Famous Paintings Reviewed

Famous Painters: More Manet

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An art history blog post from Famous Paintings Reviewed.

Although now one of the most famous painters in Western art history, Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was scorned and dismissed during his lifetime -- and for nearly a century after it ended.  As Jack Flam (ArtNews, Summer 2011) notes:

What was long considered incompetence we take to be at the core of Manet's genius: his ability to invent new ways of capturing and holding in uneasy equilibrium the ambiguities - even the absurdities - of modern life. 

Edouard Manet.  Street Singer, 1862.  Oil on canvas, 67 3/8" by 41 5/8".  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

No where is this uneasy equilibrium more apparent than in a lesser known Manet painting, Street Singer.  

Manet, one of the first painters to chronicle modern urban life, portrays a young woman exiting a debatablely tasteful Paris night club or cafe.  Although one of its doors is open, the interior is murky and vague. The directness of the singer's gaze and her hand full of cherries draw the viewer to her eyes, which reveal deep thoughts unknowable to the viewer: did something untoward happen in the cafe? Is she hurrying to another unspecified engagement? Who provided her cherries? Manet captures a moment in time, one akin to a snapshot, without forming conclusions.

We've seen how Manet painted Olympia after one of the Titian paintings he saw in Paris, Venus of Urbino.  His comparison of himself to Titian, was, by many standards, an act of bravado. But Manet was to make another bold comparison in one of his most famous paintings, The Luncheon, or Luncheon in the Studio. 

Like so many Manet paintings, Luncheon is intriguingly inconclusive.  What may initially appear to be a dining room is instead an artist's studio: the shucked but uneaten oysters, the dangling knife, and partially peeled lemon are frequent subjects of Dutch still life painting.  The armor in the chair is also a still life subject, although lesser so.  

Above the bearded man's head is a framed map, an allusion to the maps found in Vermeer paintings.  I would've missed this detail without Flam's guidance -- the letter "M" appears in the coffee pot reflection, an echo of the "M" by which Vermeer sometimes signed his paintings.  

Could Manet be intimating that he was a painter of the same caliber as Vermeer? I vote yes -- an artist who compared himself to Titian would have no hesitation with comparision to another of the most famous painters, Vermeer!

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