Edouard Manet

This paper aims to challenge and complicate the increasingly ossified understanding of the influence of Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life over Manet's art in art historical scholarship. It does so by first, offering an exposition of its deployment in studies of Manet as a framing device that both historicizes and interprets the painter's works, and second, by providing a close reading and critical reconstruction of three elements of the overlooked opening passage of Baudelaire's text--(1) the Louvre as process of ideological interpellation; (2) the Louvre as scene of the production, reproduction and experience of alienated labor; and (3) the relation of technologically reproducible images and the auratic value of the "masterpiece."

In later nineteenth century France, moralizing discourse separated women into two categories: la femme honnête and fille publique or the moral and immoral woman. Writers of the time encouraged the honest or respectable lady to spend her time in the domestic sphere and associated the non-respectable woman, or prostitute, with the city. Despite this limiting contemporary discourse, more and more “respectable” women spent time in the public sphere. Unconcerned with the rules of bourgeois respectability, they strolled the streets of Paris and shopped in its boutiques and department stores, thereby challenging the notion that women could be categorized as good or bad based on their location and comportment. This thesis looks at the ambiguity of the unattended woman in the public sphere depicted in paintings by Edouard Manet, James Tissot, and Jean Béraud. It interrogates the nineteenth-century notions of moral/immoral, and argues that it was not only the prostitute who was a symbol of modernity, but the respectable woman as well.

This essay will explore the ways in which the modern city may make visible those women alienated from regular society. Their bohemian existence in the urban underbelly presents an interesting opportunity for artists to examine female sexuality, and the conflicting duality of public and private “feminine” space in the big-city. Through comparison of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, with selected photographs from Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, it will be argued that there exists a continuity in both artist’s depiction of women on the urban fringes. Retaining a sense of self identity as female is shown to be compromised by inhabitancy within the gendered, (male) city.

In considering any form of artistic expression, we must address the question of production: “Why does this work look the way it does?” A useful answer often requires an aggressive contextual inquiry. This is especially true of prints emerging from nineteenth-century publishing circles, where the intentions of art, journalism, and illustration were often interrelated. One reason for producing a work of art in the form of a print—an “exactly repeatable pictorial statement”—was to make a calculated venture of public communication. (Calculated, for instance, because some print mediums are “more public” than others—a fact that refers us to existing conditions of printing technology and publishing practices.)

The paper aspires to contribute to contemporary attempts to think theology in a new materialist sense with a figure of thought found in Foucault’s analysis of Edouard Manet. It is a figure of thought that suggests an immanent and material yet spiritual space in the midst of our material world and our representational knowledge production.

409 pages, 98 color illustrations and 97 ink drawings.
Available in paperback and hardback at Amazon. e-book at Peter Lang Publishing: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4331-3959-8

"Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art" is a student textbook and teacher manual in cultural studies that capitalizes on the little exposure liberal arts students have to architecture, and the widespread popularity of Paris across the curriculum. Designed for a college course in the humanities, the book is also suitable for a High School course or a study abroad program in Paris.

The student textbook focuses on Paris, which throughout history has been the stage and experimental ground for artists and intellectuals from all over the world, making it the crucible of western thoughts and consummate material for an interdisciplinary study. Each chapter presents a cultural movement such as the Gothic, classical, romantic and modern that are predominant in the Parisian landscape. The interdisciplinary approach promotes critical thinking, inspiring students to identify and translate esthetic concepts from one discipline to another, and explore, for instance, what impressionist literature or cubist architecture might be.

