Fabienne Gaspari

Transcription

Fabienne Gaspari

‘Modernity and “ever-escaping meaning”: Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and
George Moore on Édouard Manet’
Fabienne Gaspari
In Lewis Seymour and Some Women, Lewis tries to understand the meaning of one of Stéphane
Mallarmé’s most famous poems, L’Après-midi d’un faune. He pays a visit to the poet in the
Parisian countryside and asks him about the significance of some lines that remain obscure.
However, Mallarmé refuses to explain their “ever-escaping meaning”1, a phrase characterising
his poetry and more generally modern art. The presence of Mallarmé’s poem, both an
enigmatic text and a beautiful object printed on Japanese paper and illustrated by Edouard
Manet, testifies to the importance of modern art and of the representational and perceptual
issues it then raised. Among other leading French artists, George Moore met Mallarmé and
Manet, two figures embodying modernity and presented as central in this paper, together with
Baudelaire and his essay Le Peintre de la vie moderne. This seminal account of modern life is
not only essential for an understanding of modernity but also reverberates through Mallarmé’s
and Moore’s thoughts on art. Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Moore wrote essays on Manet’s
painting in the days when Impressionism stood for a new art form. Moore’s art criticism, like
the writings of his French influences, aimed at reform, as Adrian Frazier explains:
Yet the major theme of his 1890s journalism was the reform of British painting. He
wanted to shake up the British Academy, rally support for the ambitious young painters of
the New English Art Club, and clarify the relationship of contemporary painting to the
Old Masters. On the whole he advocated the scholarly, allusive, modernist forms of Manet
and Degas. 2
After a presentation of the relationships between Moore, Mallarmé and Manet, I will introduce
Baudelaire’s seminal work on the modern painter and then examine how Mallarmé and Moore
foreground in their own art criticism the representation of the shifting nature of life, which
Baudelaire regarded as the essential characteristic of modernity.
1 – Biographical elements: how Moore met Mallarmé and Manet, both “modern” artists
It is interesting to associate Moore with Mallarmé and Manet in a study of modernity
because the work of these two French artists, whom Moore met several times, is representative
1
2
George Moore, Lewis Seymour and Some Women, Paris : Louis Conard, 1917, 130.
Adrian Frazier, George Moore (1852-1933), New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 207.
of the highest form of artistic innovation in the period which goes from the 1860s to the 1890s.
Moore’s visits to the literary gatherings held at Mallarmé’s house Rue de Rome (evoked as
“Mallarmé’s Tuesday evenings, a few friends sitting round the hearth, the lamp on the table”3),
and to Manet’s studio, appear as turning points in his formative years in Paris. Moore met
Mallarmé in January or February 1876 and gave him a copy of Flowers of Passion on this first
meeting. He refers to the French symbolist in Confessions of a Young Man, Vale, Avowals, and
in an article, “Mes Souvenirs sur Mallarmé” published in Le Figaro in October 19234. He
helped Mallarmé who worked on a poem written in French by Swinburne, and he was also
consulted for the translation of Whistler’s Ten O’ Clock into French5 and for the creation of a
play on Hamlet. The two men seem to have had long conversations on literature: “I have met
none whose conversation was more fruitful, but I never enjoyed his poetry, his early verses of
course excepted.”6
Moore clearly knew Mallarmé’s poetry, although it is also clear that he was somewhat
taken aback by its complex form and obscure meaning or, as he defines it in Lewis Seymour
and Some Women (1917), its “ever-escaping meaning”. The novel itself, a revised version of
Moore’s very first novel A Modern Lover, published in 1883, contains an ongoing debate on
modern art. The protagonist tries to free himself from the burden of tradition, meets The
Moderns and discusses with them their choice of violet skies and of handmaids as subjects for
their works. Even though Lewis eventually succeeds as a Royal Academician and exhibits his
painting in the National Gallery, “this great place of morals and commercialism”7, his work
appears as mediocre. One of the characters, a painter from the group of the Moderns, ironically
asks: “Is his picture in cardboard or linoleum – which surface?”8. Mallarmé’s presence in this
novel, in which the conflict between tradition and modernity forms the background of
reflections on art, shows that the French symbolist was, for the Irish writer, a central figure
connected with modernity.
In Confessions, Moore relates that Mallarmé gave him L’Après-midi d’un Faune, “this
marvellous brochure furnished with strange illustrations and wonderful tassels”9and that he
enjoyed reading Huysmans’s comments on Mallarmé:
3
George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1886), London: William Heinemann, 1928, 62.
