The absinthe drinker

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The Absinthe Drinker
Édouard Manet , 1858/1859 and 1867–1872
181 × 106 cm
oil on canvas
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek , Copenhagen

The Absinthe Drinker (French: Le Buveur d'absinthe ) is considered the first independent painting by the French painter Édouard Manet . The depiction of a person on the fringes of society is influenced by the painter Diego Velázquez and the literary work of Charles Baudelaire . Manet first completed the picture , which was painted in oil on canvas , around 1859 and then reworked it several times before he sold it in 1872. With the help of graphic works by Manet and the results of scientific investigations, the longstanding process of creating the painting can be traced. This also gives examples of how Manet works. The painting is now in the collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen.

prehistory

When Édouard Manet decided to take up the profession of painter towards the end of the 1840s, he did not choose the conservative École des Beaux-Arts for his training , but began his apprenticeship in the studio of the painter Thomas Couture . In 1847 he exhibited his painting The Romans of the Decay at the Paris Salon with great success and enjoyed general recognition at the time. Manet was one of about 30 students in Couture's studio and initially admired his teacher. During his training, which lasted from 1850 to 1856, his relationship with couture deteriorated, however, as Manet repeatedly criticized its teaching methods.

Manet saw his model in French painting less in couture than in realism by Gustave Courbet , about whose funeral in Ornans he said to Antonin Proust : “Yes, yes, this funeral is very good. […] But between us, it's not the right thing yet ”. He had greater respect for Eugène Delacroix . He asked his permission to copy his painting Dantebarke , which he did in 1854.

After his apprenticeship, Manet moved into his own studio and worked, sometimes in parallel, on various paintings that had mythological or biblical themes as motifs. Few paintings by Manet have survived from the 1850s, and it is believed that he himself later destroyed many of his paintings from this period. In addition to a few copies after old masters, such as the Pardo Venus by Titian , often only revised fragments are known of the early pictures. For the first exhibition of one of his works, however, Manet did not choose a history picture, but the contemporary motif of the absinthe drinker .

Image description

The 181 × 106 cm painting The Absinthe Drinker shows a full-length portrait of a young man. He is half standing, half sitting in front of a knee-high wall that runs parallel to the horizontal edges of the picture. The man's body is shown frontally, while the head is turned in half profile to the left edge of the picture. A castor hat pulled wide over the face covers the man's forehead and hair. His face, the right half of which is in shadow, has a short, blond beard.

A deep brown cape covers the body from the neck to the knees. The arms and hands are also hidden here. Only part of the neck and a piece of a white shirt collar can be seen in a small section. The legs are clad in olive-brown trousers, and the person pictured wears brown-black lace-up shoes on his feet. The right foot is turned slightly outwards and stands firmly on the ground. The left leg is slightly raised and stretched forward, while the absinthe drinker touches the floor with his toes. A dark blue stocking is visible between the pants and the shoe.

The wall, painted in shades of gray, separates the yellow floor in the foreground from a dark wall behind the man. In the lower left corner of the picture is a black bottle with its neck facing the edge of the picture. To the right of the man is a conical glass on the wall parapet that is two-thirds filled with a yellowish-green liquid. The displayed scene is illuminated from the right. The shadow of his upper body is clearly visible behind the man on the wall to the left. Shadows can also be seen through the legs on the wall and from the left shoe and bottle on the floor. The lighting conditions in the area of ​​the glass are unclear. The glass casts no shadow, and the wall parapet is strangely illuminated in this area.

