Manet's Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s. - book reviews

Chicago: University of Chicago Pres 1995 647 pp; 16 color ills., 200 b/w $5000

James Rubin's elegantly condens handsomely produc work argues that Manet, a Mallermean painter, makes his still-life nosegays stand for the process of image making. Manet - what a privileged artist! - was written about by means of three friends: Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Emile Zola. Following Harry Rand's admirable 1987 work Manet's Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare, Rubin argues that Mallarme provides the best approach.(1) Without offering any fresh documentary evidence, or much lay opened historical analysis, Rubin presents an account frankly poetic in the best faculty of perception of the word. Never digressive or unnecessarily weighted with details, it offers a reverie upon Manet, who to any reasonably sympathetic reader draw nears really to appear as a painter of fresh life as the still life, cultivating "ordinary percepts to the pleasure-seeking ends of the casual, notwithstanding discerning eye" (p. 197).

The introduction, an unfortunate and unnecessary concession to present-day fashion, discusses Emile Benveniste, Louis Marin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried, and Georges Didi-Huberman. Their claims really are irrelevant to Rubin's. In what ways, it is natural to demand, are Mallarme's metrical compositions equivalent to Manet's paintings?(2) Rubin's highly machiavelian answer to that question is that "it may not be too abundant to see those still-lifes as standing for his artistic neighborhood or persona" (p. 168), an argument supported, he claims, by means of Mallarme's 1876 commentary "The Impressionists and Edouard Manet," reprinted in an appendix.

In his analysis of that essay by dint of Mallarme, T. J. Clark notes that "the ironies attending Mallarme's final prediction - that the of recent origin art might prove directly useful to the masses as they take above the state - do not ne to be spelt out"(3) What, to tread in the steps of the spirit of Clark's materialist account, appears obviously problematic and unstable is Rubin's metaphor, painting as a bunch of flowers Flowers, decorations associated by convention with nature and with women are as artificial as anything other in the modern city. To identify Manet's paintings with commodities available at the florist prompts that modernist paintings look natural plane or perhaps especially when we know that they are artificial - like the hothouse flowers being handed to Olympia. Insofar as Manet's flowerlike paintings appear to be what they are not, they are agriculture masquerading as nature. If "Manet's way of seeing... is his world" (p 197) that is because a sympathetic viewer who knows Mallarme can learn to diocese his paintings aesthetically, blurring the distinction, obvious to the organ of vision of the materialist, between artifice and reality.

The first chapter of Michael Fried's work reprinting his 1969 essay "Manet's Sources," argues that a particular account of Manet's achievement must understand the way he adduces the Le Nain brothers, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and other artists, the pair to signal his "Frenchness" and to relate his art to tradition. Chapter 2 accepting a certain quantity of claims of critics of "Manet's Sources," argues that its essential thesis remains convincing: "I understand Manet's use of sources as defining a particular trice in the emergence of modernist painting" (p 183) - and that requires understanding by what mode he used his sources. Placing this practice in historical adjoining matter the third chapter looks at other artists of "the generation of 1863" - Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legro James Whistler - who share Manet's interest with representing the depicted figures in like manner they are "unaware of the nearness before the canvas of the beholder" (p 189) Here again Manet is involved with tradition, for absorption and theatricality was a long-term bear upon of French painters. Chapter 4 focused upon Manet's antitheatricality, argues that his "1860 paintings pursu a strategy of denying or voiding absorptive results while not quite purging his compositions of absorptive motifs" (p 281) Chapter 5 analyzes images readily associated with absorption: self-portraits. Because they are made using mirrors, of that kind pictures raise questions about the artist's position. Depicted in brow of his picture, absorbed in the activity of making that image, he - imaginatively in the picture - thus elides his vicinity before the painting. In the "Coda," Fried, making a certain quantity of distinctions between his approach to Manet (and Impressionism) and that of his early mentor, kind Greenberg, argues that understanding Manet in the 1860 is difficult because there is a natural bent to project backward onto his early work touchs of 1870s French painting.

This real long book - the notes alone approach to 169 pages - is a masterpiece. Willfully original, real often passionately suggestive, quite unlike anything any other art historian could write, its extraordinarily acute reading of the visual evidence and true far-reaching historical thesis will place many scholars in Fried's liability Fried's Manet, creating uneclectic pictures from of the like kind an amazing assortment of sources, has a certain number of affinity with Fried himself, who from this seemingly unpromising mass of material lay opens a singularly forceful thesis. Together with Fried's earlier publications upon art history and his 1960 art criticism, it tenders a reading of two centuries of art's history unlike any other in the literature. Nowadays, when the dominant reading of Manet and Impressionism is provided through T. J. Clark's followers, when art critics for the most part detach contemporary "postmodern" art from its tradition, Fried's oppos perspective, which radically challenges these received ideas, could not be more welcome. What other art historian deals in an equally stout-hearted way with philosophical issues that the historian of modernism, that period whose relation to our era is in the way that difficult to grasp, must understand?