Portraying Life – don’t try this on your way home.

# 67

   An exhibition of Manet’s portraiture continues at the Royal Academy until 14 April 2013. We went to see it last Friday evening. I know an exhibition has worked for me if I realise I am seeing things differently afterwards; usually on the way home. The pictures in this show are portraits and all are concerned in some way with the level of realism that can be achieved by direct observation. Collectively, they also represent Manet’s disregard for the previous European tradition of giving primacy to ‘history’ paintings: paintings which depict mainly religious and mythological subjects set in ‘morally uplifting’ compositions. A number of Manet’s portraits are specifically described as ‘genre paintings’ because they convey scenes from his everyday life. And in these he often included an identifiable individual almost as a means of confirming the reality of what was being depicted.

   Manet’s milieu was that of the leisured 19^th Century Parisian bourgeoisie. His subjects were largely his family and his friends. An urban man throughout his life, Manet had a “wide circle of literary, artistic, musical and political friends who defended his art, served as sitters for his portraits and took roles in his scenes of contemporary life.”[i]  Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) is both a group portrait and a painting from modern life. Manet included himself in the panorama as if he were “the orchestrator of this social gathering” and was thereby making it his “cultural self-portrait.”

 

Manet’s cultural milieu : a detail from Music in the Tuileries Gardens.

Manet is the figure at the extreme left.

   Entirely consistent with gender attitudes of the time, Manet depicts the women as encased, passive and figuratively grounded. His men are almost all standing, some are mobile, most have the capacity to be active; but only, perhaps, as flâneurs. They celebrate their status as the idle rich; loafers and strollers of the boulevards to a man. In 1862, however, the painting was highly controversial. The French Academy did not consider the depiction of modern urban life was a suitable subject for ‘high art’. And worse; Manet’s brushwork was intentionally fleeting and his composition defied formal perspective. It all amounted to far too much realism, not something that the École des Beaux-Arts could accept as a finished painting.

   Leaving the RA sometime after 8pm we made our way to Olivelli, a commendable and affordable Italian restaurant in Waterloo.[ii] It was not until later - when we had a long wait at the far end of Lower Marsh for a Streatham-bound 159 - that the difficulty of portraying our contemporary urban milieu began to gnaw away at me. Looking up at the passengers on the top deck of the fifth number 12 to swish past, I recorded weariness, anxiety and subdued frustration in equal measure on the passing faces. Men and women seemed to share the same air of tired resignation. None were ‘active’, none were ‘grounded’ and their ‘cultural portrait’ would be captured only by an endless loop of CCTV recorded by the security cameras.

 

My urban milieu : late last Friday

   Before this exhibition, I had not previously been aware of Manet’s painting The Railway, 1873. In this, Victorine Meurent models for him as an enigmatic young woman looking up from the pages of her book as an unseen steam train departs from the Gare Saint-Lazare. Her fingers secure references to several pages in the book and a puppy snoozes in her lap. This is painting as a snapshot, capturing a single, unrepeatable, moment in time. It is very clearly a painting made at the beginning of the age of photography. In a moment, the steam will vanish, the puppy will awaken, the little girl will turn around or the young woman may glance again at her book. It is even possible that Manet himself will appear at his studio door (in the background, to the left of Victorine’s head). In all respects The Railway is a truly modern painting, obedient to the new, impressionist, injunction to paint the effect, not the object.

Edouard Manet, The Railway, 1873

 

London, Gare de Waterloo, one hundred and forty years later.

  

   Awaiting the night bus in the rain, an immigrant worker keeps his thoughts to himself in a composition not entirely dissimilar to Manet’s, but perforce without the background of steam and the fair little girl. Manet, I believe, would at least have approved the volume and intensity of the blackness all around the lonely individual and the transient, unsettling, discomfort suggested by the glossy redness of the narrow seat.

