Manet's Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets. - book reviews

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. 256 pp.; 12 color ills., 82 b/w. $39.95

James Rubin's elegantly condensed, handsomely produced book argues that Manet, a Mallermean painter, makes his still-life bouquets stand for the process of image making. Manet - what a privileged artist! - was written about by three friends: Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Emile Zola. Following Harry Rand's admirable 1987 book Manet's Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare, Rubin argues that Mallarme provides the best approach.(1) Without offering any new documentary evidence, or much developed historical analysis, Rubin presents an account frankly poetic in the best sense of the word. Never digressive or unnecessarily burdened with details, it offers a reverie on Manet, who to any reasonably sympathetic reader comes really to appear as a painter of modern life as the still life, cultivating "ordinary objects to the pleasure-seeking ends of the casual, yet 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 poems equivalent to Manet's paintings?(2) Rubin's highly subtle answer to that question is that "it may not be too much to see those still-lifes as standing for his artistic presence or persona" (p. 168), an argument supported, he claims, by Mallarme's 1876 commentary "The Impressionists and Edouard Manet," reprinted in an appendix.

In his analysis of that essay by Mallarme, T. J. Clark observes that "the ironies attending Mallarme's final prediction - that the new art might prove directly useful to the masses as they take over the state - do not need to be spelt out."(3) What, to follow the spirit of Clark's materialist account, seems obviously problematic and unstable is Rubin's metaphor, painting as a bouquet. Flowers, decorations associated by convention with nature and with women, are as artificial as anything else in the modern city. To identify Manet's paintings with commodities available at the florist suggests that modernist paintings look natural even, 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 culture 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 see his paintings aesthetically, blurring the distinction, obvious to the eye of the materialist, between artifice and reality.

The first chapter of Michael Fried's book, reprinting his 1969 essay "Manet's Sources," argues that a proper account of Manet's achievement must understand the way he quotes the Le Nain brothers, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and other artists, both to signal his "Frenchness" and to relate his art to tradition. Chapter 2, accepting some 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 moment in the emergence of modernist painting" (p. 183) - and that requires understanding how he used his sources. Placing this practice in historical context, the third chapter looks at other artists of "the generation of 1863" - Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, James Whistler - who share Manet's concern with representing the depicted figures so they are "unaware of the presence before the canvas of the beholder" (p. 189). Here again Manet is involved with tradition, for absorption and theatricality was a long-term concern of French painters. Chapter 4, focused on Manet's antitheatricality, argues that his "1860s paintings pursued a strategy of denying or voiding absorptive effects 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, such pictures raise questions about the artist's position. Depicted in front of his picture, absorbed in the activity of making that image, he - imaginatively in the picture - thus elides his presence before the painting. In the "Coda," Fried, making some distinctions between his approach to Manet (and Impressionism) and that of his early mentor, Clement Greenberg, argues that understanding Manet in the 1860s is difficult because there is a natural tendency to project backward onto his early work concerns of 1870s French painting.

This very long book - the notes alone come to 169 pages - is a masterpiece. Willfully original, very often passionately suggestive, quite unlike anything any other art historian could write, its extraordinarily acute reading of the visual evidence and very far-reaching historical thesis will place many scholars in Fried's debt. Fried's Manet, creating uneclectic pictures from such an amazing assortment of sources, has some affinity with Fried himself, who from this seemingly unpromising mass of material develops a singularly forceful thesis. Together with Fried's earlier publications on art history and his 1960s art criticism, it offers 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 by T. J. Clark's followers, when art critics mostly detach contemporary "postmodern" art from its tradition, Fried's opposed perspective, which radically challenges these received ideas, could not be more welcome. What other art historian deals in an equally bold way with philosophical issues that the historian of modernism, that period whose relation to our era is so difficult to grasp, must understand?