Monet vs. Manet

Monet's series on the Rouen Cathedral should be enough to clinch this one.

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere-edouard-manet.jpg

i don't know. manet was more interested in people. this is a subtley heartbreaking painting that has kept art historians busy for the past 100-odd years

The central figure stands before a mirror, although critics—accusing Manet of ignorance of perspective and alleging various impossibilities in the painting—have debated this point since the earliest reviews were published. In 2000, however, a photograph taken from a suitable point of view of a staged reconstruction was shown to reproduce the scene as painted by Manet. According to this reconstruction, "the conversation that many have assumed was transpiring between the barmaid and gentleman is revealed to be an optical trick—the man stands outside the painter's field of vision, to the left, and looks away from the barmaid, rather than standing right in front of her.

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/manet_bar/looking_glass.html

for those who are interested. i love that the conversation is an illusion.

it's manet for me

and that's cool, treeship. i never got that from the painting before

this is the key part of that effect, i think

As it appears, the observer should be standing to the right and closer to the bar than the man whose reflection appears at the right edge of the picture. This is an unusual departure from the central point of view usually assumed when viewing pictures drawn according to perspective.

the viewer would be standing well to the right of the central figure, even though it doesn't seem that way. kind of a hallucinatory, panoramic quality, and you end up being even more drawn to the central figure as the anchor of the scene. at work so i can't explain this more elegantly but it's cool

Manet, but Monet was immensely influential on modernist writers.

I had a print of Impression (Sunrise) on my college dorm wall. It’s probably still my favorite painting. How tiny the figure in the foreground is compared to the smokestacks in the distance. The palpable haze. No image, for me, collapses the distance between the 19th century and our era like that one, not even a photo. Ironically it was his interest in formal questions—how to capture visual experience, versus how to represent an era, which is more Manet’s bag—that allowed him to achieve this in such a loose oil sketch.

So yeah, Monet is the profound artist in my view, but I want to give Manet his due as well. He was a different kind of artist—there were things he wanted to say, whereas I think Monet’s primary devotion was to the art of painting.

I don't have an opinion on either of them actually

Lots of other lesser impressionists used muddy colours or went the other way like that tart Renoir and their work didn't give that feeling of genuine exploration of fleeting colour and light conditions you get with a Monet. Manet doesn't seem interesting enough to me, beyond his "scandalous" or "makes the bourgeois (of that era) think" type shite I just can't even be bothered engaging with.

btw I recommend Jean Renoir's book about his Pierre-Auguste, released in a lovely NYROB edition a decade ago.

I think there is a great deal of empathy in his work even thoiugh, clearly, there are massive issues with objectification involved in depicting prostitutes in order to shock the bourgeoise. I dont think he portrayed them *just* to do that though. Their gazes are often pretty confrontational—they confront you as people, which is more than can be said for most of the depictions of women in the academic painting of the time.

Oh yeah, i want to read that alfred! On my list

I don't think Manet's formal and painterly achievement was any less than Monet's. He was a radical stylist in his time.

http://everypainterpaintshimself.com/article_images_new/LONGC.jpg

When this girl at the art museum asked me whom I liked better, Monet or Manet, I said, "I like mayonnaise." She just stared at me, so I said it again, louder. Then she left. I guess she went to try to find some mayonnaise for me.

bleh

xxp

it's all done in the studio though, which was not very rad - unless you are actually Caravaggio!

as Billy Wilder once said, "Wyler, Wilder? Manet, Monet?"

manet was an innovator, stylistically, and his brush was even looser than courbet's, bringing realism ever closer to impressionism but.... come on. of the two, monet was the one who was more interested in the visual world. there is the painting monet did of his wife on her deathbed that is just like, a wild swirl of color. he said that in his grief his disordered mind immediately just wanted to focus on the colors in the room rather than acknowledge what had happened. color was his refuge.

xp jmm

I had a print of Impression (Sunrise) on my college dorm wall. It’s probably still my favorite painting. How tiny the figure in the foreground is compared to the smokestacks in the distance. The palpable haze. No image, for me, collapses the distance between the 19th century and our era like that one, not even a photo. Ironically it was his interest in formal questions—how to capture visual experience, versus how to represent an era, which is more Manet’s bag—that allowed him to achieve this in such a loose oil sketch.

― Trϵϵship, Monday, December 10, 2018 11:36 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i rly like this post, treeship -- it's one of my favorite paintings too, and i think its radicalness still comes across: you can easily imagine how startling it must have been to see in 1872. i've been meaning to find a good print of it for years.

a friend in the bay area texted me a picture of the smoke-filled sky, with the sun just an orange blot, a few weeks ago, and i confess my guilty instant gut-reaction thought was not "oh god that must be scary to be in" but "oh hey that looks just like the sun in impression: sunrise."

the pro Manet examples so far are all really hackneyed A level art staples, despite some posters being wowed by them! I did A level art night classes in another lifetime, and am underwhelmed by ILX tonight I'm afraid!

you think a bar at the folies-bergère is hackneyed?

I'm underwhelmed by myself as usual of course, but I thought I love art might be a bit superior to this!

i'm voting monet, but manet has his masterpieces imo, and he does let us see a different side of paris.

i do think the ennui evinced by his figures can seem a little clichéd now.. sorta like, "lost in translation"-ish, portraying an idea of modernity that we have seen so much. however, some of these paintings are over 150 years old!

I have a fondness for Manet but I just image searched and god he was terrible pre Impressionism:
https://arthistoryproject.com/site/assets/files/6085/edouard_manet_-_fishing-la_peche_1863_oil-on-canvas_7680x12320mm_metropolitan_museum_of_art.jpg

what year was that?

Manet, but then I like indistinct paintings of nature

(Monet, I meant, sigh)

xxp Treesh 1869 I think? Unless there was an Édouard Manet senior.

1863 rather

huh that's not that earlier than like olympia. but yeah, i agree it's trash

huh, same year as Déjeuner sur l'herbe, does not compute. Must have been a crappy sketch.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Manet all the way Manet!

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Unexpected!

I actually think Monet was the more radical artist but I think he suffers from poster prints of his work being hung in all sorts of lobbies.

on reflection, i actually think it is rather absurd that manet won this

Monet was better on reflections

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2219118120

= Monet & Turner's impressionism was just a realistic depiction of the smog they saw.

- for certain paintings

i like the scientific thoroughness they bring to the table but it seems like an uncontroversial thesis.

Plus Monet had cataracts

OK I see the authors address that issue in the paper

I went to the Courtauld the other day, for the first time in ages - I'd forgotten that The Bar at the Folies-Bergere was there. It was a shock to find myself face-to-face with it, and there's something uncanny about seeing the original of an image that well-known, it's hard to look at it properly, felt like staring at one of those images of a human face with four eyes, or something.

Yeah going to the Musee d’Orsay was one after the other “I know that one” followed by major discoveries (to me) like Monet’s painting of his dead wife—just after her death.

I just saw a Degas v. Manet contest exhibition - apparently they were very competitive with each other irl - which Degas narrowly won (imo). A pity Degas was an anti-Semitic dick though