat green background of the hand in the centre. In fact, this colour sets the tone for the entire painting (and for My Manet<\/em>).<\/p>\n
\nHe suggests a limited stage space, but he does not employ the obvious strategy to paint a frame, say, with curtains like Vermeer (see previous blog). The tree appears to be on the edge toward frontstage<\/em>, and puppets could clearly leave the stage to the right. The situation remains \u201copen\u201d to the sides, not boxed in. Then, Manet moves the second woman \u201cpainted on the coulisse\u201d forward, she is obviously too large, and, thus, is closing off the background. We cannot readily look past her into a background, she pushes forward and pushes the viewer backward.<\/p>\n
\nIn support of this perception, Manet emphasizes the front of the stage – to the right by the tree, to the left by a wonderful still life, both not really connected to the central figures. Rather, they reach out frontstage to the viewer.
\nViolating perspective and the \u201cproper\u201d scale of objects \u2013 like the woman in the back \u2013 is a charming feature of puppet theatre as Manet\u2019s friend Duranty pointed out – which may well have intrigued Manet (as noted by art historian Michael Fried 1998, p.474).<\/p>\n
\nThis feature, we will find again and again in Manet\u2019s paintings, up to the \u201cfinale\u201d in his famous \u201cA Bar at the Folies-Berg\u00e9re\u201d twenty years later.
\nWe return to that.<\/p>\n
\nFrom a social point of view that is remarkable, since three is the minimal crew for any decent drama on stage.
\nOne person can hold a captivating monologue, two can have a love affair, but the dynamics depend on the third person introducing alternatives and shifting alliances.
\nThis is a formal<\/em> aspect characterizing the potential<\/em> for action.
\nTypical for Manet, there is no evident on-going action, the protagonists are somehow arrested in their postures for the moment.
\nThey look quite vital and ready to resume whatever they have been doing. But for the moment they pause.<\/p>\n
\nTypically, art historians relate the fact that these persons do not communicate or interact in any meaningful way to the situation of modern life isolating or even alienating the individuals. A possible \u201cmodern\u201d interpretation, but this does not contribute to any understanding of the composition in pictorial space.
\nWe do have the feeling that something important is going on – the painting is obviously fascinating people for some 160 years – but what are they doing?
\nIt is as if the actors are saying \u201cLook, this is a play with three people. We are distinct persons playing specific roles\u201d.
\nUnfortunately, we are not told the story line, only their positions. The way they look is obviously important for the whole composition, but their gazes do not create a closed space between them. Their common activity is interrupted, the space of their relationships is \u201copened\u201d, and the attention of at least two of them is distracted.
\nThe man to the right is kind of sustaining the relations within<\/em> the picture space with his outstretched arm, but he is interrupting his communication.
\nOn stage, it would be clear what is going on: the actors are attending to the audience and have to interrupt the \u201cstory\u201d, they pause to establishing the contact with the people in the audience.<\/p>\n
\nManet is introducing an \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer entering the scene. The gaze of the woman establishes the presence of the viewer in a way that makes the viewer aware of himself or herself. This, in turn, motivates the real viewer to search for additional layers of meaning in the painting which this \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer might see in the painting, but the viewer does not see yet\u00a0 exactly what the painter, Manet, intends to achieve.<\/p>\n
\nFollowing Wollheim, most of them don\u2019t in most paintings. This also means that Wollheim is here introducing an element, the \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer, which is not essential for \u201cPainting as an Art\u201d (his book title; 1987) in general.
\nTherefore, we might question his particular interpretation of Manet without taking a stand toward his general art theory (which would be beyond this blog). What is relevant in our context is that this \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer is a formal element of composition which is quite independent from any content or \u201cstory\u201d that might be going on in the painting.<\/p>\n
\nWollheim compares Manet, on the one hand, with Caspar David Friedrich, a German \u201cromantic\u201d painter (1774-1840), and on the other hand, with the early Edgar Degas, his friend and painter (1834-1917). (Degas is famous for his paintings of ballet dancers, but he started his own \u201crevolution\u201d a few years later.)
\nIn Figure 3, we see an example from both artists, although I chose different paintings to enhance the correspondences with Luncheon<\/em> \u2013 and marked a \u201czoomed\u201d detail in Friedrich.
