Foucault's take on Manet

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Manet and the Object of Painting

Michel Foucault (introduced by Nicholas Bourriaud and translated by Matthew Barr)

French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84) is known for his wide ranging interests, writing on history, sociology and politics, but he also turned his attention to cultural studies. Out of this interest came his essay on Manet, first presented as a lecture in 1971.

Foucault’s first topic is the way that he sees Manet as collapsing deep space and drawing our attention to the literal canvas shape itself. Indeed, in discussing  The Port of Bordeaux (1871), Foucault sees the axes of masts, spires, jibs and hulls as ‘repetitions inside the canvas of the horizontal and vertical axes which frame the canvas’, sounding to all intents and purposes like the American critic Clement Greenberg describing the way in which, in Barnett Newman’s work, the picture edge is repeated inside the painting. Indeed, Foucault makes a direct comparison between the Manet painting and Mondrian’s tree variations ‘at the very birth of abstract painting’. When Foucault goes further and suggests that the painted horizontals and verticals also represent the very weave of the canvas, suggesting the material properties of the artwork itself, his words sound like the outlook of the short-lived 1969 Support/Surfaces group of French painters, such as Claude Viallat (b. 1936) and Louis Cane (b. 1943), who believed that the subject matter of painting was of secondary importance to its methods and materials.

Foucault’s second theme is Manet’s use of frontal lighting, the effect of which is to reduce the space inside the canvas and emphasize that the lighting is falling externally on the work. His third and last theme is ‘The Place of the Viewer’, which he explores via one painting only,  A Bar at the Folies-Bergère  (1881–2). Foucault claims that, in emphasizing ‘the picture as materiality, the picture as something coloured which clarifies an external light and in front of which, or about which, the viewer revolves’, Manet ‘reinvents (or perhaps he invents) the picture-object’, the rupture that led to the emergence of modern art. In  The Archaeology of Knowledge  (1969) Foucault looked quizzically at the construction of the object of study and its conditions, and so it is vaguely shocking to see him delivering such a formalist teleological view of art history, ignoring the study of imagery, reception and context which was beginning to transform the study of Manet’s work

Foucault’s actual exploration of artworks is often much more interesting than the formalist categories discussed imply. The way in which Manet handles internal and external light sources in Luncheon on the Grass (1863) is well discussed, and the frontal lighting used in  Olympia  (1863) is linked suggestively to an effect of violence and spectator’s responsibility for the fact of prostitution. There is a fascinating section on the way in which The Balcony (1868-9) inverts the Renaissance convention of coloured figures versus tonal architecture and removes the light from the interior of the picture to its outside. His exploration of what questions we ask in order to make sense of where we are and what we are looking at in  A Bar at the Folies-Bergère  is as intriguing as his discussion of Velasquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things (London, 1970), and he even attributes to the viewer a sense of malaise that follows the painting’s initial enchantment as we feel unable to locate ourselves securely. One could ask,  ‘sense of malaise about what exactly, within what world-order, and what is the effect and meaning of the waitress’ withholding of herself from such transactional communication’?

Elsewhere, the play between what is being seen inside the picture and what is being gazed at outside the painting is nicely handled in his discussions of  The Waitress (1879) and  Saint-Lazare Station  (1872–3. Manet’s swivelling of gazes and interrogatory looks questioning the spectator can easily be related to a radical republican stance of making the artwork operate to bring into being a questioning spectator within a critical public sphere. We are left with the nagging feeling that Foucault’s analysis of Manet’s manipulation of some basic formal conventions of painting has not been connected enough to the imagery’s connotations and that the effects produced are left ungrounded historically. Indeed it is a function of Manet’s engagement with Realism that his wrenching around of the mimetic decorum of the Renaissance tradition should fuse with socially unsettling suggestions. Foucault’s archaeology of a formal continuity from Manet to abstraction needs to be resisted in order (using Foucault’s own words against himself here) ‘to restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence’.

This English translation of Foucault’s 1967 lecture on Manet is definitely for the cultural studies historian intrigued with the full Foucault archive or the specialist art historian keen to test if Foucault was able to make any significant contribution to Manet studies. Nicolas Bourriaud’s introduction places the essay within the context of Foucault’s development but does not explain sufficiently the story of the text’s re-emergence.

Manet and the Object of Painting by Michel Foucault (Introduction by Nicholas Bourriaud, translated by Matthew Barr) is published by Tate Publishing, London. 80 pp., 13 colour illus, £12.99. ISBN 978-1-85437-845-3