Manet's Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (Essays in Art and Culture) - Hardcover

Rubin, James Henry; Manet, Edouard

9780674548022: Manet's Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (Essays in Art and Culture)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674548027 ISBN 13: 9780674548022

Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr, 1994

A sense of stillness and silence pervades Manet's painting. His flattened, sometimes fragmented forms appear to exist absentmindedly in a world removed from speech. It is this silence that James Rubin explores in a book that shows us Manet as we see him - naturally, in pictures that articulated their own purely visual terms. In such a sense, this book is about the restoration of the visual to its primacy in art through Manet's painting. While insisting that Manet's pictures must be given the first and final say in any interpretation, Rubin uses contradictory views of the painter's works - from the present and past - as a context for approaching them. Applying J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, which bridges the gap between language and action or between the painted image and its social effect, Rubin goes beyond past theorists to describe the curious ways in which Manet's paintings act upon us. With these ideas as his guide, he takes us through Manet's work, pointing out the elements that are distinctive and consistent, particularly the painter's reliance on a pattern of gazes and the "unique state of undecidability" that this strategy produces. Rubin also examines Manet's relationship to three of the leading critics of his day - Baudelaire, Zola, and Mallarme - giving special attention to Mallarme's appreciation, and eventual use in his own poetry, of the paradox between immersion and externality in Manet's oeuvre. Finally, the book uses the image of the bouquet to exemplify Manet's creative poetics through an exploration of his still life. Filled with revealing insights into Manet's achievement, this sensitive, informed, and clearly written book goes a long way towardexplaining why Manet's paintings continue to fascinate and elude us more than one hundred years after the artist's death.

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Review:

A densely argued investigation of Manet's work, seeking to reevaluate 19th/20th-century and contemporary reception of the artist's oeuvre. The influence and criticism of Baudelaire, Zola and Mallarme are assessed...The author considers literary and semiotic readings of art in order to frame the discussion with new ideas...The final chapter raises provocative questions regarding the notion of Realism's existence and purpose.

Synopsis:

Explores how the painting of Edouard Manet (1832-83) restores the primacy of the visual in art through a sense of stillness and silence. Focusing especially on his bouquets, both in still lifes and as part of other paintings, Rubin (art history, State U. of New York) examines the curious effect the paintings have. Well illustrated, including a few

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