\nFigure 3:
\nComparing: Caspar David Friedrich – Edouard Manet – Edgar Degas<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mymanet.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/Friedrich-Degas-Manet-300x213.jpg\")
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\nThe girl to the left establishes a contact with the viewer, but the essential content of the painting is not influenced. The relations in this bourgeois family are obviously problematic (look at the mother!), and this is what Degas wanted to present to the viewer<\/em>.
\nIn Manet\u2019s painting, the figures have much more presence for the viewer, <\/em>even though not all are looking outward. This involvement we \u201csee\u201d also in Friedrich\u2019s painting. In fact, the entire painting is impressing itself onto the viewer. In this particular case, the viewer even sees him\/herself represented within<\/em> the picture space, because we tend to identify with the figure in the foreground approaching the group in the middle ground.
\nFriedrich succeeds here in presenting the experience of a represented viewer<\/em> to the viewer. In other cases, he is attributing the experience of the scene to an \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer whose intense experience gives the scene its \u201cromantic\u201d flavour, in Wollheim\u2019s interpretation just like in Manet.<\/p>\n
\nIn Wollheim\u2019s view, the \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer is, in a way, outside the painting and might be approaching the picture plane until he is actually seen within the painting. This viewer is an integrated element of the perception <\/em>of the scene, as if looking from within <\/em>even if not represented inside. Wollheim is not employing some \u201cdeep\u201d psychological or psychoanalytical processes (e.g. no Sigmund Freud; we have to return to this kind of interpretation of Manet\u2019s paintings by other authors). Rather, it is our everyday imaginative <\/em>capacity at work, similar to our dreams \u201cmobilizing our memories of what nightly goes on in our heads\u201d (p.164). No real mystery here, although \u2013 like with dreams \u2013 the world may appear sometimes mysterious and the space uncanny \u2013 like a castle ruin in the moonlight in a painting by Friedrich.
\nWollheim assumes for Manet a similar naturalistic or scientific attitude towards our perception and the perception of the \u2013 represented or unrepresented – viewer.<\/p>\n
\nAs noted by Wollheim, the figures in Manet\u2019s painting are disturbed from outside<\/em> the picture; the distance to the viewer is preserved and with it the autonomy on both sides. Their gazes contribute somehow to the meaning of the painting without<\/em> invoking some “story” and engaging the experience of the viewer in it! Note that Friedrich\u2019s painting is loaded with symbolism. It is called \u201cThe Stages of Life\u201d with people of all generations in a somewhat mystic landscape.
\nOriginally, Manet\u2019s painting had the generic title The Bath<\/em> with hardly any \u201cstory\u201d indicated – just a scene one might encounter around Paris at the time (which contemporary viewers found quite puzzling).<\/p>\n
\nFor Manet, there are more persons outside the painting than an \u201cunrepresented\u201d viewer. There is the painter himself, the model, a friend, perhaps a novelist and art critic like Edmond Duranty or Charles Baudelaire (who visited almost daily), and they are all \u2013 virtually \u2013 sitting in front of the stage in the audience.
\nAnd unlike in a normal theatre, with actors on stage and a director and stage crew supporting them, Manet \u2013 like the operator in a marionette theatre \u2013 had to address each one of them through the figures in the painting.
\nNo wonder the figures look in different directions, they have different roles to play in the communication with the audience outside the painting<\/i>!<\/p>\n
\nSocial positions inside and outside the painting<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mymanet.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/picnic-schema-print-1.webp\")
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\nThe viewer is quite autonomous, changing positions, even walking around as a critical observer and checking what is going on \u201cbackstage\u201d. (Certainly, children try to go around to see what is back there!) The viewer can, virtually or metaphorically, look from the \u201cback\u201d as indicated in Figure 4. The position can be imagined like the second woman within<\/em> the painting looking at the group from behind. Or like Manet, peeking through the coulisse \u2013 see above. The viewer may even take the position of the model.
\nInterestingly, Manet painted just this situation a year earlier (1862) portraying Lola de Valence<\/em>, a Spanish actress and dancer. Manet was kind of \u201cinterviewing his model backstage\u201d. On the left side, we see the audience looking at the stage and towards you, the viewer – and past two layers of coulisse \u2013 the pictorial space. This position or perspective is the view of the \u201cother\u201d in social space (or the \u201calter ego\u201d of the painter in psychoanalytical terms).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/mymanet.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Lola-Valencia-Small-242x300.png\")
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\nAgain, the model of the puppet theatre will prove to be helpful!<\/p>\n