Jean-Claude Noël, “George Moore et Mallarmé”, Revue de littérature comparée, Paris : Marcel Didier, 363-376,
364, 368-9.
5
See Adrian Frazier, George Moore (1852-1933), New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 44-45,
172.
6
7
8
9
4
Shall I go to bed? No. I would that I had a volume of Verlaine, or something of
Mallarmé’s to read – Mallarmé for preference. Huysmans speaks of Mallarmé in ‘A
Rebours’, and in hours like these a page of Huysmans is as a dose of opium, a glass of
something exquisite and spirituous.
‘The decadence of a literature irreparably attacked in its organism, weakened by the
age of ideas, over-worn by the excess of syntax, sensible only of the curiosity which
fevers sick people, but nevertheless hastening to explain everything in its decline,
desirous of repairing all the omissions of its youth, to bequeath all the most subtle
memories of its suffering on its deathbed, is incarnate in Mallarmé in most consummate
and absolute fashion…
‘The poem in prose is the form, above all others they prefer; handled by an alchemist
of genius, it should contain in a state of meat the entire strength of the novel, the long
analysis and the superfluous description of which it suppresses…the adjective placed in
such an ingenious and definite way, that it could not be legally dispossessed of its place,
would open up such perspectives, that the reader would dream for whole weeks together
on its meaning at once precise and multiple, affirm the present, reconstruct the past,
divine the future of the souls of the characters revealed by the light of the unique
epithet.10
Moore was fascinated by Huysmans’s praise of “decadence” and “decline”, an echo of
Baudelaire’s aesthetics from which Huysmans’s work and his own took their inspiration.
Translating Mallarmé’s poetry also gave Moore an opportunity to fathom the complexity of his
style: his translation of Plaintes d’Automne and Frisson d’hiver is included in Confessions11
and that of Phénomène Futur was given to the Savoy in July 189612. However, contrary to
other writers such as Baudelaire, Gautier, Zola, or Huysmans, whom Moore evokes in this
autobiography, it is difficult to trace the specific impact Mallarmé may have had on the AngloIrish writer. “Cependant, Mallarmé fut-il pour Moore autre chose qu’un noble exemple ? Eut-il
sur telle ou telle de ses œuvres une influence directe. Il ne le semble pas.”13 Jean-Claude Noël
denies any direct influence, yet it is relevant to reconsider this assertion in the light of Moore’s
and Mallarmé’s comments on Manet, with a particular attention to their reflections on the
modernity of his work.
Mallarmé met Manet around 1873 and began to call on Manet almost every day after he
had finished teaching. They worked together on the publication of an illustrated translation of
10
See Forgotten Pages in George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1886), London: William Heinemann,
1928, 179-183.
12
Mallarmé himself ranked Moore among the best translators of two of his poems, Plaintes d’Automne and
Frisson d’hiver: “Une ingratitude, à ne rappeler, avant tout, au sujet de ces Poèmes et Anecdotes, les traductions
absolues qu’en donnèrent principalement en anglais, MM. George Moore, Stuart-Merrill et Richard Hovey – je
crus, possédant la langue un peu, me relire.” [“It is ungrateful not to recall first of all, about these Poems and
Anecdotes, the absolute translations, mostly in English, by Mr George Moore, Stuart-Merrill and Richard Hovey –
I thought, since I knew English a little, that I was reading myself.”] (quoted by Jean-Claude Noël, George Moore,
l’homme et l’œuvre, Paris : Didier, 1966, 160).
13
Jean-Claude Noël, “George Moore et Mallarmé”, Revue de littérature comparée, Paris : Marcel Didier, 363376, 374.
