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Formal Analysis of Edouard Manet's Skating, 1877

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Formal Analysis of Edouard Manet's Skating, 1877 Claire Giddings Formal Analysis of Edouard Manet’s Skating, 1877 The 1877 work, Skating, is a testament to Edouard Manet’s mastery of revealing the truth of his times and his vision through brushwork, picture surface, composition, color and light. The work is a commentary on the social and leisure practices of nineteenth century Parisians. The formal elements of Manet’s work speak to what it was like to experience this moment of Parisian middle class entertainment. He paints the scene so as to achieve “neither the details of things, nor the air around them, but the ‘effect’ they produced” (Hanson, 19). He goes beyond description to achieve the entire experience of the moment in the painting. This painting, included in the impressionist collection at the Fogg Art Museum, portrays a woman strolling with a child beside an ice rink. Positioned in the center of the canvas, she gazes slightly to the viewer's right, away from figures in the background. The crowd around the rink has come to socialize and watch the skaters on a clear day. The placement of key figures behind the woman and child are important in revealing Manet’s social perspective. The figure cropped in half by the left edge of the canvas is a flaneur, the quintessential nineteenth century man with dark top hat and coat and an observant eye. A woman in dark dress looks out to the viewer on the right side. Manet’s work entices the viewer through formal elements such as the steeply slanted background that pushes the central figure forward and the cropping of the edges, suggesting that the viewer is part of the action of the painting, and not just an outside observer. The other figures on her sides are sliced in half by the edge of the painting, much like Japanese prints or a snap shot. The flaneur’s “figure is cut in half by the frame, a device borrowed from Japanese prints” (Rewald, History, 403). The center of focus is the woman while the darkly dressed crowd in the back seems to melt into itself and fade away. The picture is very dark, which increases the contrast of the extremely intricate black and white design on her dress and the paleness of her gloves. She draws attention to herself with her clothes. The use of brighter light in the foreground, particularly on the central woman's face, compared with the somewhat shadowy figures in the background serve to emphasize her role as the subject of the painting. Manet’s subjects were not always individual women in modern Paris. “After the Franco-Prussian war, the siege of Paris and the terrible days of the Commune, there is a visible change in the themes and tenor of Manet’s painting” (Bareau, 65). The political troubles of the 1860’s affected Manet’s work and subject matter. “The apparent emotional emptiness exhibited by the Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867) emerges more clearly as an expression of this modern consciousness” (Rubin, 75). After the hard years of political turmoil and the failures of Maximilian, Manet acquired “a new preoccupation with urban life and its different types. ‘Types’ and ‘portraits’ became virtually interchangeable, for example in his depictions of ... Henriette Hauser ... as the beauty at The Skating Rink.” (Wilson-Bareau, 159). Henriette Hauser was an actress and mistress to the Prince of Orange. She is shown here as a very fashionable woman at a place where one would go to see and be seen (Eitner, 318). Manet chose as his focus for the 1870’s and after the leisure activities of modern Parisians. He painted outdoors and scenes of cafes, terraces, brasseries, gardens and other social gathering places. The models Manet used were “men and women who actually belonged to the society whose normal existence he wished to describe and who, by their facial types and expressions, their bearing and dress, gave authenticity to his scenes from modern life” (Eitner, 318). “If Manet's art has captured something of the modern consciousness, it can only have done so because that consciousness was Manet’s own” (Rubin, 80). Manet was part of the Parisian bourgeoisie; and his subject matter reflects this. In Skating, Manet uses his knowledge of the social workings of nineteenth century middle class Parisians to portray a problem faced by an onlooker at a social gathering place such as the skating rink. The viewer is imagined as walking past the central figure and is confronted with the task of figuring out what the appropriate social response towards her would be. The response would depend on the viewer's knowledge of the criteria for inclusion in the different Parisian social classes and in which social class the viewer is meant to be. Manet gives us all the clues we need to figure this out, but also conveys the sense of uncertainty and urgency required of the decision, as the viewer has only a moment to react before the woman has passed by. The urgency of the moment is portrayed in the use of visible, swirling brush strokes that mesh the background figures into one another and reveal the movement of the skaters on the ice. “As Manet came into closer contact with the impressionists, his style became even looser, more marked with the signs of subjectivity than before” (Rubin, 124). The color combinations dabbed side by side in the background and sky heighten the sense of urgency and movement. The palette for Skating is similar to Music at the Tuillieries, 1862, where the “somber-black, ...green, ...brown, dominates – but into the subdued background the artist has introduced what amounts to pure spots or patches of a light Prussian blue, of a powerful English red, and a richness of pale yellow, and it is clear that these splashes of color lend added movement to the composition” (Sandblad, 23). Both these works use similar techniques to show movement. The viewer is suggested to be a nineteenth century social onlooker. A member of this usually modestly dressed group might consider a woman who seems overdressed in a social gathering place to be overtly sexual, possibly a courtesan and not a respectable woman. Manet knows this and has chosen a subject that takes a little deciphering. The viewer is part of the crowd that has gathered to go skating, or rather, typical of public gatherings at the time, watch others go skating and maybe meet others of the opposite sex. Similar to those in the background and crowd, the viewer is assumed to be either a flaneur or a middle class woman. The figures in the painting help to reveal who the viewer is assumed to be. The woman behind is looking in the direction of the viewer and central figure. One could argue that she may be a parallel for the viewer, another woman to identify with at the social gathering. More plausible is that she is interested in the flaneurs. She turned her head towards the flaneur on the left side of the canvas and shifted her gaze to the viewer. In addition to being the subject of the woman in the background’s gaze, it could also be argued that the viewer is a flaneur because he can identify with the other men in the painting. Behind the central figure, on the left side, is a flaneur skating and checking out the crowd and yet another cut in half by the left side of the picture frame. None of the flaneurs are looking at the viewer, their attentions are elsewhere. They have come to look at beautiful women like the subject of the painting and the woman behind. The central focus of the female figures is further evidence that the viewer is more likely a flaneur. But the viewer is now confronted with giving the appropriate social response to the central figure. Is she possibly a courtesan or a respectable woman? “Increasingly in his paintings of the 1870’s, the status of the figures in them was ambivalent ... these (social) categories were coming under increasing strain in Paris in these years, particularly in questions of class and sexual morality: in the status of the bourgeois ... and in the margins of ‘clandestine prostitution’” (Bareau, 16). The social response for a flaneur to a courtesan would be different than to a respectable woman out on a stroll. Details of the painting add confusion to the woman’s social status. The woman is conservatively dressed, although the outfit does stand out. No skin is revealed, she is wearing fine gloves and a respectable hat. Her pose is very modest, nothing suggestive, with her arms close to her body and her gaze off to the side. She is not making eye contact with the viewer. The expression on her face is one of innocence and sophistication, not seduction. And most confusing is the fact that the woman is holding a child by the hand. It would be unusual for a courtesan to go to a social gathering place like a skating rink with a child. Manet uses very loose brushwork with only suggestions of a child’s arm and face in the lower left corner of the painting. “A lot like Japanese art of the best period: only he and they are capable of suggesting a mouth or ears with a single stroke, the rest of the face modeling itself by the accuracy of these indications” (Higonnet, 204). These details might lead the viewer to see the woman as a mother figure. In contrast, the woman behind the central figure may be more sexually promiscuous.
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