Sublime to Ridiculous
Every Liberal Arts college of art "History of Modern Art" curriculum cites Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe as the prototypical Modernist painting. The scandal surrounding it builds educational interest, as it drove favorable interest in the new art of the 19th Century. Nobody sleeps through a controversy. Controversy is the defining feature of Modern Art, as everyone knows.
What everyone doesn't already know, which the analysis of the famous painting reveals, is that which makes Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe controversial. The precipitating cause of viewer disturbance is the female figure, foreground, which stares at the viewer. You were admonished as a child not to stare. You were not told how to be stared-at.
The female in the foreground not only stares, but stares brazenly, stares provocatively at the viewer. At once scandalized and fascinated by the scene before you, the unwavering stare challenges. You were not invited to the soiree in the painting. It is a private affair. The names of the persons who served Manet as models are known. Victorine Meurent is posing naked. One of the artist’s brothers (either Gustave or Eugène), and Manet’s brother-in-law, the Dutch sculptor Ferdinand Leenhoff, wearing a hat. *
Ferdinand gestures to Victorine with his hand, index finger crooked in her direction. She is clearly not paying attention to what he is saying, distracted as she is by some invisible person beyond the foreground, which can only be you (the viewer). Manet created the complex of glances, composed it, by patching-together studies of the figures made separately. Manet would not have subjected his dear ones to a group sitting for a tableaux such as Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe.
Manet's mastery of painting technique, his élan for oils, surpassed his competence for composition. He was capable of assembling the elements into a seamless whole. In his masterpiece, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, meaningful composition got out of hand. What was natural for Victorine, when she posed for her figure, does not sit naturally with the composition. The same objection to the rest of the elements of the composition in descending scale of critical fault.
The academic jury would have anticipated public outrage over the overt nudity of the subject, but it was the incoherent composition of the painting which gave the Academy sufficient grounds to reject the submission. Imagine the epithets which would be hurled at the piece—and at the Academy—if it had been approved! And all because of a shortcoming in the artist's training. The painting was rejected by the academy because it violates the cardinal sin of staring at the viewer, what is now called violating The Fourth Wall.
The Fourth Wall is a theatrical convention. Speaking directly to the audience by the actors is discouraged. It breaks with long-established convention. If the audience is asked to grant poetic license, the players must keep their side of the agreement. Breaking through The Fourth Wall stops the natural progression of the play. As a concrete example, I was given a ticket to a show, gratis. Seats had to be filled. I took a chance. It turned out to be a farce. It was a ridiculous plot, amusing, but not laugh-out-loud funny. Then, as if we in the audience didn't get it, an actor stepped to the edge of the stage. Speaking directly to the audience, he announced, “This is a farce.” I shook my head in disbelief.
Fine Art was not yet a Liberal Art when Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe was created. The art of Painting was, thereafter, discovered by artists to have principles. Painting is a form of theater—which has ever been a Liberal Art. Not until recent times has Fine Art been a Liberal Arts college degree. Before, artists had to guess why a commission was awarded to one artist in preference to other contenders, when both demonstrated technical competence. Mediating technical matters of art are Liberal Arts criteria. As a genre of theater (Poetics), painting has formal rules, one of which is not to violate The Fourth Wall. Had he known this, Manet might have averted a fiasco.
* Bailey, Martin The Art Newspaper, 24 November, 2016
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