11
Poe’s The Raven (1875, Lesclide) and on L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1876, Derenne). Moore
first saw Manet in La Nouvelle Athènes, as he relates in the essay “Chavannes, Millet, and
Manet” in Modern Painting: “But about that time my opinions were changing: and it was a
great event in my life when Manet spoke to me in the cafe of the Nouvelle Athènes. I knew it
was Manet, he had been pointed out to me.”14 In Confessions, the story of their first encounter
shows the young Irishman’s admiration. After describing Manet’s physical appearance and
mentioning the presence of Degas, a friend and a rival, sitting next to him, he says a few words
on his painting:
At that moment the glass door of the café grated upon the sanded floor, and Manet
entered. Although by birth and by art essentially a Parisian, there was something in his
appearance and manner of speaking that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was
his dress – his clean-cut clothes and figure. That figure! […] Manet paints his whole
picture from nature, trusting his instinct to lead him aright through the devious labyrinth
of selection. Nor does his instinct ever fail him, there is a vision in his eyes which he calls
nature, and which he paints unconsciously as he digests his food, thinking and declaring
vehemently that the artist should not seek a synthesis, but should paint merely what he
sees.15
Instinct and digestion are used to refer to artistic creation that is thus equated with an
unconscious process, and they are also applied elsewhere in Confessions to Moore’s own
artistic evolution. Manet stands for Moore’s own ideals, a redefinition of realism (or
“paint[ing] what [one] sees”) that links it to nature, vision, and instinctual art. The other
essential aspect that Moore later stressed is the absence of shame which Manet shows in his
approach of life and choice of subjects, a great artistic virtue according to Moore: “The word
unashamed perhaps explains Manet's art better than any other. It is essentially unashamed, and
in speaking of him one must never be afraid to repeat the word unashamed”16.
The first encounter led to visits to Manet’s studio, where Moore, sitting for the painter,
closely observed his technique. In “Chavannes, Millet and Manet”, the art critic describes the
revelation experienced when he saw his face mirrored on the canvas:
The colour of my hair never gave me a thought until Manet began to paint it. Then the
blonde gold that came up under his brush filled me with admiration, and I was astonished
when, a few days after, I saw him scrape off the rough paint and prepare to start afresh.
[…] Half-an-hour after he had entirely repainted the hair, and without losing anything of
14
George Moore, “Chavannes, Millet, and Manet”, Modern Painting (1893), United States: Kessinger Publishing,
2004, 18. For Adrian Frazier, it is Mallarmé who introduced Manet to Moore (George Moore (1852-1933), New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, 48).
15
George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1886), London: William Heinemann, 1928, 89-90.
16
George Moore, Hail and Farewell (1911, 1912, 1914), Gerrard’s Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe, 1985, 272.
its brightness. He painted it again and again; every time it came out brighter and fresher,
and the painting never seemed to lose anything in quality.17
The real revelation, treated in a half-humorous way, is not so much the exact colour of the
model’s hair but the feeling of wonder, almost of magic, produced by Manet’s handling of
paint and colour. Moore also focuses on the painter’s use of colour and proposes a very
stimulating analysis of what critics still consider as one of Manet’s greatest achievements, that
is to say the way he turns black into a colour full of light and movement:
One day, seeing that I was in difficulties with a black, he took a brush from my hand, and
it seemed to have hardly touched the canvas when the ugly heaviness of my tiresome
black began to disappear. There came into it grey and shimmering lights, the shadows
filled up with air, and silk seemed to float and rustle.18
Depicting himself as an apprentice artist, Moore explains how he witnessed the metamorphosis
of paint into light and air, and how Manet’s talent transformed the heaviness of a black stain
into sensations of aerial movement and rustling silk. If, in Confessions, the relationships with
Manet are presented from a biographical perspective, the article in Modern Painting explores
Manet’s art filtered through the art critic’s own perceptions: Moore studies how some paintings
modified his sense of colour but also of space and how they produced impressions of
dislocation and disorientation.
Baudelaire’s definition of modernity: “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent”
“Modernity” (which led to “modernism” in the early twentieth-century), first appeared
as a reaction against tradition. It questioned fixed meanings and truths and created a sense of
disorientation, of perpetual movement and uncertainty. Baudelaire, regarded in France as the
inventor of modernity19, equated modern life with contemporary reality, with change and
rupture, or in his own words, with “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent”20 In Le Peintre
de la vie moderne, which he also wanted to entitle Le Peintre de la modernité, Baudelaire
studies the work of Constantin Guys (a great traveller and a cosmopolitan painter) and praises
17
2004, 19.
18
2004, 20.
19
See Michel Draguet, Présentation (7-68), Baudelaire, Au-delà du romantisme. Ecrits sur l’art, Paris :
Flammarion, 1998 : « acteur majeur d’une révolution de la critique et de l’esthétique autour d’une notion qui,
depuis, a fait couler tant d’encre qu’elle en a souvent perdu sa signification. Baudelaire restera l’inventeur de la
modernité. » (8)
20
“le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent” (Charles Baudelaire, Au-delà du romantisme, Le peintre de la vie
moderne, Ecrits sur l’art, Paris : Flammarion, 1998, 216).
