Modern Painting (Illustrated Edition). S.S. Van Dine

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СКАЧАТЬ have never been surmised by the public. His recognition, coming as it did years after his most significant works had been accomplished and set aside, was due to a reversion of the public’s mind to its aboriginal admirations. Manet is popular today for the same reason that the lesser works of Hokusai and Hiroshige are popular, namely: they present an instantaneous image which is at once flat and motionless. As in the days of the mosaicists and early primitives, the appreciation of such works demands no intellectual operation. Their recognisable subjects only set in motion a simple process of memory. The Olympia, Manet’s most popular painting, illustrates the type of picture which appeals strongly to minds innocent of æsthetic depth. Its mere imagery is alluring. As pure decoration it ranks with Puvis de Chavannes. But in it are all the mistakes of the later Impressionists. Manet consciously attempted the limning of light, but brilliance alone resulted. He did not realise that, in order for one to be conscious of illumination, shadow is necessary. This latter element, with its complementary, produces in us the sensation of volume. True, there is in the Olympia violent contrast between the nude body, the bed and the flowers, on the one hand, and the background, the negress and the cat, on the other; but it is only the contrast of dissimilar atmospheres. The level appearance of the picture is not relieved.

      The cardinal shortcoming in a painting of this kind is that it fails to create an impression of either the aspects or the forces of nature. Such pictures are only flat representations of nature’s minor characteristics. The most resilient imagination cannot endow them with form: the intelligence is balked at every essay to penetrate beyond their surface. In contemplating them one is irritated by the emptiness, or rather the solidity, of the néant which lies behind. Courbet called the Olympia “the queen of spades coming from her bath.” Titian, had he lived today, would have styled it a photograph. Goya (who is as much to blame for it as either Courbet or Titian) would have considered its shallowness an inexcusable vulgarity. In painting it undoubtedly Manet’s intention was to modernise Titian’s Venus Reclining now hanging in the Uffizi; just as later it was Gauguin’s intention, in his La Femme aux Mangos, to endow the Olympia with a South Sea Island setting. Such adaptations are indefensible provided they do not improve upon their originals. There is no improvement in Gauguin’s Venus; and Manet’s picture, while it advances on Titian in attitude, is a decided retrogression viewed from the standpoint of form.

      In such pictures as the Olympia, Nana and La Jarretière we recognise Manet’s effort to obtain notoriety. He was not an aristocrat as was Courbet or Goya or Titian. It was not a need for freer expression that induced him to paint pictures which shocked by their unconventionality, but a desire to abasourdir les bourgeois. In choosing his subject-matter he always had a definite end in view in relation to the public; but his conceptions were spontaneous and were recorded without deliberation. He painted with but little thought as to his method. This fact is no doubt felt by the public and held in his favour by those who believe in the involuntary inspiration of the artist. But art cannot be judged by such childish criteria. Can one imagine Giotto, Michelangelo or, to come nearer our day, Cézanne painting without giving the closest and most self-conscious study to his procedure? Credence in the theopneusty of the painter, the poet and the musician, should have passed out with the advent of Delacroix; but the seeming mystery of art is so deeply rooted in public ignorance that many generations must pass before it can be eradicated.

      The truth is that Manet himself had no precise idea of what he really wished to accomplish. Up to the last year of his life he groped tentatively toward a goal, the outlines of which were never quite distinct. We today, looking back upon his efforts, can judge his motivating influences with some degree of surety. In bringing about the paradox of staticising Courbet, Manet feminised him. He turned Courbet’s blacks and greys into pretty colours, and thereby turned his modelling into silhouette and flattened his volumes. Thus was Courbet not only made effeminate but popularised. Compare the superficially similar pictures, Le Hamac of Courbet and Manet’s Le Repos. In the former the movement in composition accords with the landscape and is carried out in the pose of the woman’s arms and in the disposition of the legs. The figure in the latter picture is little more than an ornament—a symmetrical articulation. Manet has here translated the rhythm of depth into linear balance. In this levelling process all those qualities which raise painting above simple mosaics are lost. A picture thus treated becomes a pattern, incapable of embodying any emotional significance. Manet’s paintings are remembered because they are so instantaneous a vision of their subjects. For this same reason Goya is remembered; but beneath the Spaniard’s broad oppositions of tone is a limpid depth in which the intelligence darts like a fish in an aquarium. In Manet the impassable barrier of externals shuts out that world which exists on the further side of a picture’s surface.

      In Manet we have the summing up of the pictorial expression of all time. His love for decoration never left him long enough for him to experiment with the profounder phases of painting. In many of his canvases he was little more than an exalted poster-maker. His Rendez-vous de Chats was frankly a primitive arrangement of flat drawing, as flat as a print by Mitsuoki. Even details and texture were eliminated from it. It was a statement of his theories reduced to their bare elements. Yet, though exaggerated, the picture was representative of his aims. A pattern to him was form. Courbet’s ability to model an eye was the cause of Manet’s repudiating the painter of L’Enterrement à Ornans. The two men were antithetical; and in that antithesis we have Manet’s aspirations fully elucidated. Even later in life when he took the figure out of doors he was unable to shake off the influence of the silhouette. But the silhouette cannot exist en plain air. Light volatilises design. This knowledge accounts for Renoir’s early sunlight effects. Manet never advanced so far.

      The limitations and achievements of Manet are summed up in his painting, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. This picture is undoubtedly interesting in its black-and-white values and in its freedom from the conventions of traditional composition. At first view its theme may impress one as an attempt at piquancy, but on closer inspection the actual subject diminishes so much in importance that it might have been with equal effect a simple landscape or a still-life. There is no attempt at composition in the classic sense. Even surface rhythm is entirely missing: the tonal masses decidedly overweigh on the left. But the picture nevertheless embodies the distinguishing features of all Manet’s arrangements. It is built on the rigid pyramidal plan. From the lower left-hand corner a line, now light, now dark, reaches almost to the upper frame at a point directly above the smaller nude; and another line, which begins in the lower right-hand corner at the reclining man’s elbow, runs upward to his cap, and is then carried out in the shadow and light of the foliage so that it meets the line ascending from the other side. The base of these two converging lines is formed by another line which runs from the man’s elbow along his extended leg. This is the picture’s important triangle. But a secondary one is formed by a line which begins at the juncture of the tree and shadow in the lower right-hand corner, extends along the cane and the second man’s sleeve to his head, and then drops, by way of the large nude’s head and shoulder, to the basket of fruit at the bottom. This angularity of design is seen in the work of all primitive-minded peoples, and is notably conspicuous in the early Egyptians, the archaic Greeks and the Assyrians of the eighth century B.C. It is invariably the product of the static intelligence into which the comprehension of æsthetic movement has never entered. It is the result of a desire to plant objects solidly and immovably in the ground. Those artists who express themselves through it are men whose minds are incapable of grasping the rhythmic attributes of profound composition. Manet repeats this triangular design in the Olympia where the two adjoining pyramids of contour are so obvious that it is unnecessary to describe them. The figures in canvases such as La Chanteuse des Rues, La Femme au Perroquet, Eva Gonzalès and Émile Zola are constructed similarly; and in groups like En Bateau and Les Anges au Tombeau (the latter of which recalls, by its arrangement and lighting, the Thétis et Jupiter of Ingres) is expressed the mental immobility which characterised Conegliano, Rondinelli, Robusti and their seventeenth-century exemplars, de La Fosse, Le Moyne and Rigaud.

       LE DÉJEUNER SUR L’HERBE MANET

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