Edouard Manet.

Edouard Manet: A Dynamic Viewpoint.

'Music in the Tuileries Gardens:' 1862; National Gallery, London.

Illustration 1: 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens.'

This open-concert scene shows an audience of friends, family and public figures, and even includes a self-portrait. On the surface, it adheres to a notion of the 'casual' impression: a sweeping view, controlled from a detached perspective. The artist, however, makes the centre of the composition - a man, probably Manet's brother 'Eugène,' standing next to a veiled woman - an area of great painterly ambiguity. Textures reminiscent of an 'ébauche' (or 'study') are left as finished, and directly contiguous to 'worked-up,' detailed passages of paint; elements on the periphery are brought into unexpected focus; and there are discontinuities of scale, which all combine to produce a sense of tension and fragmentation, not unity.

Illustration 2: The centre of focus is unclear (detail).

Illustration 3: Peripheral elements are brought into focus - see portrait, left (detail).

Illustration 4: Discontinuities of scale - compare the size of these children to e.g. chairs in the foreground, right (detail).

Many of the methods are familiar from 'Old Master' paintings. 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens,' however, adapts them to a contemporary, urban theme. In cinema, a wide-shot can contain potential, successive camera movements, each revealing further details unfolding in time. Manet seems to compress such sequencing within one composed frame, producing an effect that I would describe as a 'dynamic' viewpoint: a type of optical 'scanning' that is active, not passive. 'Snapshot' views are juxtaposed within a contingent form, that momentarily holds fractured images together before they dissolve into chaos (signified, here, by the crowd).

'Corner of a Café-Concert,' c. 1878-80 (National Gallery, London); 'The Waitress,' c. 1879 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

Illustration 5: 'Corner of a Café-Concert.'

Illustration 6: 'The Waitress.'

'Corner of a Café-Concert' is probably the truncated, right-hand section of a larger work (see Illustration 7). Manet establishes a push-pull dynamic of viewing across, and into, the composition (from right to left), whilst including a figure who gazes out of the pictorial 'window' towards an indefinite point. It has the unexpected effect of making what is central (the café-concert) peripheral, and what seems peripheral (the woman/waitress) central (Illustration 5 and 6). The artist expands this approach, infinitely, in his late masterpiece 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.'

Illustration 7: 'Brasserie de Reichshoffen' - the left hand section of a bigger work?

'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,' 1882 (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London).

Illustration 8: 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.' 

Critics disagree about the employment of a mirror in this painting. At some point, Manet made a conscious decision to shift the reflection of two figures further to the right-side of his composition:

Illustration 9:  The barmaid is slightly less central in this preliminary sketch, and her reflection - along with that of a customer - is positioned more parallel to the viewer's line-of-sight i.e. closer to the middle.

Logical attempts have been made to describe the perspectival arrangement of 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère', in terms of conventional geometry:

Illustration 10: A rationalization of the space in 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.'

In this model, 'we,' as observers, are 'at the shoulder' of a male customer, without also being visible as a reflection. It makes the viewer a semi-ghostly, invisible presence, simultaneously conscious of the needs and desires of a male client, but suspended somewhere inbetween; privy, also, to an intimate, withheld feminine space. An alternative possibility is that Manet simply introduced irrational readjustments - distortions even - for aesthetic and/or dramatic purposes. This could suggest a further, more radical interpretation: that the relationship between model and reflection is meant to imply a sense of spatio-temporal displacement and separation. Two distinct states-of-being existing in different moments.