Guys’s representation of crowds: “His passion and his profession is to espouse the crowd”21.
He considers Guys as a dandy, a “flâneur” who searches for the immense pleasure found in the
midst of perpetual movement, of the fugitive and of the infinite: “c’est une immense jouissance
que d’élire domicile dans le nombre, dans l’ondoyant, dans le mouvement, dans le fugitif et
l’infini”22. Like a “kaleidoscope”23, the painter, reproduces the multiple facets of city life and
tries to discover ephemeral manifestations of beauty in modern existence or, as Baudelaire calls
it, “the bitter or heady taste of the wine of Life”:“la beauté passagère, fugace, de la vie
présente, le caractère de ce que nous le lecteur nous a permis d’appeler la modernité […] la
saveur amère ou capiteuse du vin de la Vie.”24
Beyond the subjects which he defines as modern (fashion, horse-drawn carriages, the
city, its crowds and its places of entertainment – cafés, operas, theatres, dandies, the women
but also “les filles”25, with their muslin dresses, furs, crinolines and jewels), Baudelaire insists
on the parallel between the images of transitory and contemporary life observed by the artist
and the swiftness of execution as he reproduces them. The subject therefore influences the
technique and even requires a rapidity of movement and an adaptation of the texture of paint
itself so as to grasp this “ghost” of reality and not lose it: “un feu, une ivresse de crayon, de
pinceau, ressemblant presque à une fureur. C’est la peur de n’aller pas assez vite, de laisser
échapper le fantôme avant que la synthèse n’en soit extraite et saisie”26. While examining the
modernity of painted things and subjects, Baudelaire is also led to a consideration of the
modernity of representation.
Although there is no mention of Manet in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, critics have
regarded this essay in relation to his work: Manet’s choice of contemporary subjects and their
artistic treatment echo the comments on Guys. What Baudelaire brings forth as a new mode of
representation – observation, the immediacy of sensation rendered by the rapidity of execution
– also applies to Manet. The real painter should be able to represent men in their modern
costume and to reveal “how great and poetic they are with their ties and polished boots”:
“Celui-là serait le peintre, le vrai peintre, qui saurait nous faire voir et comprendre combien
21
“Sa passion et sa profession, c’est d’épouser la foule” (Charles Baudelaire, Au-delà du romantisme, Le peintre
de la vie moderne, Ecrits sur l’art, Paris : Flammarion, 1998, 212).
22
Charles Baudelaire, Au-delà du romantisme, Le peintre de la vie moderne, Ecrits sur l’art, Paris : Flammarion,
1998, 212.
23
1998, 213.
24
1998, 248.
25
1998, 241.
26
1998, 221.
nous sommes grands et poétiques dans nos cravates et nos bottes vernies.”27 Music in the
Tuileries (1862), the representation of a group of men (among whom Baudelaire, Gautier, and
Manet himself) wearing black suits and top hats, illustrates this ideal.
Baudelaire tried to defend Manet and to promote his painting by urging Théophile
Gautier to write a positive review of the artist’s work shown in the Salon of 1865. Some letters
reveal the complex arguments on which this defence relies. The famous sentence found in a
fragment dated 11 May 1865 (“You, you are only the first in the decrepitude of your art”)28 is a
reaction to the hostile reception of Olympia and to Manet’s complaint about the mockery of
which his work was the butt. The word “decrepitude”, far from being pejorative, is a direct
reference to Baudelaire’s own aesthetic stance in Les Fleurs du Mal, published in 1857, in
which the decay found at the very heart of modern life becomes its essence and a source of the
beauty that art has to express. In “Triomphe de Manet” (1931), Paul Valéry writes that one
only has to turn the pages of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal to note the parallel between the
significant diversity of the subjects that the poems approach and the diversity of motifs that can
be found in a catalogue of Manet’s work. According to Valéry, this reveals shared anxieties
and some profound “correspondence”, the importance of “sensation” which both artists subtly
exploit and “organise”29. This organisation of sensation is essential to an understanding of
Manet’s redefinition of representational modes.
