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Rhizomes & Zygotes: Manet's Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s
Review

Rhizomes & Zygotes: Manet's Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s

Elliott Barowitz
Women artists news, v 22, p3
31 Mar 1997

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(4). The pensiveness of Olympia's stare is probably less a consequence of Manet's sexist male gaze (even though [Manet] had more than a passing interest in "pornographic photography") than the demeanor of his model Victorine Meurent, and Manet's observation of Botticelli's and Titian's seductive Olympias. We can assume that both Botticelli and Titian stared at their women, and they stared back demurely saying, "take me please, but gently." Furthermore, there is a possibility that Monet's "model" was a photograph of Meurent where she had to sit still and impassively for some time, giving her that distracted look so often seen in the artist's work. The story of this book is not the story of Manet's technical manipulation of the modernist picture plane nor his maleness in depiction of women. [Clement Greenberg] asserted, "the subject has to be avoided like the plague," and that to be fiat affirms the empirical nature of the two-dimensional canvas. However, even Schapiro's "freedom of the spirit," which more than anything else said about modernism evokes the parameters of modernism's ontology is not Fried's agenda either. After the 1848 Revolution, "modern" and "universality" were to the French leftists-progressives of the late-19th Century the ineluctable consequence of their nationalism. Modern painting was about modern subject matter, perhaps first seen in the labor paintings of Millet. In fact, Manet was criticized during his time (there seemed to be more critics, and almost as many newspapers as painters in 19th-Century France) for giving up modernist principles with his use of photographs and his flattening of the picture plane. [Michael Fried] amusingly refers to this criticism as "Postmodern." This debasement and deviation of principles is exactly what angered Greenberg so much. For example, he vehemently criticized ("they stink,") Johns's, Rauchenberg's, and Oldenburg's use of abstract paint adulterously applied to Pop Art imagery (which he hated anyway). Michael Fried begins this tome by reprinting his 1969 essay "Manet's Sources" updating it in the following chapter, "Manet's Sources' Reconsidered." He tells us that Manet was diligent in finding a sense of "Frenchness" for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Olympia, and other paintings of the 1860s. Manet was concerned with the genius of French painting and more than anything else wanted his newly awakened nationalism to prevail. "Manet...stood in need of access to the art of the past."

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