Jeff Wall describes his photograph Picture for Women (1979) as a 'remake' of Édouard Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, (1882). The motif of the mirror reflection is fundamental to both artworks and foregrounds mutual concerns about spectatorship, the dynamics of the gaze and spatial relations. In each case, the mirror transforms pictorial space by reincorporating the off-frame zone, juxtaposing heterogeneous fields of vision and conflating multiple surfaces. Manet's mirror is most famous for its 'infidelity' to that which it reflects, but the nature of its aberrations continues to confound critics. The controversy surrounding the mirror in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère lingers in the striking construction of Wall's Picture for Women, which appears to be entirely composed of a mirror image. I argue that the idiosyncrasies of the mirror reflection in Manet's painting find a new articulation, inspired by the cinematic, in Wall's staged photograph. Using film theories of 'suture', I extend established interpretations of Picture for Women by suggesting that the ambiguous mirror in Wall's photograph performs a suturing function and evokes cinema's mobile frame. However, suture's function is not absolute, nor final, just as the presence of the mirror in Wall's photograph is assumed, but not certain.

Download the sample chapter, "Gothic Paris: Notre-Dame and the Île de la Cité," from www.mayspangler.com. The Teacher Manual e-book (753 pp., 18 b/w ill., 59 colored ill.) for “Paris in Architecture, Literature and Art” is available for download from Peter Lang’s website. For textbook and manual examination copies, please contact customerservice@plang.com or 1-800-770-5264.

The teacher manual provides detailed commentaries of all documents presented in the student textbook, with analysis that will be engaging to a scholar but also accessible to instructors without a background in architecture, literature, or art. The wide variety of pedagogical features gives flexibility for instructors to fit their specific areas of interest, as well as those of the target audience. Among those, preamble activities and timelines introduce chapters’ main idea, observation questions build critical reading and analyzing skills, interactive activities foster cooperative learning, and projects lead to oral and short film presentations.

This BA dissertation is a discussion around the meaning behind Edouard Manet's 'Bar at the Folies-Bergère'. I explore the work as an allegory of illusion; meaning there is more than what meets the eye in the painting. Manet has contrived an air of illusion through manipulation of formal qualities in artistic treatment to specific pictorial elements and subject matter. The mirror, as an arbitrary object, has a sense of prestige attributed to its function within Renaissance imagery where the symbol of the mirror is linked with ideas of misconception. Titian in particular has used the mirror in his works to allude to ambiguity of the female identity, and here I argue that similarities can be seen in Manet's treatment of the mirror in the Bar. A turn from illusion to allusion takes place in the discussion, referring to misconceptions in society and modern Paris (capitalism, consumerism, the flaneur, the spectacle). I aim to highlight the importance of the mirror in the work to gain deeper insight to the meaning of the painting and Manet's intentions in his final masterpiece.

These are the table of contents and the introduction of the PhD thesis that I defended in may 29, 2015. The thesis focuses on the fortune of interior scenes in the 19th century French visual culture. Popular images of the July Monarchy (caricatures, vignettes, book illustration), Realist paintings, Pre-Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works are analyzed pointing on relationships with literary descriptions and theatrical mise-en-scène, also paying attention to social, anthropological and gender issues.

A study of symbolist art and literature connecting these aesthetic phenomena to some theoretical sciences of the late nineteenth century (logic, mathematics) which were also particularly concerned with the studying their means of representation. The shared goal of many of these thinkers and artists was to overcome the privacy of experience, and an empirical worldview that made such privacy and skepticism absolute (psychologism).

This article explores the development of a singular painting by Russia’s most famous realist painter, Il’ia Repin. First exhibited under the title Un café du boulevard, the work was conceived during Repin’s stay in Paris from 1873-75. Repin himself described the work as “the main types of Paris in their most typical place,” but what he produced proves a departure for the young artist not only in terms of its Parisian subject matter. Careful analysis of Repin’s letters and the work itself show him searching for a stylistic language that had universal translatability in this moment, one that he importantly associated with the French artist Édouard Manet.  Understanding how Repin came to center his painting on cocottes and flâneurs, the foremost heroes of western European urbanity, allows for a new understanding of transnational connections in late nineteenth-century art, one in which Russian artists mediated French modernism as it was developing.