Mallarmé’s study of Impressionist “plein air”
As Baudelaire shows, modernity deconstructs more traditional forms and creates new
modes of expression which convey a sense of mobility, instability, multiplicity, and
uncertainty. Mallarmé, who was revolted by the rejection of Manet’s work by the jury of the
Salon, wrote “Le jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet” (La Renaissance littéraire et
artistique, April 1874), pieces of fine-art gossip sent to The Athenaeum in 1876, and “Les
Impressionistes et Edouard Manet” (translated by George T. Robinson for the Art Monthly
Review, November 1876). Mallarmé regards Baudelaire as the first art critic for whom Manet’s
art had an immediate appeal and who launched into a defence of “these strange paintings”
27
Quoted by Georges Bataille, Manet (1955), Genève : Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1983, 64.
“Et vous, vous n’êtes que le premier dans la décrépitude de votre art”. Quoted by Michel Draguet, Présentation
(7-68), Baudelaire, Au-delà du romantisme. Ecrits sur l’art, Paris : Flammarion, 1998, 63.
29
“Il suffit de feuilleter le mince recueil des Fleurs du Mal, d’observer la diversité significative, et comme
concentrée, des sujets de ces poèmes, d’en rapprocher la diversité des motifs qui se relève dans le catalogue des
œuvres de Manet, pour conclure assez aisément à une affinité réelle des inquiétudes du poète et du peintre.”
Quoted by Françoise Cachin, Manet. “J’ai fait ce que j’ai vu”, Paris : Découvertes Gallimard, 1994, 153.
28
(“ces peintures étranges”30). He also puts forth the idea that representation goes beyond its
initial motif which at first sight may seem ordinary and realistic. This transformation of realism
results in an unexpected “crisis”31. In “Le jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet”, Mallarmé
tries to understand why Le Bal de l’Opéra was not accepted for the exhibition of the Salon of
1874 and it is obvious that he goes back to Baudelaire’s presentation of modern life to justify
Manet’s work. He focuses on the depiction of a modern crowd in its anonymous and shifting
state, mingling the monotony of the black costumes of men with a few clear touches that
brighten it, “un rendez-vous propre à montrer l’allure d’une foule moderne, laquelle ne saurait
être peinte sans les quelques notes claires contribuant à l’égayer.”32 He also pays attention to
the delicious range of tones in the rendering of the blacks, found in the suits, hats, and masks,
and in velvet, satin, and silk.
In the short pieces published in The Atheneaum, Mallarmé describes Le Linge and
shows his fascination for the wonderful effects of light that pervade the painting and for the
exceptional rendering of the most immaterial element, that is to say the plein air (in italics in
Mallarmé’s text). These effects (plein air, transparent shadow, a piece of linen flooded with
light) are the very essence of modernity: “Le Linge (où, se détachant en plein air sur l’ombre
transparente que cause un fond de verdure, une dame, en costume de matin, lave elle-même,
dans un jardin de ville, et fait sécher au soleil un linge imbu de jour”)33. In another fragment of
fine-art gossip, a similar interpretation insists on the woman’s body, which is bathed in and
absorbed by the light and becomes at the same time solid and vaporous; the flesh then appears
as a shifting pink spot that melts in the space surrounding it:
Sur un fond de verdure et d’atmosphère bleuissante qui borne un jardin parisien, une
dame en bleu lave, par jeu, ce qui de son linge ne sèche pas encore dans l’air transparent
et tiède : un enfant émerge des fleurs et regarde la lessive maternelle. Le corps de la jeune
femme est entièrement baigné et comme absorbé par la lumière qui ne laisse d’elle qu’un
aspect à la fois solide et vaporeux, ainsi que le veut le plein air à quoi tout le monde vise
aujourd’hui en France : ce phénomène se produit principalement à l’égard des chairs,
taches roses mobiles et fondues dans l’espace ambiant.34
In “Les Impressionistes et Edouard Manet”, Mallarmé expands on the same references to
human beings and things “deluged with air” and steeped in the transparent and luminous
atmosphere, which makes them quiver and evaporate. He praises the “enchanted life conferred
by the witchery of art; a life neither personal nor sentient”:
30
Stéphane Mallarmé, Ecrits sur l’art, Paris : Garnier Flammarion, 1998, 307.
