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"Condemned to See...Without Knowing": Mirrors, Women, and the Lust of the Eye in Manet's Paris"
originally published, Arts Magazine, February, 1986, 28-29
(Note: In this digital version, quotations are indented and italicized for easier reading and two paragraph breaks are inserted into what was originally an overly long paragraph. This note is indebted to the work of T. J. Clark and was written largely as an homage and suggests his considerable impact on my intellectual development in graduate school as I was finishing a thesis on Northern Renaissance and Baroque religious art.)
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College, Box 5411
New London CT 06320
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It is an art historical commonplace that traditional history painting died in the early nineteenth century as the middle class acquired a new political and economic power. Instead of myth, ancient history, and religion, bourgeois audiences favored paintings of domestic interiors, historical genre, and picturesque landscapes. [1] A concern with the private and the everyday replaced the "shared"spiritual values and the heroic, aristocratic ideals on which history painting had depended. No one better understood the permanence of this change and the helplessness of the artist before it than Henry Fuseli.
The efficient cause...why higher art at present is sunk to such a state of inactivity and languor that it may be doubted whether it will exist much longer, is not a particular one, which private patronage, or the will of an individual, however great, can remove; but a general cause, founded on the bent, the manners, habits, modes of a nation,-and not of one nation alone, but of all who at present pretend to culture. Our age, when compared with former ages, has but little occasion for great works and that is the reason why so few are produced:- the ambition, activity, and spirit of public life is shrunk to the minute detail of domestic arrangements-every thing that surrounds us tends to show us in private, is become snug, less, narrow, pretty, insignificant. We are not, perhaps, the less happy on account of all this; but from such selfish trifling to expect a system of Art built on grandeur, without a total revolution, would only be less presumptuous than insane. [2]
To phrase this development somewhat differently, it was no longer possible for the nineteenth-century artist to see nature as a mirror reflecting higher realities. [3] If history painting has given way to the prosaic facts of modern life, even these came to be increasingly elusive and unstable in the face of rapid social and economic change. Nowhere was this more clear than in the great cities, particularly London and Paris. [4] Mercier's comment about human faces in his Tableau de Paris of 1782 would soon be applied to modern life in general. "We are, as it were, condemned in this immense city to see others without knowing them". [5] If artists were to avoid retreating into what Fuseli called the private, the narrow, the snug, if the public spaces of modern life were to be represented, new aesthetic orders were surely needed. As the Russian poet Mayakovski wrote, "
The flowing, calm, unhurried rhythms of the old poetry don't correspond to the psyche of the modern city dweller...There are no flowing, measured, curved lines. The picture of the city is one characterized by corners, fractures, zigzags". [6]
For artists, the problem was the resistance of the new city to aesthetic ordering, even to the minimal ordering of perception itself. An anonymous French Tableau de Paris written around 1836 complained,
"...the real Paris, this Paris. Where is it? Who can flatter himself to have traced even its outlines? Where is this Babel with its confused masses, with its unperceived details?" [7]
The difficulties of perceiving and representing Paris only increased with Haussmann's radical remaking of the city. The dilemma of the modern artist in this new world was summed up Baudelaire in 1863. "Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the unchangeable". [8] As is well known, fugitive modernity emerged in painting in the Impressionist movement with its relentless depictions of Haussmann's Paris. The new boulevards with their mammoth department stores, strollers, and parades, the crowded cafe-concerts, the train stations and the places of surburban leisure they served, all offered a uniquely modern, visual reality severed from traditional religious, philosophical, and social moorings. Recent scholarship has pointed out how unsettling this urban reality was, how Haussmann's new Paris engendered a modernity of disturbing uncertainties. [9] Cut off from older, more stable orders of belief, visible reality was left to float on its own as mere appearance, seductive in its commercial glitter and marvellous technology, yet flat and superficial. Modern painters could attempt to defuse these uncertainties by remaking the new Paris into something charming and picturesque, as did Monet and Renoir, or else confront them head on, as did Manet, Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, and others. Interesting in this regard is Manet's use of the mirror and the woman watched by a man in the Nana of 1877 and in the Bar at the Folies-Bergere of 1881. Both paintings explore the problem of perception and representation in a modern world.
