A Note on 'Manet's Compositional Difficulties'

Author(s): Alan Bowness

Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 103, No. 699, Special Issue in Honour of Professor
Johannes Wilde (Jun., 1961), pp. 276-277
Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.
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 ALAN
A note on 'Manet's
compositional
IN his excellent short introduction to the work of Edouard
Manet,1 John Richardson takes as his starting point the
remarkable diversity of opinion that has always existed about
Manet's art, a lack of agreement about Manet's 'rightful
place in the hierarchy of the great' which is indicative of the
persistent and continuing misunderstanding of his work and
character.2 Mr Richardson goes some way towards repairing
the damage done by denigrators between the wars, but in
one important respect he agrees with the critics: he shares
their strictures for what he calls 'Manet's compositional
difficulties' which to him mar the works of the i86o's. He
has his explanation for this deficiency:
'Manet's sense of design was faulty. Now instead of disguising this
weakness, as a less independent artist might have done by making
judicious use of the compositional formulae taught in art-schools,
Manet repeatedly drew attention to it by dispensing with all but
the most summary indications of perspective and by trying to
reproduce on his canvas the informal - or as he called them,
"naive" - groupings of everyday life. This was courageous, but
it complicated rather than simplified Manet's greatest pictorial
- informal-type composition which would nevertheless be as
problem. The result is that a number of his figure-compositions
a row of
especially those, like Le Vieux Musicien, consisting of
casually placed figures - disintegrate. Worse, the spatial illusion
is flawed, at times irreparably, by a further habitual weakness
(due possibly to some defect in the artist's vision), a fallible sense
of scale: e.g. the disproportionate woman in the background of
Le Dejeunersur l'Herbe, the minuscule boy in the foreground of
L'ExpositionUniverselleand the gigantic man with the sunshade
in La Plage de Boulogne.True Manet was a tremendously spon-
taneous painter . . but even when he took the precaution of
making preliminary sketches, he was still apt to end up with a
design that is out-of-scale or incoherent, especially if the compo-
sition involves a degree of recession or includes two or more
isolated figures or groups . . .'
I have quoted at length because this view is a widely held
one, and one for which there appears to be ample justifica-
tion in the paintings themselves. Nevertheless it seems to me
to do less than justice to Manet. The slightly patronizing
tone still echoes the celebrated onslaught that Christian
Zervos delivered in Cahiersd'Art in 1932 ('Absenced'imagina-
tion, absenced'action directesur le monde,absencede courage,voild
de Manet' etc.). M. Zervos
les defauts caractiristiquesde l'&euvre
showed to his satisfaction that Manet was a plagiarist who
lifted his compositions from the Old Masters ('II a emprunte
lesyeux et les sentimentsdes hommesd'autrefois,si bien que la vraie
sensationn'existepas dansson auvre'). In his turn M. Zervos was
echoing the opinions of the Degas circle - J. E. Blanche for
example, whom Mr Richardson quotes as saying 'there
existed virtually no painting of consequence by Manet that
was not inspired by another picture either ancient or
modern'; or Sickert, who said in 1924 that Manet 'was a
well-bred modest gentleman, who discovered, as it were by
1ldouard Manet, Paintings and Drawings. 132 pp.+84 plates (16 in colour).
(Phaidon Press, Alpha Books), I8s 6d.
2 To Mr Richardson the root of the trouble lies in Manet himself; he speaks of
'duality of temperament' and 'a deep-seated dichotomy in Manet's character'
and suggests that it is from this that the divergent assessments arise. Admittedly
Manet is a somewhat enigmatic figure, but I find such a radical psychological
explanation unacceptable.
276
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BOWNESS
difficulties'
chance, that there was such a thing as painting, and who was
entirely dependent on previous painters, particularly Ribera
and Velazquez.' (Emmons, p.25I).
Now the resemblances are there all right, but they do not
amount to plagiarism and, as Mr Richardson quite rightly
says, if an artist transforms his borrowings into something
completely personal it matters not at all whence the inspira-
tion came. Manet's so-called dependence can equally well
be a reflection of a remarkable and unusual interest in
problems of pictorial composition; it was quite natural that
he should at first learn by imitation, taking what he needed
from Spanish and Venetian painting, and even more from
Japanese art. He made good use of his sources, for, by the
later 6o's, he could compose in a manner that none of his
contemporaries could remotely rival; a painting like the
Munich Dejeuner dans l'Atelier or the Louvre Balcon, for
example, has a richness of design that is quite exceptional.
It seems to me that as a young man Manet was trying to
do something strikingly new. He was seeking to develop an
tightly organized on the surface of the picture as a Velazquez.
