The suicide (Manet)

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The suicide
Édouard Manet , between 1877 and 1881
38 × 46 cm
oil on canvas
Foundation E. G. Bührle Collection , Zurich

The suicide ( French Le Suicidé ) is the title of a painting by Édouard Manet . The 38 cm high and 46 cm wide picture was created between 1877 and 1881 in oil on canvas . The interior scene shows a dead man who, after his suicide, lies on a bed with a bloodied shirt and a revolver in his hand. The painting belongs to the E. G. Bührle Collection Foundation in Zurich . The picture gained fame in 2016 for the feature film Frantz by François Ozon , where it can be seen as part of the collection of the Louvre in Paris , although it was never exhibited there.

Image description

The painting shows an interior. You can see the corner of a bedroom with a bed on which the eponymous suicide lies. The bed in front of a back wall extends from the left to the right edge of the picture. The headboard with its vertical metal rods and the curved top border borders the side wall on the left. The front left corner of the bed is cut off from the edge of the picture. In front of the bed on the left is a bedside table made of brown wood, also cut from the side. The metal bars at the foot of the bed are only indicated by a few fleeting brushstrokes. White bed linen can be seen at the head of the bed and a brown-red blanket at the foot of the bed. A bust-like portrait hangs on the back wall above the bed and is cut off from the upper edge of the painting. This could be a portrait of a hooded monk, as the author George Mauner suspects, but other portrayals of people are also possible.

The suicide lies across the middle of the bed on his back, while his legs hang forward out of the bed and the black patent leather shoes touch the wooden floor. His upper body, reaching towards the back wall, is turned slightly towards the head end. While the left hand is close to the body, the right hand is a little further away on the edge of the bed. In the hand, which is tilted slightly downwards, lies a revolver, the long barrel of which points towards the floor. Due to the shortened representation of the head that has fallen backwards, his face can only be vaguely guessed. A light skin and brownish hair can be seen, a pointed nose and possibly a mustache could be indicated or owed to the perspective. The man is wearing an elegant wardrobe, the only thing missing is the jacket. His clothing includes gray pants, a white long-sleeved shirt, and a black bow tie . The chest area of ​​the white shirt is stained with blood that appears to have emerged from a bullet hole. The contrast between the elegant clothes of the sitter and the “shabby interior” is striking. For the art historian Gotthard Jedlicka , this “desolate environment” indicates a “chambre meublée” - a furnished room.

The painting is characterized by a low level of color. In addition to white and black, there are predominantly gray and brown tones, from which the red of the blood particularly stands out. There are also red spots on the blanket at the foot of the bed and on the floor. The light falls on the scenery from above, possibly through a window outside the picture. Gotthard Jedlicka describes the way of painting as “feverish staccato”, Ina Conzen sees “hasty brushwork”. The picture is not dated. The signature “Manet” can be found in the lower right corner.

To the creation of the picture

The exact background for the creation of the painting is not known. Manet donated the picture in 1881 to a benefit auction for the benefit of his seriously ill friend Ernest Cabaner . It is unknown whether Manet created the picture for the occasion or had painted it before. Some art historians date the painting to the year of the auction, 1881. Other Manet experts also put the painting in 1877, possibly for stylistic reasons.

Various authors pointed to two real suicides in the painter's environment in connection with Manet's painting The Suicide , which, however, had occurred many years earlier. In 1859 or 1860 Manet found his young assistant Alexandre hanged in his studio. Before that, there had been an argument between the two of them. Manet moved into a new studio after his assistant's suicide. Charles Baudelaire addressed this suicide in his poem La Corde , which he dedicated to Manet. The differences between this suicide and the depiction in the picture The Suicide are obvious: in real life a boy hanged himself in the studio, in the painting a man who was killed by a gun can be seen in a bedroom.

