Death and Gender in Manet's Still Lifes - Edouard

Art in America, May, 2001 by Linda Nochlin

A recent international exhibition focused on the corpus of still lifes painted by Manet. The artist's affection for domestic subjects and the curators' decision to supplement the show with some male portraits prompt these reflections on the conventions of gender in art.

What if we didn't know who had painted the work in the exhibition "Manet: The Still-Life Paintings," recently on view at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore? Wouldn't we, at first glance, be justified in believing that this was the work of a woman rather than a man? After all, still life and flower painting were genres in which women artists traditionally excelled; indeed, they had often been considered capable of nothing more demanding than painting a pretty bouquet or a dainty fruit bowl. This changed, of course, with Cezanne and, later, the Cubists. Still life, by the later 1880s, had become a central issue: weighty, grave, serious, architectonic, decidedly unfrivolous and definitely deprived of immediate sensuous seduction. The apples of Cezanne were deemed worthy of masculine ambition; indeed, they became his iconic emblem, along with Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Bathers.

Edouard Manet's femininity is inscribed not merely in his subject matter--the peaches, the peonies and the lilacs in their vase--but in his style, one might say. His hand is light, his brushwork deft, a style asserting itself through its very unassertiveness, through its rejection of volume, its de-emphasis of structure, its dependence on immediacy and intuitive synopsis rather than on reason and calculation. Looking at these delectable fallen petals, these delicately conjured strawberries, these evanescent peaches, one is reminded of Mallarme's moving eulogy for Berthe Morisot, in which the poet dubbed her work "idyllic, delicate, shimmering"; referred to its "haunting suggestiveness"; and extolled Morisot's ability "to create poetry, by pictorial language, a medium whose prestige operates directly on the spectator, seems produced, without the apparent intervention of the artist, by the atmosphere awakening in the surfaces their luminous secret."(1)

One might go even further and speculate that it was to gainsay Manet's femininity that the organizers of the show decided to insert some more serious (and "masculine") work--male portraits with still-life accoutrements--into an exhibition that is purportedly devoted to still life alone. This, of course, is not an entirely fair accusation. It might well be that the curators (George Mauner, assisted by Marie-Therese Brincard) thought that some of Manet's best still-life work was, in fact, conjointly painted with other more important subjects. But given the generally conservative nature of the take on Manet in this exhibition, the hunch may not be entirely mistaken.

It is hard to imagine the same curators organizing an exhibition of Cezanne's still lifes and feeling obliged to include, say, The Orgy (lots of fruit, vases, dishes), the Dejeuner sur l'herbe (oranges, a bottle, a hat and parasol in the foreground) or A Modern Olympia (elaborate still life on Chinese lacquer table, hat in foreground, enormous bouquet to right) to "flesh out" the show. A Cezanne still-life show would be precisely that and nothing more. In the case of Manet, it may have been considered necessary to thicken and deepen the mix with genres outside the purported subject, to remind us of Manet's central position in 19th-century modernism with some beefier imagery, like that of the portraits of Zola and Theodore Duret. The issue of the portraits vis-a-vis a gendered reading of Manet's still lifes will be discussed in considerable detail below.

The feminine Manet is particularly evident in the dazzling group of letterheads in watercolor that includes, atop one of several letters to his young friend, Isabelle Lemonnier, the most minimal plum neatly set on a wisp of shadow. Another letter to Isabelle is decorated with a peach, still another with a split almond and two others, japonisissant in effect, with the most evanescent of flowering branches.(2) A more detailed letterhead represents Isabelle wearing a hat with ribbons; and there is another, uncharacteristically detailed, of two flower-decorated hats all by themselves.

Manet clearly was intrigued by feminine fashion (which, as Baudelaire had pointed out, was the opposite kind of beauty from the classical and eternal--hence it was a modern beauty). This interest is particularly evident in the abbreviated sketches of women's legs, boots and stockings he sent in a letter to his friend, Mme. Guillemet, owner of a fashionable dress shop in Paris who posed for half of the elegant couple represented in Manet's In the Conservatory.(3) Because these saucy legs and feet are by Manet, and because we are up on our Freud and Lacan, we must consign them to the bulging files of fetishism (along with similar fragmented legs and feet in The Ball at the Opera and the Bar at the Folies-Bergere). If, of course, they were assigned to a woman artist, they would merely be tokens of an entirely appropriate and aboveboard interest in fashion--one lady recording the latest style for the delectation of another, who happens to be the owner of a fashionable boutique. I would suggest that even if Manet is getting a sexual bang out of recording these female underpinnings, he does so with the gimlet eye of the fashion connoisseur, and that the one does not preclude the other.