He copied the Petits Cavalierswhich the Louvre had acquired
as a Velazquez in 18513 and the importance of this compo-
sition on Manet's paintings of the early i86o's has frequently
been noticed.4
To some extent he had a precursor in Courbet, but after
L'Atelier du Peintreof 1855 Courbet publicly gave up the path
of an experimenter, and the unfinished Toilette de la Maride
was not I think known to Manet. Manet must have been
profoundly impressed by the Atelier when he saw it in 1855.
Two of the most ambitious of his early pictures, Le Vieux
Musicien (1861-2) and La Musique aux Tuileries (1862) bear
a curious relationship to it; the former, like the left half of
the Atelier,is an informal grouping of the artist's models, with
each figure appearing to have an entirely self-contained
existence; the latter is (among other things) a painting of the
artist's friends, like the right half of the Atelier, but the com-
position is more 'naive' (and more Spanish) than anything in
Courbet.
In the two Manet pictures (conveniently juxtaposed in
Mr Richardson's book) the space is much shallower than
in Courbet's Atelier, but the manner in which this is achieved
is remarkably different in each. The six figures in Le Vieux
Musicien tell as flattish shapes, which just touch one another,
with a minimum of overlapping; there is virtually no reces-
sion or diminution in size, and as the old man on the right
is cut vertically by the frame, the entire row of figures is
brought forward, and strung across the picture platte.5 Each
3 The fact that the picture is not by Velazquez does not matter, because it is
clearly a Velazquez-type composition. Manet's debts to Velazquez are many
and obvious: the care both painters take over the positioning of limbs makes
some interesting comparisons possible.
4 See, for example, N. G. SANDBLAD's remarks on its connexion with the
Musiqueaux Tuileriesin Manet: ThreeStudiesin Artistic Conception,Lund [19541,
pp.37-41.
5 A comparison with what is an obvious compositional source, Velazquez's
Los Borrachos,is instructive: the space in Manet's painting is much shallower and
the figures flatter, closer to the manner of Velazquez's later work.
 A NOTE ON 'MANET' S COMPOSITIONAL
figure was I suspect treated individually by Manet (some
certainly were); they are either personal inventions, like the
absinthe drinker or the gipsies, or free reinterpretations of
another artist's work.
The composition of the Musique aux Tuileries on the other
hand is quite different. Though in some respects a flattened
Romains de la Decadenceit essentially consists of two broad
horizontal bands (figures and trees), tied together by the
gently bending vertical line of the tree. This divides the
canvas according to the golden number, as does the hori-
zontal line along the top hats between figures and trees. One
can pursue this kind of measuring in Manet: whether it was
deliberate or unconscious is impossible to say.
No two compositions of the 6o's are the same, but it is
surely in this instinctive feeling for the flatness of his canvases
that the key to Manet's early work lies. He is not concerned
with an illusionistic space, and will sacrifice to make the
space as shallow and restricted as possible. Everything is
subordinated to this overriding demand - and Manet's
innovations are as revolutionary as those of anyone. He sees
that the lighting, often very harsh, always comes from the
front, and thus it eliminates the halftones, reduces modelling
to a minimum, and simplifies and flattens the forms. He makes
figures and objects in different planes in space touch on the
picture plane, and often relates them to the edges of a pic-
ture. Handling is so free that sometimes the paint tells only
as coloured marks (Zola's 'taches') on the picture surface.
Even psychology plays its part, for in Manet's paintings the
figures if not in profile are seen full face and tend to stare out
at one. The contact made by their glance roots the spectator
to a frontal position before the canvas: he must look straight
back at it.6
But it is of course the surface design that Manet always
emphasizes, sometimes with a Japanese-type linear pattern,
sometimes building up an almost Mondrian-like grid of
horizontals and verticals, and dividing the space into flat
planes that he piles in parallel bands one above the other.
In the interests of the composition he is quite ready to distort.
It has often been observed that the bullets of the Mexican
firing squad would never hit their victims: the rifles are
twisted into the horizontal, and Manet unrepentently used
precisely this illogical design four years later in the Budapest
GuerreCivile water-colour.7
Manet's treatment of seated figures is always particularly
interesting, because, when seen from the front, a seated
figure usually introduces the unwanted element of spatial
recession. In his earliest paintings, Manet is already under-
playing this, either by creating a strong linear construction
that brings everything near to the surface of the picture, as
in Le ChanteurEspagnol, or by making the posture ambiguous,
so that one is not sure whether the figure is standing or
seated. In this respect Le Buveur d'Absinthe is the first of a
series that culminates in Cizanne's La Femme d la Cafetidre.
