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"Great art can communicate before it is understood." T.S. Eliot |
" The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present." Wyndham Lewis |
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| Most artists paid servile obeisance to the dictates of the academy and slavishly accepted its criteria. To be singled out by the academy's jury for an exhibition in the official salon was the key to the commercial success of an artist. It was not immediately apparent to the juries that, after almost six hundred years, the illusionist perspectivist art favored by the academy's traditions had lost its vitality. Many of the paintings submitted to the salon were trivial exercises in draftsmanship. Despite the importance of the jury's imprimateur for any ambitious young artist, the time was ripe for someone to announce that the emperor had no clothes. The unlikely rebel who performed this mission was the urbane, sophisticated Édouard Manet. In his youth Manet trained with the Academic painter, Thomas Coutre. When he reached the age of twenty-seven, however, he destroyed virtually all his paintings in a fit of disgust and announced to his close circle of young artist friends, "From now on I will be of our times and work with what I see." Manet went on to unveil several paintings that created an uproar in the art world. In l863 he exhibited his large composition, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass) (Fig. 10.1) in the Salon des Refusés, an unofficial exhibition organized by artists to protest their rejection from the official Salon. Many art historians mark this point as the beginning of modern art. Within the conventions of any period, artists can choose both their subject, and the manner in which they depict their subject; their particular interpretations embrace the ways they see the world. Since the beginnings of art thousands of years ago, this vision has almost always been decipherable. The spectator could use the rules of common sense to figure out the work of art. In the Academy, there was a veritable mandate that art had to be understood. In a flurry of brush strokes Manet challenged this fundamental dictum by composing a painting that had no logical consistency. There was no story, the allusion to myth was tenuous, and it was not picturesque. In short, no easy interpretation was possible. The four characters in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe were all disconnected and were not even looking at one another. The juxtaposition of an undressed woman staring at the viewer while two fully clothed boulevardiers discoursed on some subject, oblivious to her proximity, outraged Parisian critics. Unlike all previous art, this painting made no sense and they considered it immoral. Most critics believed that Manet was either mad, incompetent, or a prankster. Besides the obvious incongruities regarding the painting's theme, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe contained other, subtler, revolutionary peculiarities. Manet purposefully violated the reified laws of perspective. He disconnected the foreground from the background by eliminating the middle ground. The woman who is bathing in the pool in the rear of the composition would have to be a nine-foot-tall giant if her size were corrected for perspective. Previously, when a painter tampered with perspective, it enhanced the composition. Manet's bathing giant serves only to trouble the viewer. Further, Manet treated shadow irreverently. He purposely confounded the critics by lighting up the canvas from two different directions. The work looks as if it were painted using floodlights in front of the subjects, in addition to the natural light filtering through the trees. (Even here, Manet paradoxically arranged these shadows as if the light from the sun were coming from several directions simultaneously.) The painting's inflammatory content and strange construction tacitly challenged Aristotle's logic and Euclid's space, and called into question an entire paradigm built upon reason and perspective. The critics excoriated Manet for his composition as well as for the crudeness of his technique. They could not understand how so promising a young artist could be so clumsy and inept about the rules of perspective. They derisively called Manet's figures flat playing cards.4 But Manet was a master draftsman. If he chose to violate perspective's sacred canons, it was because he knew the old style of painting was exhausted. His subsequent paintings introduced his viewers to many fresh ways of seeing the world. In his Music in the Tuileries (1862) (fig. 10.2), painted about the same time as Le Déjeuner, he presents a chaotic scene without a focus. The vanishing point is smeared across the rear of the canvas. No central character emerges around which a viewer can begin to build a coherent view, so the hierarchy of subject evident in previous art is missing. To add to the visual stress, Manet eliminates the perpendicular line.
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