32
33
34
31
[Le tableau] est inondé d’air. Partout l’atmosphère, lumineuse et transparente, est aux
prises avec les figures, les vêtements, le feuillage, semblant s’approprier un peu de leur
substance et de leur solidité, cependant que leurs contours, mangés par le soleil caché et
consumés par l’espace, tremblent, se fondent et s’évaporent dans l’air ambiant, qui dérobe
en apparence leur réalité aux figures pour préserver leur véridique aspect. L’air règne en
réalité absolue, comme possédant une existence enchantée, à lui conférée par la
sorcellerie de l’art, une vie qui n’est ni de l’individu ni des sens mais de l’ordre des
phénomènes conjurés par la science, et montrés à nos yeux étonnés avec ses
métamorphoses perpétuelles et son invisible action, rendue visible.35
For Mallarmé, the quintessence of Manet’s modernity is his treatment of light bringing life to
the painting: it creates an image that “palpitates with movement, light and life” (“palpite de
mouvement, de lumière et de vie”36). It makes visible the invisible and also has to do with
scientific phenomena, hence associating it closely with a modernity of vision derived from
science.
As he defines “pure painting”, the symbolist poet clearly practises his own art (these
fragments read like prose poems) and his thoughts on painting are borrowed from the field of
poetry in which he himself was bringing about a revolution, a parallel made clear by Pierre
Bourdieu: “Speaking about Manet, Mallarmé speaks about himself.”37 Apart from this focus on
light, Mallarmé briefly explains the painter’s particular framing of his pictures, how he cuts the
image to suggest a new way of looking at reality. For example, one sometimes gets the
impression that the scene is observed through the frame formed by two hands (“une scène d’un
coup embrassée dans l’encadrement des mains”38); the insertion of an arm or a hat that belongs
to somebody who is not fully represented within the frame suggests what remains outside, a
reality which is deliberately excluded from the painting and yet is its continuation.
Moore and the “ominous spaces” of Manet
The critics who have focused on the role played by Manet in the history of painting
emphasise the idea of “crisis”, a key word applied to the choice of subjects, to the sense of
scandal felt by the public, and to aesthetic and representational issues. For Pierre Bourdieu,
Manet accomplished a “symbolical revolution”39 and the “laughter of the people” (“le rire du
35
37
“le très beau texte de Mallarmé pour la défense de Manet prend sa racine profonde dans l’homologie entre le
champ de la poésie et le champ de la peinture, Mallarmé comprenant très bien ce qui se passe dans le champ de la
peinture à partir de la position homologue qu’il occupe dans le champ de la poésie qu’il est en train, lui aussi, de
révolutionner”; “Mallarmé parlant de Manet parle de lui-même” (Pierre Bourdieu, Manet, Une Révolution
symbolique, Paris : Seuil, 2013, 213, 292).
38
39
Pierre Bourdieu, Manet, Une Révolution symbolique, Paris : Seuil, 2013.
36
people”40) was the expression of their incapacity to give meaning to this “crisis of aesthetic
language”41. George Moore’s first contact with Impressionist works illustrates this attitude
ranging from mockery and laughter to indignation and even outrage:
To-day is the opening of the exhibition of the Impressionists. […] I hear that
Bedlam is nothing to it; at one end of the room there is a canvas twenty feet square and in
three tints: pale yellow for the sunlight, brown for the shadows, and all the rest is skyblue. A lady walks, I’m told, in the foreground with a ring-tailed monkey, and the tail is
said to be three yards long.
We went to jeer a group of enthusiasts that willingly forfeit all delights of the
world in the hope of realizing a new aestheticism; we went insolent with patent leather
shoes and bright kid gloves and armed with all the jargon of the school.42
It is easy to notice here a pattern proper to the reception of novelty in art, the connection
between innovation (“new aestheticism”) and its rejection: the size of the canvas, its colours
and proportions do not tally with the viewers’ expectations. Yet Moore later regarded this
element of surprise and the sense of dislocation of spatial bearings (amounting to a form of
madness) as central to an understanding of this new art. Desirous of promoting the New
English Art Club, he played from 1889 to 1895 the role that Mallarmé and Zola (who however
later fell out with Manet) played in France to defend the Impressionists43.
In Lewis Seymour and Some Women, Lewis voices his negative opinion of Manet’s
illustrations of Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune: they are “rubbish” and “the man has
never learned to draw”44. With the analysis on Manet in Modern Painting, Moore made up in a
way for this hasty and unfair dismissal which also exposes Lewis’s own artistic failings and
lack of understanding. He replaced Lewis’s reaction with an attempt to understand this
aesthetic revolution and to account for the complex responses that it triggered. Although
Moore was mostly influenced by Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and their representation of
“sublime decay”45, an echo of Baudelaire’s praise of the “decrepitude” of Manet’s art, he
seems to have foregrounded in his art criticism elements found in Baudelaire’s seminal
40
Pierre Bourdieu, Manet, Une Révolution symbolique, Paris : Seuil, 2013, 25.
