Manet
In his first article, “A biographical and critical study”, he wants to give his friend the dignity of an artist, taking away from him the fame of being only a bad painter, and one that is not even able to finish a painting.
Zola affirms here that to write a study on an artist it is necessary to consider his entire work, and it is necessary in portraying an artist, to give an image as complete as possible. Zola here is relying on the belief, coming from the famous story of Creso told by Xenophon, that you can’t say the final word on anyone until his death. In bringing up Xenophon Zola intends to ultimately show that this old “authority” is not useful for the new art.
Soon afterwards, in fact, Zola reveals that for him it is not possible to give a complete portrait of Manet, because the artist is still alive, young, and has composed relatively few works, and what is more, Zola himself was able to see only a part of them (he says “about 30”).
Zola is facing the central problem of realist art: how to describe, how to make a portrait of something not stable, not once and for all, of a living body. The presence of life, with all its contradictions and its fragmentary nature prevents the artist from being able to use an old authority, or technique in his work of art.
What must one do in order to create a new language, or a new starting point to describe what is to be described?
Zola’s step will be the same step Manet will take. He will start from tradition, from the given patterns as an apparent authority for his revolution in style and content.
He reproaches Manet for having acted too naïvely in obeying his personal tendencies. You have to gratify the eyes of the critics, says Zola, not to wound (“blesser”) them.
But isn’t Manet’s Olympia preciselyan attempt to gratify the critics’ eyes?
Manet uses the same subject, the very same posture of the Venere di Urbino by Tiziano, just as in the Dejeneurs sur l’herbe he will use Raffaello and, once again, Tiziano. What he is trying to do is to use a classical, acknowledged theme and structure to give a modern signification.
What made the Venere di Urbino an accepted portrait of a naked woman was the idealization of the image. Another title for this painting was, in fact, “The naked one”. She was a type, not a real woman. On the other hand, Manet’s Olympia is a real woman, a real and naked woman. She is precisely that prostitute, with that particular color of skin and that particular face, and not really beautiful. Her nonideal features features made Olympia an insult to the current esthetics, but, what’s more striking, made her an incomprehensible image.
Manet’s contemporaries found themselves confronted with the same problem faced by Giotto’s contemporaries who stared at his blue skies without perceiving them as skies at all. In the 13 century the sky was indeed perceived blue, as object of daily, common observation. But the sky as graphic symbol, transferred into aesthetic terms, was not blue at all. In that case the sky was a symbol of heaven, so that it had to be symbolized through the noblest of substances, that is gold. It was not at all the same sky, the “real” one and the one that was a symbol. Giotto destroyed this transformation of the referent into symbol, he refused the duality of the sky.
In Manet’s case what was at stake was an idealization, not a symbolization, of the real.
In Giotto’s times, if the referent wasn’t transformed into a symbol, the image was no longer proper. In Manet’s time, if the referent wasn’t idealized, the very perception of the object was compromised.
In other words, Manet doesn’t discuss the essence of the referent, but the perception of the referent. Manet wants to transform his contemporaries’ eyes (Zola on eyes). He is not transforming the referent’s meaning, there was no doubt that Olympia was a prostitute, but he is suppressing the middle term of the similitude, the process of idealization, to establish an analogic relation between the referent and its graphic realization.
Manet’s aesthetic revolution doesn’t lie in the essence of the image, but in the technique, here intended as both the point of view and the very technique of painting.
If the object of perception doesn’t need any more esthetic idealization from its contingent form, the protagonist will be the artist’s gaze. In this way the referent acquires an identity, a dignity of its own, and the subjective point of view of the artist will determine the transformation of the object into artistic expression.
A realistic subjectivity will be Manet’s revolution, and the impressionists’ starting point.
One of the techniques Manet used was the abolition of the famous “ton gris”, a technique used up until Courbet. It was used at first by the Mannerists, but probably some artists, like Leonardo, used this technique before. The idea was that, in order to have a synthetic image of what was to be painted, a mirror had to be put in front of the object. The artist had to look into the mirror, not into reality (Parmigianino). The mirror had also the effect of softening the contrasting colors and of giving a smoother, homogenous image. Manet refused the mirror and started painting directly from reality, even though he didn’t paint completely “en plen air” as the impressionists will do. His idea was that, in order to give a truthful image of reality, you had to leave all the sharpening contrasts where they were. It is even clearer now that Manet’s intention was no longer to give emphasis to the artist’s subjectivity through the subject treated, as Courbet did, but through a different technique.
