Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Édouard Manet
French; 19th-century
Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay
95%
The Balcony. 1863. Oil on canvas
This painting comes to rest in the face of the seated woman at left (it's Berthe Morisot), which is the only firm, unequivocal object in the whole scene. It could be said that the railing, too, refuses to flinch or flow, but it doesn't have nearly the same steel that's in Morisot's viz (look at how the green bars are shadowed, softened), and besides, her sleeve slips slightly past the front of it. The railing stands in for the picture plane, holding the brushy whites and cavernous darks behind it inside the belly of the image. But the internal framing mechanism that's implied by those shutters pushes the black back of the painting forward as if to press down on the railing (the woman beside Berthe even steps beyond this threshold), and then, as well, there's Morisot's sleeve transgressing the front of the railing, which further muddles the fore and the aft of it all. The Balcony, of course, is far from the only painting of Manet's to make a coquette out of its surface through complex arranging and selectively vigorous brushwork: the ensuing development of modernism meant that many more were to come. But seldom in Manet's oeuvre (or elsewhere) does this dynamic find such a crystalline embodiment as Berthe Morisot's face, situated between the two poles of the picture and, through its hardness and obscurity (somewhat like David's Marat, in fact), mediating all of painting’s conflicting desires. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay
93%
Olympia. 1863. Oil on canvas
She's kicking off her shoe. The cat is sketchy. The pink of the maid's dress is insubstantial, but Manet's described it with such force. The openings and closings in the space behind these figures can't be explained. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay
84%
Combat de taureaux. 1865-66. Oil on canvas
That accretion of forms to the right of center — wounded horse, bent bull, matadors — would have been impossible for earlier art to sustain. Well, I guess it would have come to Manet through Delacroix. For the earlier painter, however, such messiness would have been downstream of a Romantic devotion to facture, whereas for Manet there's no frivolity here, no indulging in paint: this knot of bodies is indecipherable because it couldn't have been otherwise. The whole of the painting seems to concentrate itself just behind the head of that horse, at the core of the tableau. The tan plane this scene's set upon is almost overpowering in its openness, which is emphasized by the dispersion of figures across it. The plane tips upwards near the middle of the picture and then slopes aggressively down towards the base, but then the weight of that tableau (distributed by the airy placement of matadors) seems to lock things into place, denying the tan plane the ready access to the picture plane which it clearly desires. And all of the action is compressed, like a gas, by the weight of the audience up above in the stands. The obvious counterpoint is the famous gladiator art of Gérôme: in his academic paintings, the floor of the battleground slopes up and back off the left side of the image, its inward and outward movement facilitated by the smooth curve of the colosseum's inner wall. Gérôme denies the other-than-imagistic qualities of his pictures; Manet acknowledges it, and then proceeds to negate this acknowledgement through the most ugly and desperate means. (TFS, 2026)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
82%
The Reader. 1861. Oil on canvas
This is almost a prototype for Manet's famous portrait of Zola, and for my money it's a better painting. It's more singlemindedly about the disconnect between, on one side, the hard, dull, jagged rendering of the coat, face, hands and, on the other, the murky flows of paint that make up the picture's atmosphere. (Zola gets bogged down by its references.) The reader's body is alive but dead; his surroundings are dead but alive. In the book he's holding, a conflict is staged between the incommensurate qualities of figure and ground: the book is juicily painted such that it nearly pours off the front of the canvas, but its whites rhymes with the whites of the sitter's shirt and its greys with the grey of his hair. It's tipped up and in, too, creating this little vesicle of inwardness (contoured by the figure's hugging arms) right in the center of the image. Manet's brilliance is in the way the literality of his surface seems to coexist with his images — not without tension, but ultimately with grace. In some senses, this portrait could be a Rembrandt, not just because the book may well have been plucked from the Anatomy Lesson, but also because of the sense one gets that there's a thin barrier, at most, that keeps this figure from falling back into the browns behind him and losing all distinctness. But while Rembrandt blithely mingled his figures with their grounds, there's adamant in Manet's line that seems to derive from, well, caution or even fear. Rembrandt would never have had to include that parapet. (TFS, 2026)
Paris, France: Musée d’Orsay
79%
Portrait of Émile Zola. 1868. Oil on canvas
Bit banal to say that this picture is a meditation on picture-making, but of course it is. It's Vermeer-like, not just for its metapictorial array of internal images that hang on the back wall, but also for the way Zola's body is framed to set off a deluge of relations running through the mess of material on the tabletop and up to (of course) Olympia's gaze in grisaille, which then diverts all the accumulating energy to the outside of the image. Like Vermeer, too, is the importance of the empty area behind Zola's head, which facilitates the complexity of connections just beyond it it. Sans this negative space, the image scene be little more than an arbitrary crowding of things. What isn't like Vermeer, however, is the painting's angularity (in the jacket, in the face) and its self-involved brushiness (in the pants, in the pamphlets). This, of course, is the modernism of it all, but it amounts to slightly less than it does in Manet's best paintings, probably because the dark sections at the bottom corners of the scene don't successfully involve themselves with the abyss of Zola's black jacket, or because his face and his hand lack much of the alien sharpness that makes Manet's best figures into flat antagonists of the pictures they're stuck within. (TFS, 2026)