Édouard Manet: The dead torero , 1866

The second suicide is that of the young painter Jules Holzapffel . He shot himself in his apartment on April 12, 1866 after his works had been rejected at the annual Salon de Paris . His death moved the public and Émile Zola commented on this in the magazine L'Evinement . In his article Un Suicide , he described the painter's death and attacked the salon's jury system. Manet, who was friends with Zola, had himself repeatedly received rejections from the salon jury. The author Beth Archer Brombert therefore considers a temporal proximity between Holzapffel's suicide and the creation of the painting Der Suicide to be likely. However, this chronological classification is not shared by other authors. Above all, stylistic differences to other pictures painted around 1866 illustrate this. For example, the thematically related painting The Dead Torero ( National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC) from 1866 lacks a lively brushwork, as can be seen in The Suicide . The art historian Theodore Reff pointed out that, contrary to the descriptions in Zola's article, Manet's painting The Suicide neither depicts a studio nor the man on the bed as a painter.

The title of the picture gives no information about the identity of the suicide and the viewer learns little about the possible background that led to the suicide from the scenery shown. Eugenia Querci believes that a recent tragic event inspired Manet for the painting. There is no evidence to support this assumption, but on Gotthard Jedlicka the picture “looks like an ingenious illustration for a newspaper note”. Theodore Reff suspects a personal motive behind the suicide, such as emotional or financial problems. Linda Nochlin accepts gambling debts as the reason. The clothes of the suicide would have been appropriate for a casino and such debts of honor and possibly related financial ruin could have been an understandable motive. For Ina Conzen, Manet thematizes in this picture "the perishing of the big city" and for Georges Bataille this work depicts the "desire for negation" in an even more abstract way.

Henry Wallis: The Death of Thomas Chatterton , 1856

Even before Manet, writers and painters dealt with suicide in many ways. The novel The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appeared as early as 1774 and in 1873 the novel The Demons by Fyodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski was published. Manet's friend Baudelaire also has the same theme several times. In painting, the picture The Death of Thomas Chatterton ( Tate Britain , London) by Henry Wallis from 1856 is one of the most famous suicide motifs. The young poet Chatterton depicted here may have died of poison, but the corpse stretched out on the bed and the arm hanging forward show a certain resemblance to Manet's painting The Suicide . However, it is not clear whether Manet knew the picture.

In his own works, Manet had repeatedly dealt with the subject of death, especially in the 1860s. In addition to The Dead Torero from 1866, these include two depictions of Christ from 1864–1866 ( Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York and Art Institute of Chicago ) and the various versions of the motif The shooting of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico (main version at the Kunsthalle Mannheim ) from 1868–69. In the last years of his life Manet created a series of still lifes in which the motif of the dead eagle owl (E. G. Bührle Collection, Zurich) from 1881 embodies the subject of death particularly clearly.

  • Édouard Manet:
    Christ mourned by angels
    1864

  • Édouard Manet:
    The shooting of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico
    1868-69

  • Édouard Manet:
    Dead Eagle Owl
    1881

reception

Manet's painting The Suicide had hardly any influence on his contemporaries or subsequent generations of painters. In 2011 the artist Yinka Shonibare created the photographic work Fake Death Picture (The Suicide - Manet) based on Manet's example . For this purpose, the artist had recreated the spatial situation from Manet's picture and draped the suicide in the same body position on the bed. The striking difference between Manet's painting and the modern adaptation is the colorful presentation of the suicide in Shonibare. His husband, killed by a pistol, appears as a baroque figure with knee breeches , buckled shoes and a white wig . In addition to orange-colored stockings, the man's clothing is particularly striking, the cut of which is based on European fashion of the 18th century, whose ornamental fabric patterns, on the other hand, go back to African models.

In his work Splitter II , published in 2010, the writer Enrico Danieli described a visit to the “Bührle Museum” (meaning the house of the E. G. Bührle Foundation in Zurich ), in which a guest of the collection searches in vain for the painting The Suicide . Since the visitor is informed on request that he is traveling, the result is a play on words in which it remains unclear whether the painter Manet or the picture Der Suicide is meant.

