Fine UX: flat design in the late 1800's
How Manet’s style has more in common with iOS7 than you might think
Manet’s portrayal of a naked contemporary woman in Luncheon on the Grass caused such a scandal in Parisian society that it was rejected from the Salon of 1863 and relegated away to the Salon des Refusés. Yet if viewers focus too intently on the controversy surrounding the subject of Manet’s work, they often miss another story: the innovative style that he was developing in paintings like Luncheon. Manet’s style not only formed the foundation of abstract art; it also emphasizes the same principles we see today in the trend towards flat UI.
To understand how radical Manet was, let us first consider another nude from the same year: Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus. In the painting, Cabanel gives dimension to his Venus’s body with subtle gradations of color. As the blackest blacks and whitest whites appear at her edges, those extremes are mediated by how meticulously the painter blends the intervening tones together: every highlight and shade transitions seamlessly into the next. Taken all at once, the full range of tones in Cabanel’s work give form to the Venus’s skeleton and muscles turning beneath her flesh.The effect is a fully modeled body that we interpret to exist within the space of the painting.
Compare the Birth of Venus to this close-up of Manet’s nude. Gone is any attention to blending: the model’s entire side is one solid block of color, interrupted only by the sharp black lines that indicate the creases of her stomach. Manet has made no attempt to give dimension to his forms in the way that the Venus is modeled, and he is perfectly content to let the contrasting tones of skin and shadow sit side by side with no progression in between.When contemporaries saw this treatment of the body, they complained that Manet’s woman looked too “flat” — in essence, they missed the tricks that Cabanel’s painting played on their eyes to make them believe that they were looking at a fully dimensional body.
These tricks of the eye—called trompe-l’oeil—had formed the core of the European aesthetic since the Renaissance, when artists figured out how to convey depth with one-point perspective. From this development onward, the art world believed that paintings should serve as a realistic “window onto the world,” and that artists’ skills should be measured by how well they gave off the illusion of space. It wasn’t until Manet’s time that artists began to question whether the aesthetic of one medium (nature) should constrain the possibilities of another (paint).
Within this framework we can interpret Manet’s refusal to add progressive shades of light and dark to his model’s body as his way of questioning the relation of his painting to nature. In Luncheon on the Grass, he frees himself from any obligation to reproduce life by creating a woman so flat she could only exist within the context of his canvas. When his successors looked back on his work, they realized that they too could create entirely new, non-referential paintings whose content was completely distinct from nature. This realization eventually gave rise to the abstract art movement and pieces like Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground (which happens to look a lot like Medium’s logo).
That nineteenth century artists were asking themselves whether they should refer to nature in their paintings parallels our contemporary discussions of skeumorphism’s place on our glass interfaces. When we have flat surfaces, why should we populate our interfaces with rounded buttons that can only ever mimic dimensionality? When we can read gestures, why should we confine user input to the push of a button?
I won’t go too far into a discussion of skeumorphism here; the rise of iOS7 and Window’s Metro design have prompted that conversation far enough. I just want to make the point that we can look to the discourses surrounding fine art to challenge how we interact with our technology today—even that art is from one hundred years go.
A recent tool by the Museum of Modern Art shows how prolific and interconnected the development of abstract art was after its artists were fully unencumbered from having to reproduce nature. When our UI designs are fully freed from aesthetic references to the analog world of buttons, I hope the number of new paradigms for interaction will be as abundant as twentieth-century art.
