Manet Portraits at the RA

It must have seemed a good idea at the time for the Royal Academy to put on the first major exhibition of Manet’s portraiture in the UK, Manet: Portraying Life, which has now arrived in London after showing at the Toledo Museum of Art. But not so easy to put into practice. For a start Olympia 1863, Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe 1862/3 and The Balcony 1869, all pictures highly relevant to the theme and to the pivotal position which Édouard Manet (1832-83) occupies between the traditions of the Salon and Modernism, are never (well, hardly ever - see Update 7 March below!) loaned by the Musée d’Orsay. Secondly, no more than 54 works make up the show, a surprising number of which are unfinished. One picture, Interior at Arcachon 1871 is making its second appearance at the RA in five months. But thirdly, and more fundamentally, what is a portrait as opposed to a picture which includes one or more human figures?

The answer, I would guess, is something to do with the indication of character and personality which the painter conveys in the portrait and through the immediate context chosen for the subject. On that basis, there are some fine portraits in the RA show, for example those of Emile Zola 1878, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets 1872 (detail in banner above), Stephen Mallarmé 1876 (below), and The Luncheon, 1868, which primarily depicts Léon, the son of Manet’s wife (left).

But others are barely portraits, for example the players in A Game of Croquet 1873 (above), despite its considerable interest in terms of the separation of Manet from the Impressionists. Again, in what sense is the National Gallery’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens 1862, on solitary display in the second gallery and provided with a who’s-who of the 20 individuals in the picture, a work of portraiture (below)?  A portrait of a sector of contemporary society, perhaps.
 

The absence of the Musée d’Orsay’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe is mitigated to some extent by the presence of the Courtauld’s smaller later c1863-8 version. However, the latter’s generosity didn’t extend to a loan of Suzon at her [The] Bar at the Folies-Bergère 1882 (below right), which would have been preferable to so much Victorine Meurent, however fine The Railway 1873 may be.

The small scale of the exhibition helps to explain why Gallery 3 is given over to Manet’s timeline and maps of Paris and France - not that Manet spent much time outside the former. His presence in Arcachon stemmed from his leaving Paris during the period of the Commune, unlike Courbet (who, by the way, appears in the left part of Monet’s version of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe 1865-1866).

The RA’s show was given considerable media coverage at the start of the year and it certainly provides an opportunity to see significant works by a major artist and to appreciate his skill in painting in black and dark brown which is hardly apparent in reproductions. Nonetheless I do wonder whether some visitors will be disappointed, particularly at a full ticket price of £15. Reviving my 'anticipointment index' of a year ago, I rate it at 3 out of 5, the lower being the better. Manet: Portraying Life continues to 14 April.


UPDATE 7 March

The Musée d’Orsay, with the special permission of President Hollande, is going to lend Olympia (above left) for the first time to an exhibition in Venice this year.

Auteur Theory; Anticipointments

This post consists of two items, both by way of being footnotes to other posts, past and future.

Auteur Theory

My first post about a film, almost a year ago, was titled The King’s Speech. A couple of months later came the next film post, Joanna Hogg’s ‘Archipelago’. And from then on, right up to George Clooney’s ‘The Ides of March’ in November, I’ve always given the name of the director in the possessive before the film title. Belated acknowledgement to Tom Hooper in the original omission.

François Truffaut
Originator of cinéma d'auteur

The Auteur Theory of film “emerged in France about 50 years ago and holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary auteur (Fr author)”, quoting from Wikipedia’s helpful entry. To me the flaws in this are fairly obvious, not least because a film requires craftsmanship and creativity from so many people other than the metteur en scène, for example the screenwriters and the camera men and women. On the other hand, a film is shot by location and the director has to control the assembly along the intended timeline (with flashbacks and other artifices) of those scenes he or she chooses and discards the rest - except the ones selected for resuscitation as Deleted Scenes on the DVD.  Also, there seems to be an increasing awareness among the general film-going public, as opposed to cineastes, of a film’s director, his or her previous and forthcoming films and so on – Allen, Spielberg, Scorsese, Clooney just to give a few current examples.

So for the moment, I will continue putting the director’s name before the film and subscribing to the Auteur Theory - Prétentieux? Moi? Jamais! Next up will probably be The Iron Lady directed by Phyllida Lloyd.

Anticipointment

Cash Peters came up with this word during his Radio 5 swansong last month, attributing it to the Hollywood Reporter. But it seems to go back to 1995, and has a musical existence (The Ashton Shuffle, Australian house music? – I’m way out of my depth). Anyway, as a blend of anticipation and disappointment, anticipointment is a useful concept these days when so much is preceded by a massive PR hype which so little could ever live up to. I will try to develop an Anticipointment Index in future posts and promising candidates might be The Iron Lady (see above) and the David Hockney show, A Bigger Picture at the RA.

Hockney has put a note on the poster for his RA show: "All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally" which has been interpreted as a dig at Damien Hirst. Hirst’s works often involve using a large number of assistants. Somehow I don’t think Hockney would be very supportive of Auteur Theory.

ADDENDUM 16 JANUARY

David Hockney and the RA have now explained that no criticism of Hirst was implied.

I have done some more thinking about the Anticipointment Index and have come up with the chart below where marks out of 5 are given – the higher the mark, the worse the anticipointment. Moreover, the greater the preceding hype the more difficult it is to obtain the desirable low score.

ANTICIPOINTMENT INDEX 1.0