In the Nana, a half-undressed actress and popular boulevard figure paints her face before a small round mirror. (Fig. 1) On the right sits a top-hatted gentleman watching her. An object of sight to herself and to him, to her world of theatre and street, and to the real viewer, she seems surrounded, even hemmed in by the flanking eyes of mirror, gentleman, and real beholder. No separation is made between public and public, inner and outer, real and artificial. Her gaze toward the viewer seems more neutral and blank than psychologically expressive. [10] Painted with the same light touches of bright color as the rest of the image, her face is not a traditional window to the soul anchoring appearance in deeper reality, but just another pretty surface like her silky undergarments or the couch's shimmering gold borders and red velvet. In a similar way, the stripping away of Nana's clothing works not to reveal a more intimate self but rather reduces her even more completely to the impersonal object of the gentleman's erotic gazing. Here her underwear turns her into the kind of fetish object which facinated so many nineteenth-century men. [11] This erotic sight is appropriate to her nature as his mistress/prostitute and evokes the more explicit "lust of the eye" featured in Manet's earlier scenes of prostitution and naked women watched by men such as the Dejeuner sur l'herbe and the Olympia. Indeed, as Reff and others have pointed out, the "grue" (crane) depicted on the wall hanging behind Nana was a contemporary French term for a "high class" prostitute. [12] In any case, the whole setting of the painting indicates Nana's sexual favors are available for the right price. With its depiction of working women reduced to commodities for the male Parisian haute bourgeois, with its indecorous flaunting of private immorality, Nana was bound to generate middle class controversy. In many ways its display in a shop window was the perfect setting; tied thus to the new street reality, its undermining of the traditional bourgeois interior became complete. Already the Goncourts had complained about the undermining of the home and its virtues by the new Paris.
"To live at home, to think at home, to eat and drink at home, to love at home,...we find this boring and inconvenient. We need publicity, daylight, the street, the cabaret, the cafe'...We like to pose, to make a spectacle out of ourselves, to have a public". "The Parisian does not have a home anymore. Everyone behaves as if he lived in a cheap hotel". [13]
With its privacy and undress, Manet's Nana was a kind of bourgeois interior invaded and turned inside out by the boulevard and cafe-concert imagery of display, commerce, and prostitution. The traditional theme of Venus at Her Toilette was thus emptied of its transcendental meaning, its use of the mirror to show love starting in sight and led from luminous, physical beauty to inner loveliness. [14] In its place is a modern "Venus", an object of a sight reduced to the "lust of the eye", a flat, impersonal, ambiguous, fragmented thing like the wall-hanging in the background or the gentleman cut in half by the picture's right edge. As with the Dejeuner and the Olympia, the whole painting with its shimmering flat colors confronts us insistently with its sense of visual reality as a series of illusory, painted surfaces, something to be seen but not readily interpreted or given any human depth.
These pictorial and social themes found richer expression in the Bar at the Folies-Bergere. [15] (Fig. 2) Here, subject and style were even more completely interwoven in the display of an illusory, fragmented world. This is most evident in the feet of the trapeze artist glimpsed at the upper left or the piece of the gentleman-spectator who reappears on the right. To repeat Mayakovski, "The picture of the city is one characterized by corners, fractures, zigzags". Attempts to read the picture as a rational, three-dimensional space are thwarted by the large mirror, an ever-present metaphor for the pictorial illusion of loose brushstrokes on a flat canvas. Mirror and brushwork both melt depth into surface, solid forms into a confusing, flat pattern of light and color.
As in the Nana, a top-hatted gentleman gazes at a young woman from a lower class. A superficial reading of the picture might see the barmaid as a monumental, central form dominating both surrounding space and the pictorial composition. One might see, in short, Baudelaire's heroism of modern life. But is this really what Manet gives us? Has he not turned the heroic, monumental composition of Old Master painting on its ear? Rather than controlling her surroundings, Manet's "heroic" barmaid seems imprisoned by a rigid and frontal symmetry and by the narrow space given her between mirror and bar. Surely these are pictorial metaphors for the limitations imposed on her by social position, job, and sex. Even if we disregard the fact that such barmaids usually doubled as prostitutes, Manet's woman is clearly dressed up with her decolletage to be a sexually appealing object for male eyes. Other contemporary illustrations of the Folies-Bergere show similar top-hatted gentlemen eying pretty barmaids. [16]
If such barmaids were there to be seen, Manet reinforces this idea by surrounding her with eyes, the the male customer on the right, the woman looking through binoculars at the left, and the mirror behind which opens her whole body up to the visual scrutiny of the cafe crowd. Despite this encompassing, relentless gazing, the customers, the artist, and the real beholders are all "condemned...to see others without knowing them". Framed by the splendid mirror, the colorful bottles and glasses, the new electric lamps, and the vulgar entertainment, the barmaid becomes an exotic object mounted in a larger display, part of a carefully designed, commercial environment calculated to sell quantities of overpriced beverages to a mass public.