The influence of Baudelaire and Velázquez

Charles Baudelaire, who was friends with Manet, had a great influence on Manet at the end of the 1850s . In his discussions of the Paris salons , Baudelaire called for a reality-oriented, novel vision of the beautiful, in contrast to the historicizing academic painting. He summarized these thoughts around 1859 in Le Peintre de la vie modern published in 1863 . The idea for the painting The Absinthe Drinker came to Manet possibly through Baudelaire's poem Le Vin de Chiffonniers from the Les Fleurs du Mal collection , published in 1857 . Here he describes the drunken life of the rag collectors in Paris. Baudelaire, who was more than 20 years older than Manet, also spoke to him about Spanish painting. In his youth he had seen the Espagnole Gallery in the Louvre, which King Louis-Philippe had laid out and which went abroad after his overthrow. Baudelaire was particularly enthusiastic about Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Goya of the paintings by Spanish artists shown at the time , who were formative for Manet's painting in the following years. In addition, the art critic Théophile Gautier contributed to the rediscovery of Spanish art in France with his travelogues from Spain, which also included a description of Spanish painting in the Prado . In addition, the Spanish-born Empress Eugénie set off a Spanish fashion in France in the 1850s.

The model for the absinthe drinker was a rag collector named Colardet (also Collardet), who begged in front of the Louvre. Manet met him on one of his frequent visits to the Louvre and asked him to model him. Models in painting are the paintings Aesop and Menippos by Velásquez, which Manet was known through etchings that Goya made after the paintings by Velázquez. He himself only saw the originals when he visited Madrid in 1865.

Manet's portrait of Baudelaire and the models of Velázquez

  • Édouard Manet,
    1862 or 1868/9:
    Charles Baudelaire

  • Diego Velázquez,
    around 1638:
    Aesop

  • Diego Velázquez,
    around 1638:
    Menippos

  • Francisco de Goya, 1778: Menippo's
    copy after Velázquez's
    etching

The creation of the picture

É. Manet, around 1858:
The Drinker or The Smoker
Copy after Van Craesbeeck
Manet's early discussion with a "drinker"

Before the absinthe drinker, Manet painted the painting The Drinker (also The Smoker ) around 1858 . This is a copy of what was then known as Adriaen Brouwer's self-portrait , which is now attributed to Joos van Craesbeeck . This picture, painted in the style of 17th century Dutch painting, anticipates a "drinker" thematically, but is not a direct preparatory work for absinthe drinker , but belongs to the series of painting copies that Manet made since his apprenticeship.

The old musician , 1862
Manet's integration of the absinthe drinker in a group portrait

The painting The Absinthe Drinker was changed several times by Manet. There are no photographs of the various stages, but a watercolor, several etchings and a caricature provide information about the development process of the picture. As a preparatory work, the watercolor study Man with the High Hat, made in 1858/59, was created . The overall conception of the picture is essentially present here. However, at this early stage, the bottle and glass are missing. After preliminary completion of the painting for appraisal by the salon jury, Manet worked on four different etchings by the absinthe drinker in 1862 . The (reversed) prints now also show the bottle at the drinker's feet, but not yet the glass on the wall. In the same year Manet also completed the painting The Old Musician , in which he inserted the figure of the absinthe drinker . When Manet first publicly exhibited the absinthe drinker on the occasion of the world exhibition in 1867 , the entire bottom area of ​​the picture was missing. As the corresponding caricature of the picture in Le Journal amusant of June 29, 1867 shows, Manet had cut off the picture in the area of ​​the man's lower legs. Between 1867 and 1872, the year when Manet sold the picture to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , Manet expanded the painting by 40 cm at the lower edge of the picture. In addition to the now renewed legs and the bottle, he also added the filled glass to the composition for the first time before the sale.

Manet's graphic implementation of the absinthe drinker and a contemporary caricature

  • Man in the tall hat
    watercolor, 1858/59

  • The Absinthe Drinker
    Etching, 1860

  • Absinthe Drinker
    Etching, 1862

  • G. Random, 1867:
    Le buveur d'absinthe
    caricature in
    Le Journal amusant

The 1859 Salon

Around 1859 there were important reasons for painters to exhibit at the annual Paris Salon. This included a certain official recognition, as the salon was organized by the French government and run by a state commission. Furthermore, the painters received a great deal of public attention through reports in all Paris daily newspapers and weekly magazines. In addition, the salon offered good opportunities to get in touch with potential customers.