Manet's The Suicide also plays an important role in François Ozone's film Frantz from 2016. The film is set in the period after the First World War and shows various young people who deal with death in different ways. At the end of the film, the leading actress explains that Manet's painting The Suicide is her favorite picture . The scene takes place in the Louvre in Paris , although in reality the painting does not belong to the collection and was never shown there.

Provenance

Édouard Manet: Portrait of Ernest Cabaner , 1880

On May 11, 1881, an auction for the benefit of the seriously ill musician Ernest Cabaner took place in the Paris auction house Hôtel Drouot , which the painter Franc-Lamy had organized to finance the medical care of his friend. Édouard Manet was also acquainted with Cabaner and had created a pastel portrait of him in 1880. Manet donated the painting The Suicide to the auction, to which painters such as Edgar Degas and Jean Béraud contributed works . What induced Manet to donate a picture of a dead person for the benefit of a seriously ill person - Cabaner died on August 3, 1881 - is unknown. It was called No. 22 in the auction and sold for 65 francs . It then came into the possession of the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , who resold the painting to the margarine manufacturer Auguste Pellerin . Pellerin owned a collection with several important works by Manet, which were offered internationally in 1910 by a consortium consisting of the Paris galleries Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune and the Berlin gallery of Paul Cassirer . In the same year the Hungarian sugar manufacturer Ferenc von Hatvany bought the painting The Suicide .

Von Hatvany had built up an important collection of works by French and Hungarian painters and painted himself in his free time. During the Second World War , as a Jew, he was forced to live in hiding and deposited important works from his art collection in lockers at various Budapest banks. At the end of the war, the bank deposits were looted and parts of the collection appeared on the black market. Hatvany then managed to buy back some works for 10,000 forints each, including Manet's The Suicide . When Hatvany emigrated to France in 1947, he was unable to take any work of art from his collection with him. In June 1947, Claire Spiess succeeded in transferring six or seven works from the Hatvany collection to Paris for the divorced wife of his nephew. This also included Manet's The Suicide , which was easy to transport as a small-format work.

In 1948 Hatvany sold Manet's The Suicide for 29,000 Swiss Francs to the Fritz Nathan Gallery in Zurich. In the same year, the Zurich industrialist Emil Georg Bührle acquired the painting for his extensive art collection, which focused on French art of the late 19th century. After the collector's death in 1956, the painting initially remained in the possession of the Bührle family. This transferred the painting The Suicide and seven other works by Manet together with a large part of the deceased's collection to the E. G. Bührle Collection , which has been presented in a museum since 1960.