 

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1862-3

   But then, a Waterloo bus shelter on a cold rainy night; what could be further from a summer picnic in a woodland clearing? When the bus finally came, I sat staring at a postcard purchased in the exhibition. Around me, other passengers dozed, gazed into the night or tapped the screens of their smart phones. It occurred to me that Le dejeuner sur l’herbe may be a painting about the tension between confidence and vulnerability. A nude woman is having a picnic with two fully-dressed men. She is not at all alarmed by her situation and stares directly at the viewer. Her right leg is planted very definitely within the space of the reclining male. The men are in conversation which may or may not include the naked woman. A second woman, improbable in size, bathes in the near background. It would surely have been the assertiveness of the naked woman that made the picture so controversial when exhibited in the Salon des Refusés of 1863. She was manifestly confident when the society of the time required her to be distinctly vulnerable.

 

Confidence and vulnerability on the night bus.

   The night bus takes some of us home but others – minimum wage cleaners and security guards – may be heading back to work. Confidence enables sleep, it’s their economic situation that renders them vulnerable. Transport for London records 38 million such night-time journeys annually. Clothed or unclothed, a picnic on the grass becomes the stuff of dreams. And “What you lookin’ at?” is meant as a vigorous challenge, not a casual enquiry… welcome to my world, Monsieur Manet.

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[i] All quotations are from the Gallery Guide written by MaryAnne Stevens.

[ii] Olivelli. 61 The Cut, London SE1 8LL. www.ristoranteolivelli.co.uk

The Kippers - a tasteless tale of ‘50s folk.

# 66

Episode 18,719: Codgers, Dodgers and Bonkers:

 Coming at you in tonight’s episode - Shock-studded Nigel ‘Johnny’ Farrago, Euro sceptic bad-boy and leader of hot-riding tricycle gang, The Kippers:

·        Follow ‘Johnny’ back down the years to the land that time forgot,

·        Meet The Kippers, trapped forever in a monochrome world where it’s always 1953,

·        Thrill to their authentic ‘B’ movie dialogue,

·        Cringe as The Kippers descend on the dozy little free-market town of Toryville,

·        Gasp as Farrago trashes Danish pastries, French letters, Polish plumbers, Dutch caps, Brussels sprouts, Romany caravans, German shepherds, bouncing Czechs, Grecian 2,000 and Spanish flies,

 

Stone me, it’s the Geriatric Chapter of UKIP pedalling into Toryville

·        Yawn as the Tories whinge about having The Kippers down their way and up their noses,

·        Run for it when hard-living ‘Johnny’ Farrago mumbles to anyone who’ll listen, “After a while, you just gotta have fun and if someone gets hurt, I guess that’s tough!”

 

Über-cool, jive-talkin’, top Kipper, Nigel ‘Johnny’ Farrago

   Things have been getting pretty desperate of late down here in Toryland, I don’t mind telling you. Going from bad to worse you might say. The pound’s down, the economy’s flat, the cupboard’s bare, the country’s bust, the tide’s out and the game’s up. Buttocks are being tightly clenched all over Berkshire. The local gentry are defecting to The Kippers in droves; others are demanding that Sheriff ‘Call me Dave’ Bonkers stands up to the leather-jacketed old codgers.

   To be fair, Dave has been twitching frantically in recent days and yesterday it’s rumoured he actually blinked. Eventually, well by just before tea-time, even Dave couldn’t stand the sight of Farrago any longer and he snapped into decisive action, ordering potted shrimp sandwiches all round with fifty shades of Earl Grey.

 

Sheriff Dave’s Dilemma: will five sandwiches be enough to get Farrago stuffed?

   But has Sheriff Dave left his shock culinary initiative too late? Behind his back Dave’s daughter, the truly scrumptious Doris Bonkers, has been pouting and making eyes at Farrago. Suddenly, Doris slips closer to the leathery Lothario and tempts him with a slice of Battenberg.

   “I wish I was going someplace,” sighs Doris, “I wish you were going someplace. Why, I even wish we could go someplace together…”

 

Coy, Battenberg Temptress Doris Bonkers.

  Anxious to avoid any unmediated contact with reality, the clueless Tories sit around the Toryville Tea-room nattering about such pressing matters as the need for a bedroom tax on gay-marriages. Step forward investigative waitress Mildred ‘Peaches’ Paxperson; she’s a girl who sure knows how to question a guy.