In this more fundamental sense, she is "prostituted" as a voluptuous object dressed up in the larger "erotic" display of things, no less opaque than her somewhat blank, uncomfortable face. [17] If prostitution is basic to Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, it has recently been shown as a central theme in his Ball at the Opera. There too we find the strange spaces of the new Paris with its rich ambiguous surfaces, its social masquerades replacing reality with illusion, its thinly disguised, rampant prostitution. [18] It is on a more metaphoric level that prostitution works in the Bar, a level concerned also with the limitations of perception in a modern world and the attendant difficulties of making art out of modern life. Haussmann's Paris, with its voluptuous commercial glitter, its huge department stores displaying mass-produced goods set exotically in new large windows, and its social reality of theatre and masquerade, is analagous to the Bar's mirror; both reduce people, perception, and experience to the tiresome lust of the eye. Seen this way, even the top-hatted beholder becomes an object of sight, dressed up so he can admire himself in the mirror and be admired in turn by the cafe crowd. In collapsing distinctions between seeing and being seen, Manet's mirror reminds us that cafe visitors came to see themselves as much as for the theatrical entertainments. [19]
Given these interwoven metaphors of prostitution and looking, it is interesting to note how often Haussmann's Paris was described as a Babylon, "la grand citée de la volupté", a place of lust, illusion, and prostitution. [20] Among the many examples which have been discussed by literary critics, [21] I add two descriptions from Henry James which seem particularly close to Manet. The first comes in a letter to Edward Waren of 1898.
This extraordinary Paris with its new - I mean more multiplied-manifestations of luxurious and extravagant extensions, grandeur, and general, chronic expositionism ...it strikes me as a monstrous, massive flower of national decadence, the biggest temple ever built to material joys and the lust of the eyes". [22]
The second text comes in the Ambassadors, finished in 1903. In the novel, Strether looks out over Paris.
It hung before this morning, the vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridiscent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next. [23]
Though these passages postdate Nana and the Bar by seventeen and twenty-two years respectively, they respond to the new city in ways close to Manet's paintings. The insistent ambiguity and flatness of modern vision, the expanding of surface into depth only to collapse back into surface, the transformation of reality into spectacle and optical illusion, this was what Manet brought out so powerfully with woman, mirror, and male beholder.
A more superficial account might end thus with a kind of optimism; surely the Bar at the Folies-Bergere is about the triumph of the artist's higher, critical vision over the shallow voyeurism of the customer. The painting, after all, uses a mirror to expose and criticize meaningless illusions. If modern life is increasingly emptied of meaning, modern painting will deal intelligibly with this problem and lead the real spectator to a more human experience of city life. Such an analysis, however, ignores the fact that Manet's Bar deliberately stressed the incoherence of the city. [24] Similarly, contemporary observers complained about the new Paris not as something which could be overcome, but as a permanent social reality transcending individual resistance. In the 1880s and 90s, it was popular to speak of "Paris incoherent"; there was even a musical play devoted to this idea. [25] No doubt Manet also perceived these changes as permanent. Presumably, he understood, as had Fuseli, that "
The efficient cause...why higher art at present is sunk to such a state of inactivity...that it may be doubted whether it will exist much longer, is not a particular one, which private patronage, or the will of an individual...can remove; but a general cause, founded on the bent, the manners, habits, modes of a nation,- and not of one nation alone, but of all...".
In this context, Manet's Bar can be seen as a warning about the collapsing, fragmenting, increasingly shallow and incoherent spaces left to the modern artist. It signals a growing doubt about whether a serious "higher art" worthy of the past "will exist much longer" given the social and spiritual conditions of modern life. As the history of European art in the later 1880s and 90s bears out, these doubts were shared by other artists as well, artists who soon turned decidedly and radically from representational images to various kinds of abstraction. Here at least, a certain order, albeit hermetic and self-reflective, could possibly be restored to painting.
[1] Patricia Mainardi, "The Death of History Painting in France, 1867", Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 100, Dec., 1982, 219-226.
[2] Henry Fuseli, Lectures on Painting, London, 1830, 129, cited in John Barrell, "The Function of Art in a Commercial Society: The Writings of James Barry", The Eighteenth Century, 25, 2, 1984, 117-140, esp. 120. Bourgeois privacy is discussed in Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man. On the Social Psychology of Capitalism, New York, 1974. Similar comments on the collapse and/or meaninglessness of history painting are found in A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen uber schone Literatur und Kunst (1801-1803), Heilbronn, 1884, I., 17-229, recently discussed by Michael Baxandall in a lecture at Princeton. Also see the chapter in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun entitled, "The Emptiness of Picture Galleries". A poetic parallel is Wordsworth's comment in a note to his "Ode to Lycoris": "The hackneyed and lifeless use into which mythology fell toward the close of the seventeenth century, and which continued through the eighteenth century, disgusted the general reader with all allusion to it in modern verse".