Edouard Manet E-Book

Louis Hourticq

• Herausgeber: Louis Hourticq
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Edouard Manet: 29 Masterpieces by Louis Hourticq.Édouard Manet (1832–1883) was a French painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia, both 1863, caused great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.THERE was a time when the relation of artists and amateurs of art stood on a sound basis. The amateurs were few and cultivated, and with the artists the desire to please was more urgent than the need for being original. This excellent state of affairs had passed away before the nineteenth century, and now the artist cultivates his originality, jealously preserves it, and the audience for which he works has become a multitude. The greater the independence of the artist, the greater the throng about him, shocked and scandalized by his efforts to gain their approbation, efforts for the most part directed towards differentiation between them and himself; and misunderstanding has become so normal that it is hard for us to conceive of a man of genius except as a misunderstood being. 

Leseprobe

Edouard Manet

29 Masterpieces

by Louis Hourticq

ÉDOUARD MANET

(1832-1883)

Édouard Manet (1832–1883) was a French painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, and a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia, both 1863, caused great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.

INTRODUCTION

THERE was a time when the relation of artists and amateurs of art stood on a sound basis. The amateurs were few and cultivated, and with the artists the desire to please was more urgent than the need for being original. This excellent state of affairs had passed away before the nineteenth century, and now the artist cultivates his originality, jealously preserves it, and the audience for which he works has become a multitude. The greater the independence of the artist, the greater the throng about him, shocked and scandalized by his efforts to gain their approbation, efforts for the most part directed towards differentiation between them and himself; and misunderstanding has become so normal that it is hard for us to conceive of a man of genius except as a misunderstood being. And r yet it is a modern malady and it is not only the artists who suffer from it. The public of the nineteenth century was subjected to the torment of constant uncertainty. Hardly had it recovered from the hubbub about the romantics, when Courbet set Paris by the ears with his aggressively vulgar peasants. Hardly had the uproar over Courbet died down than Manet brought confusion worse confounded. Since then there have been so many scandals and squabbles one after another that the surfeited public has refused to be indignant any longer. Violence can no more rouse it from its lethargy. But Manet was producing his work at a time when not one of his audacities could be met with indifference. His pictures met with practically nothing but laughter and derision. He encountered even more violent disapproval than even Courbet had done.

Courbet had shocked by the affected ugliness of his models and his noisy glib charlatanism; but even the most hostile of his detractors were forced to admire his magnificent craftsmanship. It was objected of Courbet, "There are such men and such things, but why paint them?" Of Manet it was said: "No, things are not like that. You're laughing at us." And for thirty years Manet stuck to his guns and went on obstinately showing his work to an indifferent and incredulous public. Did Manet know exactly the new kind of painting that he was trying to substitute for the old ? That is not so certain. The study of his pictures in chronological order reveals clearly a certain indecision in his mind. , Every one of his paintings is a bold attempt to set down on canvas some aspect of things that had not hitherto been revealed; once he had gained his effect — successfully or unsuccessfully — he passed on to some new audacity. It is this bold inconstancy of his that accounts in a great measure for his long continued quarrel with the public. He was for ever mercilessly disconcerting it; the visitors to the Salon were not prepared by the old outrage for the new. Such a hardened offender mocked at clemency, a procedure unusual among painters. Even the greatest have very rarely been able to resist the temptation to re-handle kindred subjects and to aim at picturesque effects of the same order. Painting is such a difficult language, and Nature is so elusive that the majority limit their vision to a few motives only, and adapt their technique to them and compensate by plumbing into the depths for their quality. Manet on the other hand, even when he finally laid down the brush, had come by no settled formula. Very rarely has there been such a combination of audacity and uncertainty. His audacity came from the sincerity of his vision, his uncertainty from the inadequacy of the medium.

Take it for all in all, Manet's work seems essentially to be an endeavour to substitute in painting the changing light of day for the artificial, manipulated light of the study. Naturalistic painting had of its essence to face this difficulty. It is in Manet's work that we see clearly how the radiant light of day did little by little dissolve the bold shadows of naturalistic painting. The naturalistic painters of all time, from Paolo Uccello to Courbet, not to mention Tintoretto, Caravaggio, the Spaniards, and Gericault, and all the men who have tried to render solid bodies and things in paint, have been prodigal in their use of dark colouring traversed with sudden lights; bold contrasts of light and shade are the only methods by which a painter can show up the objects on his canvas in bold relief. There are ingenuous visionaries, like Fra Angelico, or the fantastic decorators, like Rubens or Boucher, who paint in light only ; Courbet, and following him, Manet, painted in shade, like the Spaniards. But in 1850, when landscape painters had taken to painting out of doors, it became impossible for figure painters to stay shut up within the four walls of the studio. Courbet endeavoured therefore to set his figures in the full light of day. But though he had been magnificent when he painted in shade, he became dull when he tried to paint in light.