Il saggio - attraverso l'analisi e l'incrocio delle fonti, anche inedite - ricostruisce la storia e la fisionomia della sezione francese della prima mostra della Secessione romana del 1913, al fine di riflettere su alcuni aspetti della ricezione critica dell'impressionismo e del postimpressionismo in Italia alla vigilia della Grande Guerra.

The essay - through the analysis and the intersection of sources, some of which unpublished - traces the history and the aspect of French section of the first Roman Secession exhibition of 1913, in order to reflect on some aspects of the italian critical reception of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism in the eve of the Great War.

History remembers Édouard Manet as a master who emerged complete from the rib of Gustave Courbet. But Manet tried to cut to the chase of greatness well before that legacy took hold. Early in his own career, Manet experimented with the style of Peter Paul Rubens to create Fishing (c. 1862-1863). Fishing, nominally a landscape, includes the artist’s self-portrait with his mistress and several quasi-allegorical figures. The composition and the choice of Rubens as model make sense only in the context of works that he created shortly before and after: The Surprised Nymph (1859-1861) and Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1862-1863). Fishing reveals Manet before Realism: cocky because he thought that he could be Rubens and callow because he thought that he needed to be.

This study discusses Edouard Manet's 1849 voyage to Brazil, presents evidence to connect this experience to his body of work and suggests new keys to old mysteries. A few contemporaries noted Brazil's impact on Manet's artistic vision but did not analyse it within specific paintings. Writer Emile Zola defined the 1849 journey as Manet's 'coup de tête'; a friend held that tropical light was responsible for recalibrating Manet's tonal perception. Manet's stay in Rio was longer than is often implied-a full nine weeks anchored in Rio's Guanabara Bay, with twice-weekly forays into Rio city and nearby countryside. A shock of recognition hit while scrutinising Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe (1863): Brazilian signifiers in the grey mountain, the toad and 'the cherries of June, figs of September' that have long puzzled scholars, plus additional Brazilian elements not previously identified. Looking at Olympia, the maid's costume and demeanour is far more appropriate to a Brazilian slave than to an odalisque. By relating historical accounts of mid-century Rio de Janeiro and its French immigrants to Manet's observations in the letters he wrote home, it was possible to identify the places he visited and the French family he stayed with. This perspective led to the conclusion that Olympia (1863) was conjured from a remembered scene in Rio. In summary, convinced of Brazil's small but vital role in Manet's psyche and work, I consider the process by which sources become official and suggest further avenues of research. 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay aims to question the "influence" of Charles Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life on the work of Édouard Manet within the context of art history. It does so first by exploring how it is that the 1863 text became prioritized in Manet scholarship, paying particular attention to the latter's revisionism of formalist art criticism in the postWar period. I then focus on the Baudelairean character of T.J. Clark's stunning exposition of Manet's paintings in terms of class struggle and composition, arguing that it inadvertently reifies class opposition by ignoring the complex notion of the lumpenproletariat. From this, I offer a commentary on the underexplored opening passage of Baudelaire's text, explicating the interlaced dialectical contradictions that form it. This is done so as to shed light on a set of problems that contest the schematism of the logic of influence and to provide a preliminary set of coordinates for understanding the Baudelaire/Manet relation as a site of the contestation of the experience of modernity rather than as one-way relation of influence of one artist over another.

Les  tableaux  présentés  dans 'L’Œuvre' (1886)  de  Zola  ont  été  maintes  fois  commentés. Cependant  l’évolution  artistique  du  personnage  principal,  Claude  Lantier,  reste  peu explorée.  En  effet le  personnage  de  Zola  traverse  des  périodes  diverses  qui  peuvent  être clairement  définies :  naturalisme,  impressionnisme, réalisme  moderne  (actualisme)  et finalement  symbolisme.  Pourquoi  cette  évolution  artistique  de  l’artiste  imaginaire ?  Est-ce pour utiliser le roman comme extension de la critique d’art de l’auteur ou pour tracer une  histoire  de  l’art  de  son  époque ?  Est-ce  pour  marquer  la  décadence  héréditaire  et  le génie  incomplet  de  Lantier ?  Est-ce  par  soucis  réaliste  d’ancrer  son  personnage  dans  la réalité  artistique  de  son  temps ?  Est-ce  pour  se  donner  l’occasion  d’expérimenter différents types  d’écriture picturale ?  Ou est-ce  une  simple  excuse  pour  nourrir  un  débat essentiellement littéraire ? Nous nous proposons ici de revisiter et d’analyser ces tableaux inspirés  de  tableaux  réels  ou  complètement  imaginaires  pour  tenter  d’apporter  des éléments de réponses à ces questions. 

