The painting features a nude woman casually lunching with two fully dressed men. Her body is starkly lit and she stares directly at the viewer. The two men, dressed as young dandies, seem to be engaged in conversation, ignoring the woman. In front of them, the woman's clothes, a basket of fruit, and a round loaf of bread are displayed, as in a still life. In the background, a lightly clad woman bathes in a stream. Too large in comparison with the figures in the foreground, she seems to float above them. The roughly painted background lacks depth, giving the viewer the impression that the scene is not taking place outdoors, but in a studio. This impression is reinforced by the use of broad "studio" light, which casts almost no shadows. The man on the right wears a flat hat with a tassel, a kind normally worn indoors. A nude woman casually lunching with fully dressed men would reasonably be expected to be an affront to audiences' sense of propriety.
The subject and composition of Manet's work connects to precedents of the Italian renaissance, a type well represented in the Louvre. As Émile Zola observed in his text Édouard Manet, 1867:
"This nude woman has scandalized the public, who see only her in the canvas. My God! What indecency: a woman without the slightest covering between two clothed men! That has never been seen. And this belief is a gross error, for in the Louvre there are more than fifty paintings in which are found mixes of persons clothed and nude. But no one goes to the Louvre to be scandalized."
Perhaps it was the translation of these precedents into a setting that reflects uncomfortable truths within modernity that was most troubling to its contemporary audience.
One interpretation of the work is that it depicts the rampant prostitution in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the western outskirts of Paris. This prostitution was common knowledge in Paris, but was considered a taboo subject for a painting. Indeed, the Bois de Boulogne is to this day known as a pick-up place for prostitutes and illicit sexual activity after dark, just as it had been in the 19th century. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, "The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne," is a 1945 French film directed by Robert Bresson. It is a modern adaptation of a section of Denis Diderot's Jacques le fataliste (1796) that tells the story of a man who is tricked into marrying a prostitute.
Milan Kundera dramatised the novel in 1971, under the title Jacques et son maître. In his essay The Art of the Novel, Kundera argues that Jacques le Fataliste is one of the masterpieces of the form.Night Time in the Bois de Boulogne
Interactions? non-interactions? of the figures in Manet's painting?
What many critics find shocking about this painting is the interaction, or lack thereof, between the three main subjects in the foreground and the woman bathing in the background. There are many contrasting qualities to the painting that juxtapose and distance the female nude from the other two male subjects. For example, the feminine versus the masculine, the naked versus the clothed, and the white color palette versus the dark color palette creates a clear social difference between the men and the woman.
Additionally, some viewers are intrigued by the questions raised by the gaze of the nude woman. It is indeterminable whether she is challenging or accepting the viewer, looking past the viewer, engaging the viewer, or even looking at the viewer at all. This encounter identifies the gaze as a figure of the painting itself, as well as the figure object of the woman's gaze. (Armstrong, Carol (1998). "To Paint, To Point, To Pose" Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. pp. 93–111.)
Le Bain (an early title for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe) was therefore, in many ways, a defiant painting. Manet was cheekily reworking Raphael, turning a mythological scene from one of the most celebrated engravings of the Renaissance into a tableau of some dubious bourgeois Parisian holidaymakers.
The subject was perhaps the allegory of poetry and music: the two women would be an imaginary apparition representing the ideal beauty, stemming from the two men's fantasy and inspiration. The woman with the glass vase would be the muse of tragic poetry, while the other one would be that of the pastoral poetry. Of the two playing men, the one with the lute would represent the exalted lyric poetry, the other being an ordinary lyricist, according to the distinction made by Aristotle in his Poetics.
Or, is this possible allegory, like so much classic subject matter, a highly functional pre-text for an erotic juxtaposition of clothed male bodies and naked female bodies? Knowing something about the intended audience is usually revealing as to possible intents and purposes for the imagery, but relying on conjecture leaves such questions open.
The female "nude" "I"
Academic art history tends to ignore the sexuality of the male nude, speaking instead of form and composition. The first free-standing, life-sized sculpture of an entirely nude woman was the Aphrodite of Cnidus created ca. 360–340 BCE by Praxiteles. The statue would have been polychromed, and was so lifelike that it even aroused men sexually, as witnessed by the tradition that a young man broke into the temple at night and attempted to copulate with the statue, leaving a stain on it.
This is classic "clickbait"!
Should we ban sex robots while we have the chance? asks Jenny Kleeman in the Guardian opinion piece Mon 25 Sep 2017. AI sex dolls are on their way, with potentially sinister social consequences:
The issue with sex robots in general – not just hypothetical ones programmed to have a “resist” function – is how their existence will affect how human beings interact with each other. Sex robots are different from sex dolls and sex toys because they have AI. More than just a mechanism for giving you an orgasm, a sex robot is designed to be a substitute partner: a vibrator doesn’t laugh at your jokes and remember your birthday, but Abyss Creations’ Harmony model can.
