The School That Never Was: A Rambling Theory of Édouard Manet

As a general rule, I’m not much of one for speculative history or fiction. I’ll happily admit, for example, that I was deeply unimpressed with George Orwell’s 1984. While I was quickly (and, on my first reading as a teenager just learning about politics, rather violently) drawn in by its dramatic, oppressive worldbuilding, further engagement over the years has made me suspicious of the book’s superficial treatment of human nature, which seems severed from the flow of real philosophical inquiries taking place at the time. (Though I’m sure it didn’t help that I read it at the same time as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which, by comparison, I found to be a criminally underrated masterpiece somewhat along the lines of Dostoevsky.) 

At their worst, I fear that these “What if…?” concepts can become a substitute for genuine engagement with our beliefs, politics, and humanity. They can switch out – almost without our noticing – the mirror that reveals us to ourselves, replacing it with a fleeting mirage, which parades as reflection but is little more than fear-mongering or, worse, self-aggrandizement. Any imagined future that doesn’t help us grapple with the existing present is an insult to the past and a detriment to us all.

Eduoard Manet, Chez le père Lathuille, 1879

Having established my trepidations regarding speculation on such lofty grounds, I hope the simple proposal I now have to make will seem less contentious. I would like to argue that Édouard Manet, that gargantuan of the painting craft, whose masterful work bridged the gap between Realism and Impressionism in the mid-nineteenth century, might well have done better to have avoided the Impressionists entirely. In fact, I’d like to theorize that, in an alternate world in which the forces of Impressionism were less irresistible, Manet could have started his own school on separate grounds entirely, creating a method of artistic abstraction that could have had a seismic impact on our contemporary art world.

Of course, I might be playing a little fast and loose with history to make this argument. Manet himself expressed his distaste for certain Impressionist principles, though he adopted them more and more as he aged. But, for my purposes here, I am less interested in the historical facts of Manet’s life than I am in the empirically verifiable truth of his artistic genius – or, more specifically, in one little line.

I may not have mentioned it in my articles before (or maybe I have), but many of my family and friends – including, unfortunately, the more prudish and easily spooked – will know that I am a bit obsessed with Manet’s Olympia. I remember exactly where I was when I first saw it (in the second seat from the door in the front row of my college’s art history lecture hall) and who I was with (or, at least, my inimitable professor, Barbara Bushey, whose work featured in my recent piece on textiles). But most of all, I remember discovering a world of potential possibilities as I found my gaze drawn to Manet’s remarkable rendering of the figure’s two legs. The way they were delineated from each other – it was a line but not a line. A form but not a form. A shadow but not a shadow. It was, to my mind, the first darting glimpse into the world of a mode of abstraction that somehow seemed to respect the real more fully than realism itself.

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863-1865

And then, to my chagrin and shock, it was gone. Manet’s later works, such as the world-famous Bar at the Folies-Bergère, are masterpieces, of course; there’s no denying that! But as much as I admired these pieces, I was baffled by how fully he seemed to slough off what had appeared to me the most innovative, daring, and revolutionary aspect of his style. Where the Impressionists abstracted the world by reevaluating it in relation to the human eye’s perception of light and color, Manet, I was convinced, had begun to do the same by reimagining the relationship between more objective dimensions of space: in the fluid merging of line and form in the spaces where materials meet.

Olympia’s figure also reminded me a bit of the West’s Japonisme craze – in fact, if you look at some of the portraiture coming out of modern-day Japan from artists such as Ikenaga Yasunari, you’ll find (albeit culturally in reverse) a similar tension in their work between form and line. Japonisme was all the rage in France during a great swath of Manet’s life. Why, I asked myself again, would he abandon such a goldmine of artistic inquiry?

Edouard Manet, The Fifer, 1863

That is, of course, a complicated question, subject to a vast variety of factors, many of which must be so private to his lived experience as to fall forever outside the historical record. But even though the transition towards Impressionism is evident in his work, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if he had continued to refine this striking approach. How might it have impacted the progression of art history?

Among the infinite possibilities – from a quicker transition to Modernist styles like Cubism or Art Deco, to a more serious early engagement with Japanese art techniques (and perhaps even philosophy?), to a return to mathematical ideation as a foundation for aesthetics (albeit with the benefit of our modern wealth of discoveries) – I find myself returning again and again to one theory. As transgressive and contentious as Manet’s work was to the French Académie at the time, I see in it the seeds of an innovation that might have counterbalanced the twentieth century’s constant drive towards abstraction. It could have been – and perhaps still could be – a new line of inquiry for representational art.

In some ways, Manet’s early work is the conscious antithesis of Impressionism. He initially rejected the idea that art should be limited to the subjects of the artist’s visible perception without significant input on the artist’s end to distill the portrayal. The Olympia brush stroke is evidence of a mastery that far transcends representation in its own right: it demonstrates a complete understanding of his medium and a deep, intuitive attunement to the mathematical principles and relationships that undergird our reality. These relationships have only become more apparent as the decades have gone on, now forming the basis of much of our scientific and philosophical inquiry (consider Einstein’s theory of relativity or the field of phenomenology). Manet’s genius, in my estimation, lies in the efficiency with which he can express the relationships between things.

Edouard Manet, Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers, 1865

A true “student” of Manet might, then, expand upon this element of his work by experimenting with new and fresh ways to express “real” subjects in a way that captures the dynamism and tension that relates each element to the others. Lines that express multiple forms, forms that echo each other in pattern or style, figures that engage proactively with the space around them – maybe even with the space surrounding their two-dimensional surface: any of these could be ways for artists, even today, to recapture the crackling intensity that pervades his early work. It could be a rejoining of form and subject, revitalizing compositional ideas with the content that anchors it firmly in our reality.

Edouard Manet, A Parisian Lady, 1883

As the situation now stands, the art world of the 2020s has been so thoroughly fragmented by the sheer amount of content available on social media that I don’t doubt that someone out there or even dozens of people are creating work that, intentionally or not, falls very much in line with what I’m describing here. If nothing else, I am happy to draw attention to the potential that such technically masterful representation retains in the modern world. This “school of Manet” may in itself be little more than an interesting speculative scenario, but, like all the best speculation, I set it forth not out of anger over what is or sadness for what might have been but with hope and excitement for a future that is yet to be.

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