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