Word: manet
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Today, surrounded by art that rejects formal grace in the interest of narrative, contradiction and hyperbole, we are conditioned to see a different Manet. In eyes that have viewed DeChirico's train stations, for instance, Manet's painting of a woman and a child at the Gare St.-Lazare acquires a strangeness that contradicts his intention of painting a peaceful urban scene. The grown woman stares at the painter, the little girl turns her back and gazes raptly through the iron bars into an industrial future, full of clamor and swift disjunction. For each phase of modernism there...
...Manet's greatness as a formal artist and no other word for his achievement will do, is not to be predicated solely on the way his work anticipated the desires of later painters. The paintings, seen in themselves, do not look so very flat anyway. As Art Historian Anne Coffin Hanson points out in one of the catalogue's searching essays, they reproduce flatter than they are. In reality, "surface qualities come into play . . . It is as though the artist had discovered a means of simultaneously combining touch and sight...
...Manet's sense of touch was extraordinary, but its bravura passages are in the details: how the generalized bagginess of a trouser leg, for instance, rendered in flat, thin paint and firmed up with swift daubs of darker tone in the folds, contrasts with the thick, creamy white directional brush strokes that model the curve of a spat. The ceaseless, intelligent play of flat and round, thick and thin, "slow" and "fast" passages of paint is what gives Manet's surface its probing liveliness. There is nothing "miraculous" about it, but it was not the result...
...Fifer, 1866, Zola remarked that Manet did not shrink from "the abruptness of nature": "His whole being bids him to see in patches, in simple elements charged with energy." The same claims would be made by the postimpressionists-patch and discontinuity, "arrangement" as against continuous modeling. If The Fifer were a little more abstract, more "Japanese," it would almost be a Van Gogh. At times, Manet's tact in balancing the decorative and the real almost passes belief, an example being the black stripe on the fifer's right leg-swelling and closing with negligent grace, extending...
...most famous example of Manet's contrariness is, of course, the Déjeuner: two women-one completely naked, the other virtually so-and two clothed men, occupying the foreground of a sketchily painted Arcadian landscape. We have been taught to see its allusions stick out like elbows (here a homage to Giorgione, there a quotation from Marcantonio Raimondi), but what infuriated the audience at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, and has caused so many gallons of ink to be spilled on it since, is its insolubility as narrative. An "uncouth riddle," one critic called...