9 Mr
Richardson finds Victorine Meurend's characteristic expression 'dead-
pan', and speaks of her 'mask-like impassivity', but, despite her aloofness, she
seems to me more often than not to be arresting and directly inviting. I should
have thought too that the Dejeunerwould not have scandalized Manet's con-
temporaries so easily had Victorine not been looking at them out of the picture
in such a provocative fashion.
Plate io in KURT MARTIN: lidouard Manet, Watercoloursand Pastels, 24 pp.
introduction +32 colour plates with notes. (English Edition, Faber & Faber),
45s. This is a useful selection with sensible notes, marred by poor colour
reproduction.
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DIFFICULTIES'
Manet goes further in his willingness to upset the expected
scale of figures in different planes. Of his compositional
innovations this has always been the most difficult for his critics
to stomach, and the fact that Manet himself dismembered
more than one of his larger compositions shows that he was
not always satisfied with what he had done. But it is im-
portant to insist that the 'manque d'6chelle exacte dans les
proportionsdesfigures' is not one of 'certainesnigligencespropres
au style de Manet',8 but something done deliberately and with
a reason. The second woman in the Louvre Dejeuneris too
large for her position in space, but she is such an essential
and natural part of the composition that this has rarely been
remarked upon.9 It is the over-size man which makes Mrs
Pleydell-Bouverie's La Plage de Boulogne an exciting picture:
Mr Richardson calls it 'one of Manet's most disjointed and
disproportionate compositions' but it must in fact have-been
carefully constructed on the basis of a double square with
right-angled triangles.10 Another painting criticized is Mlle
Victorineen costumed'un Espada: Manet's 'sense of scale has let
him down so badly that the bull-fighting scene makes an
annoying hole in the decorative scheme', but he is surely
trying to relate, on a single plane, the bull-fighting scene
in the middle distance and Victorine's arms in the fore-
ground.
I believe that most of what Mr Richardson and Manet's
critics see as faults are deliberate experiments - sometimes
clumsy perhaps, but bold and adventurous. Manet has been
subjected to as malicious a barrage of abusive critical com-
ment (especially by the Degas circle) as any painter has had
to face, but his experiments were not due to defective eye-
sight, nor to being unimaginative where composition was
concerned. There is a remarkable variety about Manet's
compositions in the i86o's,-1 and one cannot seriously be
expected to believe that anyone with as thorough a training
as Manet had could not have got his proportions and pers-
pective constructions right had he wished to. It is always
unwise for the critic or historian to castigate a great artist
for his apparent mistakes and deficiencies: better try to
understand why things appear as they do. We do not censure
Manet's elimination of half tones, why should we be so
critical of his 'compositional difficulties'?
8
J. MATHEY: Graphismede Manet, Essai decatalogueraisonnides dessins,published
by the author, Paris [1961], 35 PP.-+ 135 pl. The sentence quoted is on p.17.
1 It is
perhaps worth pointing out that in the Courtauld version she is smaller
and less well-integrated into the general figure composition. This seems to me
to be the conclusive reason for believing that the Courtauld picture precedes
the larger picture in the Louvre, and is not a later version, as has sometimes
been suggested. The water-colour sketch in the Walzer collection (RICHARDSON,
pl. 7) would come between the two oils.
10 AS ALAIN DE LEIRIS points out in a recent study of this
painting and the
drawings in a Louvre sketchbook on which it is based (Gazettedes Beaux-Arts
[January 1961]), the type of composition - he lists its qualities as 'randomness,
dispersion, disparity' - is exactly right for the subject of figures on a beach. For
this very reason the author is on dangerous ground when he starts to draw
general conclusions about Manet's relationship to Impressionism from Manet's
practice in this particular picture with its peculiar subject. It does not seem to
me to mark any radical departure, and I think M. de Leiris overlooks the
pictorial structure underneath the casualness, and exaggerates the newness of
Manet's dependence on his own visual experience. He made on-the-spot
sketches of this kind for earlier works, and used them as befitted the subject.
The Coursesa Longchamppictures of 1864 are particularly interesting and
x11
would repay detailed study. In the large water-colour (MARTIN, plate 7) for
example, the composition is divided into two parts, equal in size, but contrast-
ing in design. The left hand part is comparatively flat, with the kind of compo-
sition that one finds in Mlle Victorineen costumed'un Espada: the right hand has
a deep perspective recession, counteracted by the dark tree and the group of
horses thundering directly at the spectator.
277