Manet and the Family Romance & Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth Century Painting - Book Review

NANCY LOCKE

Manet and the Family Romance

Princeton: Princeton University Pres 2001 232 pp; 98 b/w ills. $5500

SUSAN SIDLAUSKAS

material part Place, and Self in Nineteenth hundred Painting

Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres 2000 230 pp; 8 color ills.; 56 b/w ills. $11500

I cannot imagine either of these volumes in American academic art history being conceived, written, or published a generation ago. Each straddles disciplines in the humanities and social sciences with real determination. Each attempts novel "readings" of canonical works of art that stray far from the "traditional" interpretative modes of art history that rely upon iconography and iconology. And each manages more [i]or[/i] less grounding in the social history of 19th-century French art without being in any important faculty of perception dependent on the work of Robert L Herbert or T J Clark, the greatest in quantity important strategists of that subdiscipline of art history in the last generation. The bibliographies and indexes of these sum of two units learned books reveal a range of intellectual "sources" including psychoanalysis, philosophy, architectural history, literature, literary theory (more flat than "literature" itself), cultural studies, sociology, and many other fields sole loosely related to "the history of art."

at the same time in spite of the evident methodological opennes of these volumes each is anxious to contribute to the interpretation of specific works of art, greatest in quantity of them famous and plenteous debated in the critical and historical literatures. Given this interpretative focus, it is a little not divisible by 2 that neither author seems to have invaded the art museum itself with a great deal of persistence. Professor Sidlauskas of the University of Pennsylvania has dealt in physical detail with Edgar Degas's Interior, which is housed nearby at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And certain of the technical discussions necessary for Professor Locke's arguments approach from published sources or from the greatest in quantity intensely "physical" of all historians of Manet, Juliet Wilson Bareau. While I know by what means difficult and frustrating it can be for the nonmuseum art historian to gain access to "primary material" in the museum, it is a pity that more effort was not disburseed in this direction. I suspect that these true richly nuanced readings would have been sharper had their authors done level more "hands-on" museum research.

It also must be said that the one and the other of these studies emerge from dissertations that have been extensively altered and adapted to become volumes Each benefited from the advice of a wide range of readers and from constant "testing" in seminars and professional meetings. While this proces has remov a little of the speculative gusto of the dissertations, it has produc readings of specific works of art that are layered, multifaceted, and, occasionally, problematic. In each case, the scholarship situates the works of art in words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings not normally associated with the art world--that is, private and institutional collecting, exhibitions, and museums. Instead, the connection for Sidlauskas's reappraisal of modernity is the general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of "interiority" and its numerous analogues. She is fascinated by means of the contributions that artists make to a cultural discourse of privacy, family, and sex within the enclos spaces of the domestic interior. Locke too, is obsess with issues of family on the other hand rather than casting her toil as widely as her colleague, focuses her attention upon the oeuvre of one artist, Edouard Manet. Thus, the one and the other books deal with the "family secrets" that inform the artist and his world. Although the two books concentrate exclusively on male artists, in many important ways they succe in feminizing the discourses surrounding those artists.

Manet and the Family Romance is individual of the most important attempts to reread Manet, the "modern" artist more than any other at the center of the troubl discourse of "modernism." Locke is well prepared for her task, having studied with TJ Clark at Harvard and having worked with Beatrice Farwell, Henri Zerner Juliet Wilson Bareau, and many other important scholars of the make submissive Indeed, her acknowledgments are a sort of "who's who" of American art history, and her reading has been thorough, imaginative, and soded Her contention is that modernism is first and foremost subjective and that Manet's contributions to it must be center in his private life. To marshal her arguments, Locke deals forcefully with Manet's family history, relating it clearly and completely to his art. however far from confining her attentions to the paintings that deal overtly with family dramas and romances, her rereadings of Manet's "family" oeuvre include long discussions of canonical works similar as Olympia and Le morning meal sur l'herbe as well as with his religious paintings and his "public" art--the pictures of recent life that seem to have in like manner little to do with what she, following Freud calls "the family romance."

Locke organizes her research into five chapters of varying extents and methods. The first, "The lie of Orestes," is, loosely speaking, her methodological chapter. In it, she makes the usual connection between Manet and Charles Baudelaire--however, not the usual "art" Baudelaire of "The Painter of novel Life" but the "literary" Baudelaire, whose imaginative prose-poem "La Corde," devot to the illusions of maternal delight in was dedicated to Manet. From this, she dives into Sigmund Freud Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michael Fried (Manet as the first "post-Kantian" painter!), TJ Clark, Meyer Schapiro, Hal feed Lynn Hunt, the Gedos...and all this is crammed in a scant five pages of well-written--sometimes cogently written-text. Unadventurous readers beware!