After the absinthe drinker was finished , Manet invited his former couture teacher to his studio to let him assess the finished work. Antonin Proust quotes Couture's reaction as follows: “Dear friend, there is only one absinthe drinker here, and that is the painter who was able to bring about such nonsense”. The disputes over the absinthe drinker represent the final break between Manet and couture.

Manet, possibly out of spite of the negative reaction to couture, presented the absinthe drinker as his first work to the fourteen-member jury of the Paris salon, which also included the painters Ingres and Delacroix. When Manet learned of the rejection of the painting by the salon jury in the presence of Proust and Baudelaire, he immediately blamed Couture for it. According to Proust, he said: “Ah, he [couture] is to blame for my rejection. He must have said beautiful things against me in front of the bigwigs of his gelichters. But one thing comforts me: that Delacroix thinks it's good. Because I was firmly assured that Delacroix found it good. ”However, Manet did not see this first rejection as a defeat, but as an incentive for a consistent further development of his painting and remarked:“ Well, I was so foolish to him now and then To make concessions. When I started a picture, I stupidly kept an eye on its formulas. That's an end now. "

At the end of the 20th century, various authors tried to explain the jury rejection. Pierre Schneider justified the rejection of the picture with the statement: “Manet's gloomy treatment, the blurring of the contours and the background - in short, his unacademic approach - offended the eyes of the public.” Mikael Wivel explains the negative reaction with the fact that Manet is a French Spanish style type rather than depicting a Spanish style Spanish type. Françoise Cachin states: “The great novelty of the rejected picture consisted in its subject, […] in the unbelievable lack of embarrassment to paint such a large picture as a small sketch […]” The art historian Juliet Wilson sees the real reason for the rejection -Bareau less in Manet's painting style, which is still strongly influenced by couture, but in the format of the picture. A life-size portrait was traditionally reserved for rulers and members of the nobility. In contrast, for example, Dutch genre paintings of the 17th century showed happy drinkers rather than bust portraits. The jury either did not see the model Velázquez or it was rejected. Already Manet's contemporary Théophile Gautier expressed his amazement in his travel reports from Madrid that Velázquez painted vagabonds, beggars, thieves, philosophers and alcoholics as well as the Spanish kings. In a comparison of Manet and Velázquez, Gotthard Jedlicka judged in his Manet biography in 1941: "If you hold the absinthe drinker in your mind next to the philosophers of Velasquez, he is able to withstand it - and that is the highest praise that can be expressed."

The World's Fair of 1867

The first and only public presentation of the absinthe drinker during Manet's lifetime took place during the World Exhibition in Paris in 1867 . Since the official jury of the world exhibition excluded Manet from participating in the local art exhibition, Manet had an elaborate pavilion built on the edge of the exhibition grounds at his own expense. Manet exhibited almost all of his works from 1859 to 1867 in this pavilion. The 53 oil paintings shown also included the absinthe drinker , who is listed in the exhibition catalog as 130 × 99 cm.

Related images Manet

Le Bon Bock , 1873
Manet's later success with a typical genre image

In August 1865 Manet traveled to Madrid to see the original Spanish painters he admired in the Prado. After his return to France, three beggar philosophers were created based on the example of the paintings Aesop and Menippus by Velásquez, which also served as inspiration for Manet's absinthe drinker . Manet exhibited the philosopher (beggar with oysters) , the philosopher (beggar with cloak) and the philosopher (rag collector) together with the cropped painting of the absinthe drinker in a separate pavilion on the edge of the exhibition grounds of the 1867 World's Fair. However, the exhibition with a total of 50 paintings by Manet received little attention and the quartet of pictures influenced by Velásquez received rather negative criticism. After Manet had these four pictures, including the revised absinthe drinker in 1872, for 1,000 frs. could sell, he turned back to the portrayal of a drinker. In 1873 he painted the portrait of the lithographer Émile Bellot with the title Le Bon Bock . This painting received praise in the salon of the same year, but was criticized by his friends as being too conservative and viewed as a mistake. As an artistic response to the painting The Absinthe by his painter friend Edgar Degas , Manet's painting The Plum was created in 1877 . This depiction of an unknown woman with a plum brandy in a Parisian restaurant shows, like the absinthe drinker , less of a portrait and more of a contemporary type.

