Édouard Manet, La Lecture (1869)

Édouard Manet, La Lecture (1869), Oil on Canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

La Lecture (The Reading) is worthy of consideration from different viewpoints. At one level, it was consequential in the sense that its creation was influenced by another artist and it in turn influenced the creation of other works. Manet was said to have been influenced by Whistler, in particular his Symphony in White, No. 1, which made a study of white on white, a bold flaunting of the ‘l'art pour l'art’ artistic aesthetic (others have argued that the influence flowed more strongly in the other direction, from Manet to Whistler).

James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1, 1861-62, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Whistler himself was moved by the art of the Pre Raphaelite-Brotherhood (and inter alia, Wilkie Collins’ novel The Woman in White), and to a lesser extent by Courbet’s handling of paint and his avoidance of salon-worthy classical or religious academic art, while the influences that Manet then had on the artists that followed him includes those on Degas, Morisot, Renoir and Matisse. Art, it seems, is never born ex nihilo, it is always more like the progeny of fertile and promiscuous parents. Today, La Lecture is a highlight of the collection at the Musée d'Orsay where doubtless it continues to hold sway in the minds of those visiting to experience ‘great art’ for themselves.

However, at another level, and what interests me more, is the specific depiction in this work of reading aloud and active listening. In contrast to paintings of reading where subjects have their ‘heads in books’, here a fashionably dressed (bourgeois) woman, based on the artist’s wife Suzanne, stares back at the viewer as she listens to the other figure, modelled by their son Leon. Her eyes stare directly towards us while her ear remains cocked towards him. Her attention is divided between disparate realms – ours and his, so that she occupies ambiguously the liminal space between them. Art critics have drawn attention to the impressionistic brushstrokes employed to depict the delicacy of her chiffonerie, its very Whistler-like contoured whites and greys underlining a kind of diaphanous insubstantiality. Yet the airiness of this stuff acts as a metaphor for the evanescence of the spoken word, of fiction, and of the interior world of the mind’s eye.

Leon is relegated to the top right corner and is depicted in profile against a void from which we imagine his voice to emerge, and the left edge of which appears, appropriately like a page torn from a book. The physical tangibility of his left hand leaning on the top of the couch, sits at odds with the tenuity of the sheers and silks that envelop his mother, whose right arm seems floatingly weightless. Leon’s right hand which holds the book, is blurred, as if to underscore the idea of the written and spoken word as unsolid, a will-o'-the-wisp experience, living (on) only in the mind. The two figures occupy different levels; he stands behind her back while she sits listening, and this separation by posture and by spatial positioning conjures a little uneasiness for the viewer witnessing the scene. The painting hypothesizes the real and the imaginary spheres: is he a voice in her head, painted as a sombre thought-bubble, or a real physical presence? Her facing-away from him and his occupation of a separate domain suggests a possible attitudinal separation, caused by the state of their relationship perhaps, their age difference, sex difference, maybe their differing social outlooks. Does his leaning forward suggest the deference of a courtier towards an enthroned monarch commanding his obeisance? Is her pose and attitude similar to the chilling authority on the face of the Portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez (an artist incidentally, whose work Manet revered)? Is his reading to her dutiful? Or is he submitting her to a reading that is uncomfortably modern to her ears? Maybe a novel by Émilie Zola, or a volume of poetry by Baudelaire? Is his speaking therefore an imposition of modernism onto an unreceptive mind?

The curtain diffuses the light from the natural world outside, whose vegetation is mostly kept at bay - the vertical line of the gap in the curtain can’t help but partially admit a view of the real-life greenery beyond the window, as does the distracting obtrusion of the indoor aspidistra on the left. The cleverness of the painting lies in the duality of its subject matter seeming to hover between imaginary and real, between the spoken word and the cognitive visualizing of voiced text so that uncertainty or a fugitive sense of interiority, is created.  Suzanne seems to look to us for reassurance or at least connection, as she endures or enjoys the reading – her absorbed and unfocussed expression, (reminiscent of that in At Bar at the Folies-Bergère) the focal point of the painting, is made uninterpretable to us, despite the warmer tones of the paint used to depict it, and in contrast to the whites behind and beneath her. This indeterminacy is reflected in the nebulousness of the mark-making and in the gauziness of her arms where real flesh and blood lies half-hidden; her corporeality dissolves within the muslin of her dress, the billowing of which is restrained or punctuated by her black sash, like a chapter break line drawn onto and across the whiteness of a page, as if to reflect a pause in her reception of the narrative, an uncomfortable caesura in the cascading of her watery silks, which are otherwise as pliant as her imagination.

In contrast to Dunlop Leslie’s work Alice in Wonderland (which will be the subject of another blogpost),

the conventional practice of parent-reading-to-child is reversed here, albeit that the dissonance created is mitigated by Leon’s relative maturity. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which familial dependency has been upturned and the incongruity is problematic – in other words, is it touching or pitiful?

To a certain extent, enigma was a stock in trade for Manet. The reception given to his infamous Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe for instance, when it was shown at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, was one of bafflement as much as shock and disgust at its impropriety. Viewers were puzzled by the incongruities it presented. La Lecture is not of the same order, but it does pose us questions nevertheless, and makes us look more intently; it makes us try to see through the veils to what lies beneath or within. This peinture claire, made up of a limited tonal range of chalky white and grey pigment, speaks of transparency and opaqueness, revelation and concealment – the imprecision of thought, poetry, prose and paint!

However, what is most clearly conveyed in this portrayal of reading aloud, is the trance-like auto-hallucinogenic condition entered into by willing submission to the spoken word. The alternative mental realm has no material substance, but the power of imagination and fancy can be as real to the receiver as anything palpable, and Manet connects the viewer to this sphere thanks to its gossamer-based metaphors for psychic interiority.