Amazon.com Review
The nude women in
Olympia and
Déjeuner sur l'herbe and the other self-possessed figures who stare out at the viewer from Édouard Manet's paintings have long been fascinating mysteries to art historians. Other aspects of Manet's work--figures with implausible postures, strange perspectives--have been equally baffling. Add the artist's propensity for portraying street people of his era in a dreamlike manner hardly consistent with the realism you'd expect from "the painter of modern life," and you have the material for a rich vein of speculative academic writing.
In this stiffly written book, Nancy Locke, an associate professor of art history at Wayne State University, proposes a new way of looking at many of these works. Without denying their importance as reflections of society at large, she argues that they also reflect psychosexual aspects of Manet's personal life. Locke attempts to build a case for what she calls "a Freudian drama, complete with Oedipal desires, dilemmas of illegitimacy, and real and imagined deaths and absences" based on a number of intriguing but shaky-sounding suppositions.
The "family romance" centers around Suzanne Leenhoff, whom Édouard's well-to-do father, Auguste, hired as a teacher for his sons. When Édouard was 20, she gave birth to a child named Léon, whom she passed off as her younger brother. The artist, who married Leenhoff more than a decade later, portrayed her in such paintings as La Nymphe surprise. It has long been assumed that Léon, who also appears in several of Manet's works, was Édouard's son. But Locke thinks Auguste was the father, and marshals circumstantial evidence ranging from contemporary letters to provisions of the Napoleonic Code. Of course, the value of Locke's theories rests on their ability to give us useful insights about Manet's paintings. A more forthright and persuasive writer might charm us with the sheer novelty of her ideas--or more airtight arguments. Is La Nymphe Manet's "attempt to imagine his father's desire for the woman who was his mistress"? This reader is not convinced. --Cathy Curtis
From Publishers Weekly
The rich bibliography surrounding 19th-century painter Edouard Manet includes stimulating books by Anne Coffin Hanson and T.J. Clark that describe Manet's revolutionary and inventive approaches to art with imaginative interpretations. Nancy Locke, an associate professor of art history at Wayne State University, here weighs in with a psychoanalytical view of the paintings, based less on Freud than on more recent French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Unlike more formalist art criticism, which focuses on shapes and brush technique to the exclusion of content, her basis for this approach is that Manet often used members of his family as models, such as his illegitimate son, who pops up in a variety of poses in the artworks. The result, divided into chapters like "Family Romances," "Manet Pere et Fils," and "The Promises of a Face," is presented in deadly solemn academic prose, but with a common sense that shines out from behind her Gallic forebears: "For Manet, every act of painting was grounded in resistance to everything for which his family name stood: there was the authority of the judge [his father], the property, the income, the receptions, tradition, the family honor." Balancing personal influences with social meanings, the paintings have a variety of resonances, which Locke brings out in a language mainly suited for academic art historians, although civilian art lovers may want to give it a try for its unusual perspectives. Illus. (May)Forecast: University libraries are this book's natural market, and the price may well prove prohibitive elsewhere. But the volume's idyllic and well-laid-out cover, and its biography-based title could attract some high-end browsers.
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