The Absinthe Drinker and the Related Philosophers Portraits

  • The Absinthe Drinker
    1858/1859 and 1867–1872

  • Philosopher
    (beggar with oysters)
    1864–67

  • Philosopher
    (beggar with cloak)
    1864–67

  • Philosopher
    (rag collector)
    1869

Absinthe in painting

Edgar Degas, 1876: Absinthe
A typical representation of the absinthe theme in an interior
É. Manet, around 1878: The plum
Manet's artistic response to Degas' absinthe

The painting The Absinthe Drinker by Édouard Manet, created around 1858/59, is one of the earliest depictions of absinthe in painting. Until absinthe was banned at the beginning of the 20th century, numerous artists after him chose absinthe as the motif for their pictures. Alongside Manet, Honoré Daumier was one of the first artists to deal with the topic of absinthe in their work. His caricature Le premier verre, le sixième verre from 1863 shows two absinthe drinkers in a café. After Edgar Degas' absinthe from 1876, it is Vincent van Gogh , Paul Gauguin and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec around 1890 who variously chose absinthe drinkers as a motif in their paintings. Pablo Picasso took up the topic of absinthe for the first time in 1901 in some works. In his Cubist work phase, he repeated this theme again between 1911 and 1914.

Absinthe was usually not drunk pure, but diluted with water in cafés or bars. In Manet's picture The Absinthe Drinker , however, there is no reference to the usual water. It also remains unclear where the beggar (or rag picker) on the street got the glass from. These discrepancies may have meant that all the other artists who chose the absinthe motif always chose bars or other interiors for their depictions. Manet's form of absinthe drinker therefore remained without repetition in painting. In the 1870s he himself often chose interior views of bars and cafés as a motif or motif background. In addition to the plum schnapps in the painting The Plum , it was above all the beer, which became increasingly popular in the Third Republic, which he now used as an alcoholic prop in various painting compositions. The absinthe drinker remained Manet's only representation of absinthe in his paintings.

interpretation

While in the literature on Manet the various authors agree on the influence of Baudelaire and Velázquez on the painting The Absinthe Drinker , there are different interpretations of this work. Gotthard Jedlicka wrote: “But the name of the picture and the attributes [bottle and glass] are irrelevant. What only occupied Manet was depicting the dark figure of a standing man against a less dark background, on which it throws two different shadows. ”Pierre Schneider explains the contemporary rejection of the painting,“ because the painter had not tried to To emphasize depravity of the portrayed with feeling. ”In contrast, Manuela B. Mena Marqués recognizes the helplessness of the drinker in the upright position of the head and the serious expression on his face. The same author also underlines the moralizing nature of the painting, since it shows the physical and moral decay of the sitter caused by the consumption of absinthe. Mikael Wivel sees it similarly: "Colardet is not depicted as a rag collector, but as a man who in this world is dependent on nothing but absinthe." For him, the series of isolated full-figure depictions of Manet is not so much about communicating who they are but what they are. Hajo Düchting writes: “Depicted is one of the wretched figures [...] whose only consolation, the shimmering green absinthe, is presented all too clearly.” Jens Peter Munk comes to the assessment: “Manet's choice of a full-body image for a tramp can be an ironic comment can be seen on the social conditions of the second empire. "

In contrast to his teacher Thomas Couture, Manet chose a contemporary motif with the absinthe drinker . While Couture's main work The Romans of the Fall period shows the decay of manners in ancient Rome as the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, his former student Manet painted an alcoholic with the absinthe drinker in 1859. It is not the portrait of the rag collector Colardet, but the representation of one Type. Here he took up Baudelaire's demand for the treatment of “la vie modern” without breaking with tradition. Baudelaire's wine in Le Vin de Chiffonniers became The Absinthe Drinker at Manet . Manet chose this drink because absinthe was a modern drink and he was able to underline the topicality of the picture with this prop. Manet transferred the pictorial theme he had adopted from Velázquez to the Paris of his time. Art historians consider the absinthe drinker to be Manet's first independent work and is at the beginning of a series of motifs that show marginalized groups of Parisian society, including rag collectors, gypsies and street singers as well as the prostitute in the painting Olympia .