The paintings presented in Zola’s Masterpiece (1886) have been many times commented upon and analysed. However, the artistic evolution of the main character, Claude Lantier, has  attracted  very  little  attention.  Zola’s  character  goes  through  diverse  periods  that  can clearly  be  defined:  naturalism,  impressionism,  modern  realism  (‘actualism’)  and  finally symbolism. Why does Zola present this fictional artistic evolution to his readers ? Is it to use the novel as an extension of his art criticism or to portray contemporary art history ? Is it to show Lantier’s hereditary decadence and incomplete genius ? Is it a realist process to anchor his character in the artistic reality of his time ? Is it to experiment with different types  of  pictorial  writing  ?  Or  is  it  simply  an  excuse  to  fuel  what  is  a  mostly  literary debate? In this article we revisit and analyse the real or imaginary paintings presented by Zola to try to bring elements of answer to these questions.

Dans l'introduction de son article sur La Baigneuse de Courbet, pendant le Salon de 1853, Paul de Saint-Victor fait du réalisme « une épizootie ». Le mot est emblématique : à la fois parce que le motif animal est prégnant dans les toiles, parce que son traitement est souvent senti comme incongru par rapport aux représentations des animaux dans la tradition picturale, et parce que des assimilations avec les animaux – déplacées, souvent, par rapport à ce qui est représenté – surviennent très fréquemment dans les discours qui traitent des toiles, au milieu du XIX e siècle. Épidémie donc que le réalisme : il est une maladie qui enfièvre ou abolit les règles de l'art, une contagion au parfum de sauvagerie qui a parcouru le corps social pour parvenir jusque dans les espaces les plus protégés de la culture. Ainsi, La Baigneuse de Courbet a - t - elle été, selon une anecdote souvent citée, qualifiée de « percheronne » par l'Impératrice lors du vernissage du Salon de 1853.

Manet painted Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers in 1864 and then exhibited the painting with the now infamous Olympia at the 1865 Salon. Like Olympia, the painting was disparaged for its use of recognizable French lower class models and vulgarity. The picture was such a popular and critical failure that most chose to ignore it. Scholarship has continued to focus on Olympia but an analysis of Manet's work in the 1860s cannot be complete without examining the artist's intention in pairing Olympia and Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers.

Édouard Manet is commonly associated with the beginnings of french modernism and impressionist art – the unique themes and confusing sujets of his extensive œuvre are still being discussed to this day, with interpretations ranging from formalist to phenomenologic standpoints. The following work focuses on the specific sujet of studio depictions, exemplified on two of Manet’s works, Portrait d’Eva Gonzalès and Monet peignant dans son atelier, which both reveal a complex net of reflective and selfreflective notions. But why does Manet use the historically significant sujet of studio depictions, and what significance can be derived from this type of representation? To what extent are these works to be judged as self-reflective? Based on Stoichiţăs fundamental research on the topic of self reflective forms in art and exploration of Spanish influence on french modernist painters, this paper analyses the two paintings and expands on the approach of self-reflection, with special focus on the notion that the self is intrinsically interwoven with its environment and therefore always part of a group. Through this new approach on self-reflective painting, it can be shown that Manet intentionally relied on the traditional drew upon the sujets of the legend of Lukas as well as the pictura-allegory to legitimise the work of not only him, but also his circle of fellow painters, who at that time under a certain burden of proof of their controversial novel painting style.