“the crisis that Manet provokes is essentially a crisis of aesthetic language: people no longer know how to talk
about [painting].” (“la crise que provoque Manet est essentiellement une crise du langage esthétique : les gens ne
savent plus comment en parler”) (Pierre Bourdieu, Manet, Une Révolution symbolique, Paris : Seuil, 2013, 34).
42
George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1886), London: William Heinemann, 1928, 36
43
Modern Painting (1893) and Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters (1906) show this militant stance. His
art criticism was published in The Bat, The Hawk, The Fortnightly Review, The Magazine of Art, and The Speaker.
44
George Moore, Lewis Seymour and Some Women. Paris: Louis Conard, 1917, 130.
45
“The study of Baudelaire hurried the course of the disease. […] ‘Les Fleurs du Mal!’ beautiful flowers in
sublime decay. […] the children of the nineteenth century go to you, O Baudelaire, and having tasted of your
deadly delight all hope of repentance is vain. Flowers, beautiful in your sublime decay, I press you to my lips”
(George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1886), London: William Heinemann, 1928, 54). Flowers of
Passion (1877) was a direct tribute paid to Baudelaire and “Ode to a Dead Body” reads like homage to
Baudelaire’s “charogne”.
41
presentation of the painter of modern life. In “Chavannes, Millet, and Manet”, Moore
envisages Olympia as an illustration to a poem by Baudelaire and this consideration of
intermedial relationships (Manet was actually inspired by Baudelaire’s “La Géante” and “Les
Bijoux”) reflects the critic’s dual interest in image and text and remains central in his art
criticism: “the picture would do well as an illustration to some poem to be found in Les Fleurs
du Mal. It may be worth while to note here that Baudelaire printed in his volume a quatrain
inspired by one of Manet’s Spanish pictures.”46
Moore may have first intended to identify and understand the principles of modern
painting, yet it is obvious that some pictures remained mysterious and disturbing. Writing
about these pictures did not exactly lead to a clear analysis of their form and meaning and
rather appeared as the evocation of a complex experience. A sense of dislocation pervades the
description of Le Repos (1870-1871), one of Manet’s portraits of Berthe Morisot:
It is a very simple and yet a very beautiful reality. A lady, in white dress with black spots,
sitting on a red sofa, a dark chocolate red, in the subdued light of her own quiet, prosaic,
French appartment, le deuxieme au desssus de l’entre-sol. The drawing is less angular,
less constipated than that of « Olympe ». How well the woman’s body is in the dress!
There is the bosom, the waist, the hips, the knees, and the white stockinged foot in the
low shoe, coming from out the dress. The drawing about the hips and bosom undulates
and floats, vague and yet precise, in a manner that recalls Harlem, and it is not until we
turn to the face that we come upon ominous spaces unaccounted for, forms unexplained.
[...] The face in this picture is like the face in every picture by Manet. Three or four points
are seized, and the spaces between are left unaccounted for.47
The viewer, who notes the echo between the white dress with black spots (“une robe a
poix” (sic.)) and the face which itself seems to be dotted and full of gaps, attempts to explain
his own malaise by focusing on technical aspects. He pays attention to the painter’s play with
the materiality of the painting and to the stress put on the medium itself, a feature of Manet’s
art and of modern art in general. Forms “undulate” and “float”, they are dissolved and the
traditional realistic representation is deconstructed, yet Moore organises his own perception,
however dislocated it may be, by building the ekphrasis on fragments and by underlining
salient bodily parts (bosom, waist, hips, knees, and finally the tip of a foot). He finally
concentrates on the “ominous spaces unaccounted for, forms unexplained” found in the face,
normally the site of identity and individuality yet here the place of uncertainty, a feature that
Moore ascribes to every face in Manet. The description of a reality first presented as “very
46
2004, 24.