Manet saw that it was not enough to transpose the sombre painting of the naturalistic painters into a lighter tonality, and therefore he resolved on sacrifices to which the precise draughtsmen of the schools would never have consented. He was bold enough to eliminate the nice and exact science of modelling, which had been handed down as a tradition ever since it had been established by the Italians of the Renaissance. That science presupposes

an attentive vision, an intellectual interpretation of the model rather than a direct transcription of impressions received.

Manet unhesitatingly sacrificed all the finesse of modelling in order to be able to see and to render absolute contrasts. In a face in which the classicist sees fine shades which give roundness to the mass, he sees only a plain surface evenly lit, bitten into by a few harsh shadows which throw up the features in relief. This process can be seen in caricature in one of Manet's early works, the poor "Angelina" in the Luxembourg, where the face consists entirely of chalk and soot , which never mingle. Fortunately, Manet soon saw that his harsh shadows must not be abused and that forms and figures could not be so abruptly split up into compartments of black and white. But he reduced every effect to a bare contrast of flat tones with hard outlines, sometimes ending in nothing more than a striking summary reminiscent of the Italians or the Spaniards, though they were more sure and less deliberately violent.

Two pictures in the first manner, "Le Dejeuner sur FHerbe" and the "Olympia" in the Louvre were executed with all the application that a man brings to a profession of faith. In these pictures the painter is clearly struggling with the difficult problems of the changing light of day and modelling without shade. Did he solve these problems? The young people in the "Dejeuner sur THerbe " are supposed to be sitting in the radiant light of the sun. The blunt contrast of an ivory body and sombre greens, and the bold black of the clothes, the shadows and the men's beards, together with the acid tones of the grass make up a robust harmony. But how far short does this picture fall of calling to mind the countless fairy-like reflections and play of light in woods on a summer day! In the "Olympia" Manet tried to depict a nude under a similar light. He discarded all the tricks of the trade, modelling with love and joy, omitting not only the light shadows, which serve to show up the suppleness of the form, but also those minute reflections, the blues of the mezzotints, the reds in the shadows, with which the Flemings adorned the flesh in order to render its fine pearly quality and its warmth. "Olympia" is coloured with a uniform old ivory tint; her little flat head, her thin chest, her amber abdomen, her slim legs are all dully outlined. The joyous face has the curdled rigidity of an archaic figure and the whole picture of wantonness is drawn in livid pallor and the hues of morning. No doubt the sadness of the light, the whole unaccommodating design do respond to the artist's vision, which always traduced everything that was presented to it. But it is also possible to think that Manet's intentions were falsified by his medium.

As a matter of fact he was not looking in the right direction. The solution of the problem has been found, but by others and by a method very different from his. Manet, the figure painter, is absorbed in the reality even of his model, his gaze explores shape and size, he feels solidity at a distance, and with his brush draws in the various forms in bold outline. Painters have only really begun to render the effects of the light of day when they have been bold enough to dissolve form into the atmosphere. It was the landscape painters, who, in this matter, were to show the way. The sky, water, leaves, all justify every conceivable fantasy in colouring. On the other hand, the human face is more obstinate stuff to handle and does not so easily admit of being dispersed (as it were) among the moving and changing reflections which flicker over inanimate objects.

Through Manet's accentuation of the contrast of black and white and his suppression of the transitions of graded shadows with the object of throwing bold forms up into the light there was created a new technique which relied upon the vibrations of the light between our eyes and the object. In the adjustment of the light of day and modelling the classical painter sacrificed everything to modelling; Manet contrived it summarily with the use of a few flat tones vividly contrasted; Claude Monet and the "impressionists," on the other hand, dissipated their forms with little bright patches which transpose the rays of light into a coloured motley. In order to counterbalance the brilliance of the light with vivacity of colour they cast about for every conceivable reason for colouring light and shade. They accentuated the thousand elusive reflections which Manet blotted out with his broad flat tones, while in doing so he effaced all delicacy, all subtlety of form.