   “Hey Farrago,” demands ‘Peaches’, “What ya rebelling against?”

   “Whadda ya got, baby?” ‘Johnny’ snaps back, quicker than an MEP trousering his expenses.

 

Asking the questions, ‘Peaches’ Paxperson

   Just then, with an annoyingly repetitive and very loud squeak, squeak, squeak of wobbly wheels coming off, Nick ‘Chino’ Cleggie pedals into town at the head of rival tricycle gang, The Dodgy Libertines. Cock-a-hoop to still have a meal-ticket and followers numbering several, Cleggie greets Dave and Farrago.

   “I say chaps, I loves you both dearly of course, but I’ve been looking in every ditch from Eastleigh to here, hoping you was dead.”

 

Dodgy Libertines’ leader Nick “Chino” Cleggie

   At this rather unkind greeting, Sheriff Dave looks more baffled than ever and not a little hurt as he hands round the cupcakes. He had thought he and Cleggie were pals, working together for the good of tax-dodgers everywhere. What had become of those happy days playing with their conkers behind the bike sheds at Eton he wondered, a tad glumly.

   Meanwhile, round and round the mulberry bush, the people of Toryville grow increasingly restive. Some are beginning to whisper about electing a new Sheriff.

   “I’ve seen hoodlums like this before,” shouts prominent local know-it-all Mister Gove. “If you don’t get tough with them the minute they get outta line, you’re sunk. You’re the cop here, aren’t you Sheriff Dave? If you can’t boot these jerks out there’s plenty of us can…”

 

A concerned citizen

   That does it for Dave. The prospect of seeing Gove as Sheriff fills him with a bowel-loosening dread and he resolves to be really quite firm with Farrago. First, he threatens to put the lid back on the biscuit tin. When that doesn’t work he orders Doris to stop cutting the crusts off Johnny’s sandwiches. But Farrago sits there, totally unmoved and grinning idiotically. (Well, I ask you, how else would he grin?)

 

Stoopid? Moi?

   “I don’t get you,” says Dave, trying to sound very stern. “I don’t want to get cross in front of all these people but I don’t get your act and I don’t think you do either. I don’t think you know what you’re trying to do or how to go about it. I think you’re stupid. Real stupid and, probably, real lucky.”

Just to underline the point, Dave sticks his tongue out and makes the special ‘horrid face’ he usually keeps for Ed Balls.

   Cool as you like, Farrago drains his tea-cup and beckons Doris to pour him another. He wipes his mouth without using the serviette provided and looks sideways at Dave.

   “You keep needlin’ me if you want,” mumbles ‘Johnny’, “But if you do I’m gonna take this joint apart and you’re not gonna know what hit you.”

    “Glory be, Johnny,” says Doris, “You said all that without once moving your lips. Can it be there’s Method Acting in your madness?”

    Dave surveys the crowded parlour and realises too late that Doris has put out all the best china. The bill for breakages will be extreme if the biker boys kick off. Suddenly, the tea-room has gone quiet. Too quiet. Dave politely asks Farrago to step outside and everyone laughs so much they nearly fall off their chairs. Dave is really getting quite cross by now.

   “What’s the matter, fish-face?” he says to Farrago, “You been hit over the head so often you don’t know when you’re getting a break?”

Cue music: Rum tee-tum, tee-tum, tee-tum, dum der diddlee, dah dah….

Will Johnny step outside? Is Dave planning to lock the door as soon as he does? Will Doris ever get to go someplace? Why has no one set places for Balls and Millipede? Who ate all the pies? Stands the church clock at ten to three and is there honey still for tea?

Who gives a toss?

Find answers to all these questions and more when the next election comes around and we bring you ‘Cut to the Chase’ - hopefully the final gripping but grisly instalment of ‘Meet The Kippers’.

[The Bus Lane wishes to express its grateful appreciation to ‘The Wild One’, (Columbia Pictures, 1953. Director: László Benedek. Starring Marlon Brando, Mary Murphy and Lee Marvin. ) without which tonight’s episode of The Kippers would not have been possible.]