literature

  • Georges Bataille : Manet . Skira, Geneva 1988, ISBN 978-3-8030-3111-2 .
  • Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet . Skira, Milan 2005, ISBN 88-7624-472-7 .
  • Beth Archer Brombert: Edouard Manet, rebel in a frock coat . Little, Brown, Boston 1996, ISBN 0-316-10947-9 .
  • Françoise Cachin , Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau : Manet: 1832-1883 . Exhibition catalog, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, German edition: Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88725-092-3 .
  • Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists . Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 2002, ISBN 3-7757-1201-1 .
  • Enrico Daniele: Splinter II . Literareon im Utz-Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-8316-1474-5 .
  • Gotthard Jedlicka : Edouard Manet . Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Erlenbach-Zurich 1941.
  • Ed Lilley: Two Notes on Manet . The Burlington Magazine , vol. 132, no. 1045, April 1990, pp. 266-269.
  • George L. Mauner: Manet, peintre-philosophe . Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 1975, ISBN 0-271-01187-4 .
  • Linda Nochlin : Realism . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1971, ISBN 0-1402-1305-8 .
  • Theodore Reff : Manet's Incident in a Bullfight . Frick Collection, New York 2005, ISBN 0-912114-28-2 .
  • Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein : Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné . Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris and Lausanne 1975.
  • Manfred Sapper: Art in Conflict. Consequences of the war and areas of cooperation in Europe . Eastern Europe, Volume 56, Issue 1–2, Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-8305-1043-8 .
  • Akiya Takahashi: Manet et le Paris modern . Exhibition catalog Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Le Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo 2010.
  • Kunsthaus Zürich (ed.): Collection Emil G. Bührle. Festschrift in honor of Emil G. Bührle on the opening of the new Kunsthaus building and catalog of the Emil G. Bührle collection . Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich 1958.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The German title Der Sumörder is used consistently in various publications. See, for example, Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , p. 238.
  2. ↑ The French title can be found in the catalog raisonné of Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , Paris and Lausanne 1975 Volume 1, No. 258.
  3. ↑ George L. Mauner: Manet, peintre-philosophe , p. 142.
  4. ↑ Referred to as patent leather shoes in Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , pp. 101-102.
  5. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, p. 101.
  6. ↑ Gotthard Jedlicka: Edouard Manet, p. 192.
  7. ↑ Ina Conzen suspects a side window. Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , pp. 101-102.
  8. ↑ Gotthard Jedlicka: Edouard Manet , p. 192.
  9. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , pp. 101-102.
  10. ^ In the catalog raisonné of Rouart / Wildenstein the picture is dated to 1877. See Denis Rouart, Daniel Wildenstein: Edouard Manet: Catalog raisonné , vol. I, p. 208. Theodore Reff also dated 1877: Manet's Incident in a Bullfight , p 1881 “, see Gotthard Jedlicka: Edouard Manet , p. 192. 1881 can also be found in Akiya Takahashi: Manet et le Paris moderne , p. 184. In the catalog for the Bührle collection, both dates 1877 and 1881 can be found alternatively, see Eduard Hüttinger: Catalog of the pictures in the Kunsthaus Zürich (ed.): Collection Emil G. Bührle. Festschrift in honor of Emil G. Bührle on the opening of the new Kunsthaus building and catalog of the Emil G. Bührle Collection , p. 101. Other authors limit the dating to the period “1877–1881”, see, for example, Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and die Impressionisten , p. 132 or Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet , p. 278.
  11. ↑ The suicide of assistant Alexandre is dated by various authors to 1859. See Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett, Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832–1883 , p. 61. However, it may not have happened until 1860. See Ed Lilley: Two Notes on Manet , p. 267.
  12. ^ Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett, Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Manet: 1832-1883 , p. 61.
  13. ↑ The article Un Suicide appeared in the magazine L'Evinement on April 19, 1866 . See Ed Lilley: Two Notes on Manet , p. 267.
  14. ↑ "it seems more likely that Manet would have painted it close to the event, when everybody was talking about Holtzapfel's [sic] tragic end" Beth Archer Brombert: Edouard Manet, rebel in a frock coat , p. 187.
  15. ^ Theodore Reff: Manet's Incident in a Bullfight , p. 53.
  16. ↑ Eugenia Querci: Il suicida in Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet , S. 278th
  17. ↑ Gotthard Jedlicka: Edouard Manet , p. 192.
  18. ^ Theodore Reff: Manet's Incident in a Bullfight , p. 34.
  19. ↑ Linda Nochlin: Realism , p. 75.
  20. ↑ Ina Conzen: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists, p. 101.
  21. ^ Georges Bataille: Manet , p. 104.
  22. ↑ Eugenia Querci: Il suicida in Maria Teresa Benedetti: Manet , S. 278th
  23. ↑ Information on the work of Yinka Shonibare with illustration on the website of the auction house Sotheby’s
  24. ↑ Enrico Daniele: Splitter II , p. 58.
  25. ↑ Christian Buß: Love, limitless , article about the film launch of Frantz in the magazine Der Spiegel from September 20, 2016.
  26. ^ Ed Lilley: Two Notes on Manet , p. 269
  27. ^ Ed Lilley: Two Notes on Manet , p. 268
  28. ↑ Akiya Takahashi: Manet et le Paris moderne , p. 184.
  29. ↑ Manfred Sapper: Art in Conflict. Consequences of the war and areas of cooperation in Europe , p. 94.
  30. ↑ Manfred Sapper: Art in Conflict. Consequences of the war and areas of cooperation in Europe , p. 95.
  31. ↑ Akiya Takahashi: Manet et le Paris moderne , page 184.