Edouard Manet

This book addresses nonspecialist art historians, students, and the wider public. It opens with evocations of Edouard Manet and with a brief account of his life, of the world of art with which he had to contend, and of the friendships that nourished him. In Manet’s period, professional and social ties united many artists and writers in vigorous aesthetic debates.

Most is known about the literary debates, which form the chief subject of the second chapter. Here, the protagonists define the meaning of Realism, the nature of beauty and imagination in art, and the role of morality with a vivacity and trenchancy that are a pleasure to read.

None of Manet’s verbal contributions to these debates survive, but he often painted in the combative spirit of the debating chamber, as a reformer, making his position explicit by inviting comparisons, fully illustrated here, between his own pictures and those of earlier and contemporary artists. Yet Manet was no mere aesthetician; he was above all a Realist, that is, a fascinated observer of people and of his epoch, detached, amused, ironic, but also touchingly humane, a Realist who transformed what his eye registered to reveal the truth as he perceived it.

In order to elucidate his art, Vivien Perutz draws on close observation of his pictures and a historical reconstruction of his world. She investigates the significance of the political and social phenomena depicted by Manet, which range from the Execution of Maximilian to images of low-paid waitresses and loose women. In some ways her book resembles a review; Perutz draws together recent research, sets out the controversies and argues through them from the premise that it is both desirable and possible to view Manet’s oeuvre as the creation of “a multifaceted artist whose aims cannot be summarised in simple slogans,” yet “a man consistent in temperament and habits of thought, some consistencies being lifelong, others proper to a particular time or place. “Like his literary colleagues, she argues, Manet regarded form and content as indissoluble. She therefore allows Manet’s career to unfold gradually while moving continuously between the two.

Perutz describes Manet’s evolving style and how he responded to new paint media and grinding processes, to photography, and to open-air painting. She explores the nurturing influence of seventeenth-century art and Manet’s relationship with the new avant-garde.

The originality of this book lies in the completeness and comprehensiveness with which it examines Manet’s work in the light of recent scholarship and in the context of thought and events contemporary with Manet. It is written in a very clear, almost effortless style. It includes excellent descriptions of individual paintings – not just as works that are iconographically challenging, but also as objects that are visually rewarding.