Perspectives on Manet by Therese Dolan (review)

Therese Dolan's multi-authored investigation of Manet uses diversity as a critical strategy, approaching Manet though contrasting perspectives. Two comparable volumes from the 1990s — 12 Views of Manet's Bar, edited by Bradford R. Collins (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Manet's 'Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe', edited by Paul Hayes Tucker (Cambridge University Press, 1998)—each assembled a series of interpretations by a team of scholars, but of a single work by Manet. Dolan offers us nine essays that range over a wide spectrum of Manet's output, as well as recent critical responses. In the final chapter, 'Reconstructing Manet', Stephen Z. Levine gives an overview of the divergent and still hugely influential accounts of Manet by T. J. Clark (1984) and Michael Fried (1996), each setting new parameters. Where Clark investigated modernity as central to Manet, with Marxian attention to social dynamics, Fried pointed to modernism and the 'facingness' through which a Manet painting involves the beholder. Issues surrounding nineteenth-century French realism recur in the collection. Nancy Locke, in 'Manet and the Ethics of Realism', develops Stendhal's '[l]a peinture n'est que de la morale construite', as quoted by Baudelaire, in relation to Foucault and Sartre, and Antoine Compagnon. Jane Mayo Roos, in 'Manet and the Impressionist Moment', gives us an Impressionist modern-life context but uses Barthes in leading us away from mimesis; a painting such as Manet's 'Le Chemin de fer', she demonstrates, involves us in uncertainty and discontinuity. In 'Zola's Manets' Robert Lethbridge leads us to the heart of this realist debate, focusing on Manet's 1868 portrait of Zola and the 1900 photograph made of it by Zola himself. Manet's uses of artists of the past are present throughout Dolan's volume, as are links with more contemporary painters. Suzanne Singletary's 'Manet and Whistler: Baudelairean Voyage' brings rich contextual comparisons, and James H. Rubin, in 'Manet's Heroic Corpses and the Politics of their Time', unravels Manet's involvement with Daumier and Delacroix in depictions of the events of 1870-71. Marilyn R. Brown teasingly reminds us of Collins's 12 Views in her 'Yet Another Look at the Bar: Manet, Duranty, and Double View', relating the mirror and its effects in Manet's Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1882) to Lacanian theory and to the puzzles of the doppelgänger. Other contributions concentrate on analysis of single works: Susan Sidlauskas on Manet's portrait of Victorine Meurent (1861-62), and Dolan's own essay, 'Manet's Synesthetic Portrait: Composing Cabaner', tracing musical execution and technique in Manet's pastel portrait of a composer close to symbolist poets. Taken as a whole, Dolan's volume uses diversity to be inconclusive, subscribing to the prevalent view today that Manet's work simultaneously invites and subverts attributions of meaning. The beholder seizes on an apparent surfeit of significance, which adds up to patterns of contradiction and uncertainty, and a kind of irony. Dolan does not propose an overall change of direction in Manet studies, but she has assembled fresh examples of the problems of interpretation latent in Manet's works and the range of critical response they continue to provoke.