Provenance

The absinthe drinker was one of a group of 24 paintings that Manet sold to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1872 . It was bought by the opera singer Jean-Baptiste Faure , who was Manet's most important collector during his lifetime. Faure owned 67 of the 400 or so paintings by Manet. In the 1870s, Manet also painted several portraits of the opera singer, the most famous of which are now in the Folkwang Museum in Essen and in the Hamburger Kunsthalle . At the auction of the Faure Collection in 1906, Durand-Ruel again acquired the absinthe drinker . The painting was then shown in the 1914 exhibition of French art at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, where Helge Jacobsen acquired it for the Ny Carlsberg Foundation. His father, the brewery entrepreneur Carl Jacobsen, founded the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in 1888 as a collection of ancient works of art. Carl Jacobsen admired Greek and Roman sculptures and found Manet's pictures ugly. Only after his father's death did his son Helge build up an extensive collection of 19th-century French paintings. One of the first pictures in this collection was Manet's absinthe drinker . After Helge Jacobsen became director of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in 1915, he set up the picture gallery he had donated there, in which the absinthe drinker has been on display since 1917 .

literature

Remarks

  1. ^ A. Proust: Edouard Manet. P. 16.
  2. ^ Gotthard Jedlicka: Manet. P. 32.
  3. ^ A. Proust: Edouard Manet. Berlin 1917, p. 27.
  4. ^ Julius Meier-Graefe: Eduard Manet. P. 34.
  5. ^ Françoise Cachin: Manet. P. 26.
  6. ^ A b Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain. In: Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacaambre: Manet / Velasquez. P. 212.
  7. ↑ Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark: The Absinthe Drinker and Manet's Picture-Making
  8. ^ Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain. In: Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacaambre: Manet / Velasquez. P. 209.
  9. ↑ a b c A. Proust: Edouard Manet. Berlin 1917, p. 30.
  10. ^ Hajo Düchting: Manet, Paris life. P. 26.
  11. ↑ Pierre Schneider: Manet and his time
  12. ↑ Mikael Wivel: Absintdrikkeren. In: Manet. P. 60.
  13. ^ Françoise Cachin: Manet. P. 14.
  14. ^ Théophile Gautier: Les courses royales à Madrid. Quoted in: Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacaambre: Manet / Velasquez. P. 212.
  15. ↑ a b Gotthard Jedlicka: Manet. P. 42.
  16. ^ Gotthard Jedlicka: Manet. P. 90.
  17. ^ Catalog des Tableaux de M. Édouard Manet exposés avenue de l'Alma en 1867. In: Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark: The Absinthe Drinker and Manet's Picture Making. P. 78.
  18. ^ Caricatures by G. Randon in le Journal Amusant of June 29, 1867 reproduced in Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet and Spain. In: Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacaambre: Manet / Velasquez. P. 240.
  19. ^ Barnaby Conrad: Absinthe: History in a Bottle.
  20. ^ Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné.
  21. ↑ Pierre Schneider: Manet and his time. P. 28.
  22. ↑ Manuela B. Mena Marqués In: Manet en el Prado. P. 450 analogous transfer of the English catalog text
  23. ↑ Manuela B. Mena Marqués In: Manet en el Prado. Pp. 449–450, analogous transfer of the English catalog text
  24. ↑ a b Mikael Wivel: Absintdrikkeren. In: Manet. P. 60, analogous transfer of the English catalog text
  25. ^ Hajo Düchting: Manet, Paris life. P. 30.
  26. ↑ Jens Peter Munk: The Absinthe Drinker. In: Catalog French Impressionism, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. P. 46.
  27. ↑ Luciano Berti: Manet. number 1
  28. ^ Hajo Düchting: Manet, Paris life. P. 26.
  29. ↑ Jens Peter Munk: The Absinthe Drinker. In: Catalog French Impressionism, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Pp. 7, 46.