47
2004, 25-26.
simple” eventually appears as much more ambiguous, “vague and yet precise”. Similarly,
although in a briefer way, Mallarmé notes that the woman’s face in Rêverie (1873) is lost in the
shadow, while her muslin dress is bathed in the dim daylight: “le visage de la rêveuse se perd
dans l’ombre, mais un vague jour amorti baigne sa personne et sa robe de mousseline.”48
This study of Le Repos hinges on Moore’s perception of modern art as a representation
of what is fleeting and vague and reveals the modernity of his own analysis. Indeed, when
reading Michel Foucault’s work on Manet, Manet and the Object of Painting, Georges
Bataille’s Manet, or T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and
His Followers, it is obvious that Moore managed to identify characteristics that twentiethcentury criticism would later expand upon. First, the focus on what the image produces in the
viewer is a point emphasised by all these critics who also refer to the artist’s play on the
materiality of the medium. The sense of “enchantment and malaise that one feels in looking at
[Manet’s painting]” is foregrounded by Foucault who, commenting on A Bar at the Folies
Bergères (1881-1882), associates it with the exclusion of the viewer and the painter from a
stable place: “it is not possible to know where the painter has placed himself in order to paint
the picture as he has done it, and where we must place ourselves in order to see a spectacle
such as this.”49 Like an echo of the ominous spaces and unexplained forms mentioned by
Moore, the strange impression of an absence (“l’étrange impression d’une absence” 50) is put
forth by Bataille. T. J. Clark makes the link with Baudelaire clearer by explaining that the
locations chosen by Manet (ball, bar, picnic, prostitute’s bedroom, café) are quintessentially
Parisian and typical of the second half of the nineteenth century: they are “laid on for display
but also for equivocation” and epitomise the contingent and the transitory. There, “the visible
comes to be the illegible”51. Moore’s comments on Le Repos bear a resemblance to Clark’s
remarks on Manet’s painting as “a texture of uncertainties”: like Moore, Clark shows that it
leaves the viewer in “a kind of suspended relation”52 and generates doubts about vision itself:
Doubts about vision became doubts about almost everything involved in the act of
painting; and in time the uncertainty became a value in its own right; we could almost say
48
Stéphane Mallarmé, “Les Impressionnistes et Edouard Manet”, Ecrits sur l’art, Paris : Garnier Flammarion,
1998, 312.
49
Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting (1971), transl. Matthew Barr, London: Tate Publishing,
2009, 78.
50
Georges Bataille, Manet (1955), Genève : Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1983, 48. Writing about the “absolute
black” (“noir absolu”) of Manet as he saw it in the eyes of the 1872 portrait of Berthe Morisot, Paul Valéry
regarded it as the “presence of an absence” (“Triomphe de Manet”, quoted by Françoise Cachin, Manet. “J’ai fait
ce que j’ai vu”, Paris : Découvertes Gallimard, 1994, 156).
51
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, London: Thames &
Hudson, 1984, 48.
52
Hudson, 1984, 251.
it became an aesthetic. […] [Art] prefers the unfinished: the syntactically unstable, the
semantically malformed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it
shows it.53
Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Moore developed their own vision of modernity through
analyses which laid the stress on the fleeting, the unfinished and on the uncertainties created by
pictorial representation. Beyond its provocative and scandalous nature, Manet’s painting was
for them the quintessence of modernity. If Mallarmé’s study of Le Linge reveals the poetic
wonder felt when looking at life-giving and palpitating light, Moore shows a much greater
anxiety about vision, thus anticipating the focus on dislocation and deconstruction, a
characteristic of twentieth-century criticism. Manet’s portrait of Mallarmé and his portrait of
Moore54 could be used as final illustrations of “the fugitive, the transitory, the contingent”
praised by Baudelaire. The words of Bataille about Manet’s play on the subtle, the
ungraspable, and the opposition to the fixity of meaning, will serve as a conclusion:
La subtilité d’un jeu ne devait plus représenter que le jeu lui-même, au sommet du subtil.
Inutile à cette fin d’y rien changer. Il suffisait dans le même mouvement de charger et de
délier le trait du pinceau et de traduire ainsi l’insaisissable. Quelque chose demeure de
cette profonde opposition à la fixité d’un sens jusque dans le portrait d’un écrivain
anglais, de George Moore. Jamais peut-être la figure humaine n’est plus proche de
l’innocence et de la vérité insaisissable de l’huître… Mais si le beau portrait de George
Moore est subtil, la subtilité de celui de Mallarmé a certes un élément de plus, où il n’est
rien qu’un léger mouvement tournant, qu’aucun glissement ne subtilise.55
53
Hudson, 1984, 12.
54
Manet painted two portraits of Moore, an oil on canvas (1878-79) and a pastel (1873-79).
55
Georges Bataille, Manet (1955), Genève : Editions d’Art Albert Skira, 1983, 112-113.

Fabienne Gaspari

Transcription

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