Art that makes you go OH MY GOD YOU CAN’T DO THAT
Repurposed from my spiffy email newsletter.
Bad Art = Art or creative output that someone has deemed worthy of attack for any variety of reasons, usually because it has broken some real or imagined boundary. Visit the Bad Art Project page.
Let’s talk about a painting that totally freaked people out in 1863. I mean, freaked.
Here it is. It’s Le Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe by Edouard Manet. And it’s considered to have touched off much of modern art.
You might be thinking, okay, it’s a little peculiar, and the perspective might be kind of weird, but what’s the big deal? Nudes have been in paintings forever. As have baskets of fruit. And trees. And fellows trying to look intellectual. So?
Well.
Manet hauled off and took a classical-looking nude, and just put her IN the picture WITH the clothed guys. Like, she was WITH them. Not being looked at BY them. Sitting there. It totally messed with everybody’s context for nudes up to that point. It said, hey, people in paintings are people, and you can show them whatever way. Together. In a painting.
This was A BIG DEAL.
Yes, you’re right. Up to then, it had been completely okay for fully-clothed museum or salon-goers to stand there and gawk at paintings of nudes on the wall, or stare at statues of folks who didn’t have a stitch on. But to place clothed everyday people and classical nudes in the same picture plane, the same context, that messed people up. Those two things weren’t supposed to be together. It implied that — the model was another human person. That she was real, not an allegory, not a symbol.
That weirded people out in a big way. It broke a major mental barrier.
How about the woman who modeled for this painting? Her name was Victorine Meurent. She appears in a number of Manet’s most famous paintings. He found her coming out of a music gig somewhere. And, she painted too. There’s only one known surviving painting of hers, but it’s beautiful. Here it is, it’s called Palm Sunday:
In stage, it’s called “breaking the fourth wall” if an actor turns and directly addresses the audience or camera. It shatters a boundary that we mentally put there.
Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe broke the fourth wall of classical nudes. Manet destroyed the boundary between the model and the model’s personhood. Victorine Meurent helped him to do it. As did Manet’s brother and brother-in-law, who modeled for the two men.
So it might not look like a world-changing painting today, but boy, was it. Art affects how we think. It puts our ideas outside of us so they can run around. Manet really did a number on people with this painting. I’m glad he did. (It’s always fun to remember that all art was once modern art, a point made by Jerry Saltz in his excellent piece, “How to be an Artist” in New York Magazine.)
May you have a nice picnic somewhere, may the good news be yours, won’t you be my neighbor?
— Betsy