Up front . . . . . . more "clickbait"
The "Audrey" Sex Robot
. . . and back!
Perhaps the most important question to ask is why there is a market for sex robots in the first place. Why do some people find the idea of a partner without autonomy so attractive? Until we have the answer to that, we’ll need to prepare ourselves for the inevitable rise of the sex robots.
The female "nude" "II"
Rarely seen during the Middle Ages, the female nude reappeared in Italy in the 15th century. Subsequently, eroticism became more emphatic in paintings such as Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (ca. 1510), which situated the reclining nude in an idyllic landscape.
Up front . . . "clickbait" through "re-framing"?
Still more Venuses this year... always Venuses!... as if there were any women built like that!
From 'Sketches from the Salon,' published in Le Charivari, May 10, 1865
These works inspired countless reclining female nudes for centuries afterwards. The annual glut of paintings of idealized nude women in the 19th-century Paris Salon was satirized by Honoré Daumier in a lithograph.
According to Proust, he and Manet had been lounging by the Seine as they spotted a woman bathing in the river. This prompted Manet to say, "I copied Giorgione's women, the women with musicians. It's black that painting. The ground has come through. I want to redo it and do it with a transparent atmosphere with people like those we see over there."
Who are they? A family portrait?
The figures of this painting are a testament to how deeply connected Manet was to Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Some assume that the landscape of the painting is meant to be l'Île Saint-Ouen, which was just up the Seine from his family property in Gennevilliers. Manet often used real models and people he knew as reference during his creation process. The female nude is thought to be Victorine Meurent, the woman who became his favorite and frequently portrayed model, who later was the subject of Olympia. The male figure on the right was based on a combination of his two brothers, Eugène and Gustave Manet. The other man is based on his brother-in-law, Dutch sculptor Ferdinand Leenhoff.
An artist and model, looking at the artist and looking at us?
Victorine is Manet's favourite model. Victorine is not anyone's muse. Victorine is an artist looking at an artist, and, by extension, the audience of this art at any multiple ponts in space and time. Her act of looking is direct, disabusing, undeceiving and up front.
. . . et ils rient . . . . . . and they laugh . . .
Manet submitted his painting of a luncheon on the grass to the Salon of 1863. It was rejected. The Salon was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art event in the Western world.
Manet's painting was not the only artwork by a leading "modern" artist to be rejected that year. The 1863 the Salon jury had refused two thirds of the paintings presented, including the works of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and Johan Jongkind.
The rejected artists and their friends protested, and the protests reached Emperor Napoleon III. The Emperor's tastes in art were traditional; he commissioned and bought works by artists such as Alexandre Cabanel and Franz Xaver Winterhalter, but he was also sensitive to public opinion. His office issued a statement:
"Numerous complaints have come to the Emperor on the subject of the works of art which were refused by the jury of the Exposition. His Majesty, wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints, has decided that the works of art which were refused should be displayed in another part of the Palace of Industry."More than a thousand visitors a day visited the Salon des Refusés. The journalist Émile Zola reported that visitors pushed to get into the crowded galleries where the refused paintings were hung, and the rooms were full of the laughter of the spectators.
Daumier - The Critic
Though the peculiarity of the combination of one female nude with three clothed figures sparked mixed responses, the lack of interaction of the figures in addition to the lack of engagement by the nude woman provoked laughter instead of offense. Laughter as a response represses the sexual tension and makes the scene rather unthreatening to the viewer in the end. This kind of critical attention also legitimized the emerging avant-garde in painting, and Manet in particular.
Manet continued to use Meurent as a model until the early 1870s, when she began taking art classes and they became estranged, as she was drawn to the more academic style of painting that Manet opposed. In 1875, Meurent began studying with the portraitist Étienne Leroy. The following year, Meurent first submitted work of her own at the Salon and was accepted. Manet's own submissions were rejected by the jury that year.
Bourgeoise de Nuremberg au XVIe siècle, Meurent's entry at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1879, was hung in the same room as the entry by Manet. Work by Meurent also was included in the 1885 and 1904 exhibitions. In all, Meurent exhibited in the Salon six times. She also continued to support herself by modelling through the 1880s for Norbert Goeneutte, an artist best known for his etchings, and for Toulouse-Lautrec. Meurent was inducted into the Société des Artistes Français in 1903, with the support of Charles Hermann-Leon and Tony Robert-Fleury, the Société's founder. By 1906 Meurent had left Paris for the suburb of Colombes, where she lived with a woman named Marie Dufour for the remainder of her life.
Victorine Meurent
Clothed
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