Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe

The painting that made Manet famous. Rejected from the Salon exhibition of 1863, it was accepted into the Salon des Refuses where it got lots of (mostly negative) attention. We all know the story. The painting is now considered ‘the departure point for Modern art‘ and we now think of those who laughed in supercilious terms. I’m here to defend them.

The problem with the painting is that it’s internally inconsistent, but not convincingly so, and that was the point.

Anytime you make anything, from your first move (stroke, shot, whatever) you are establishing the rules of the universe in which the piece lives and which the viewer must enter. It can be anything but it must be consistent even if that means consistently incoherent. You can establish the rule that there are no rules – the basic precept of collage – but you still have to either remain consistent or break your own rules so confidently and convincingly that it rewrites them.

Le Dejeuner does neither. Keep in mind I am speaking in purely pictorial terms here. I am not referring to the sexual or gender politics, only how it works as a picture. Neither am I saying that there is something inherently ‘wrong’ about a picture being internally inconsistent. I am saying that when that is deliberately done – when you can’t tell whether an illusionistic ‘error’ is deliberate or not – it is no longer a ‘painting’. At that point the piece becomes conceptual – more about perception, established pictorial mores, social and art politics than about painting itself. I think Le Dejeuner was a brilliant piece of conceptual art and branding but a painting which – as we now take its ‘disruption strategy’ for granted – ages less and less well. It never was a ‘good picture’. It wasn’t intended to be. It’s now a political artifact.

There are 3 elements: The figures in the foreground, the landscape itself and the bather in the back. The foreground figures don’t appear to belong in the landscape – they are handled completely differently and there’s no compelling pictorial logic to it. It looks lazy. Then there’s the woman in the water, who looks as though she was cut out of a magazine and pasted in. Her scale is wrong. The trees on the left  and the landscape beyond them tell us she should be farther back. In fact, the more you look at it, the more obvious it is that the left side is a completely different painting from the right. It all looks awkwardly cobbled together. The ‘shock value’ of the picture when shown at the Salon des Refuses  lies in the irritation of the contradictions – did he mean to make a bad painting or was he incapable of making a good one?

In retrospect – and in the light of Manet’s entire body of work – we see Le Dejeuner as the first indicator of his genius. That may be true – not as a painter but as a marketer.

 

For me, this is more like it. Very few painters can use paint like Manet – in which it is equally and simultaneously both pigment and illusion. Frans Hals, Berthe Morisot, John Singer Sargent, Lucien Freud – not many.

 

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