In the winter garden

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In the winter garden (Édouard Manet)
In the winter garden
Édouard Manet , 1877
Oil on canvas
115 × 150 cm
Old National Gallery , Berlin

In the winter garden (French: Dans la Serre ) is a picture by the painter Édouard Manet . It was created in 1877 in the winter garden of the painter Jan Rosen on Rue d'Amsterdam in Paris and shows the Guillemet couple.

description

If you disregard the jungle-green background of the picture, it is divided into two levels by a bank. Madame Guillemet is sitting on this bench on the left. She wears a blue-gray dress with a black belt around her waist, a black loop on the collar and a good dozen black buttons that keep the dress closed in front of her chest and stomach. The tip of a pale yellow blouse peeps out from the neck and sleeves, harmonizing with the slightly darker apricot of the hat and the speckled yellow of an umbrella that lies on Madame Guillmet's lap and which she grasps with her right hand. Your left arm is bent on the backrest. The left hand is bare. You can see a ring. The right one seems to be in a yellow glove. Monsieur Guillemet is standing behind the bench on the right. He wears light brown trousers, a black frock coat, a white shirt and a beard that would have looked good on Dostoyevsky too . He bends over, crosses his legs slightly and supports himself with his forearms on the armrest. In his left hand he is holding a cigar that does not seem to be lit. His index finger points in the direction of his wife. While her gaze goes blankly to somewhere, he looks thoughtfully over his wife at the floor. The picture is complemented by flower pots - one is blue, the other terracotta - as well as pink and blue flowers at Madame Guillemet's head height.

Édouard Manet:
At Père Lathuille, in the open air (1879)

opposites

In the winter garden and the painting by Père Lathuille, in the open air from 1879 seem to relate thematically to one another. Each picture shows the stage of a couple relationship. In the winter garden, as if the name heralds the degree of passion, the distance between the couple is indicated by the design of the picture. Their eyes don't meet, their expressions hardly show any movement, their bodies are separated from each other by the bars of the bench. Monsieur Guillemet is leaning forward. He is closer to his wife with his head than with his body, which disappears behind bars and crossed arms. The colors are dark, reserved and cool.

Apart from the fact that there is also a couple there, everything is completely different at Père Lathuille. The couple are intensely related to each other. It has forgotten the world around it and looks into its eyes with a longing that can hardly be prevented from breaking the remaining distance in a frenzy of lust. The colors are chosen accordingly. While the couple's eroticism rests in the shade in the winter garden and has passed its zenith , the garden of the Lathuille inn is flooded with the full range of southern sunshine. Your warmth opens the door to Eros .

Models

The Guillemets, who, like so many of Manet's models, belonged to his circle of friends, ran a fashion house on Rue Fauburg Saint-Honoré. Months passed before the picture was finished. Talk, laugh, move! They only become real when they are alive. This is how Manet spoke to the couple. But it seems as if the painter's encouragement had little effect. As an admirer of the Père Lathuille, M. Gauthier-Lathuille, the son of the inn owner, sat as the model, who came to his role by sheer chance. On leave from his dragoon regiment , he was promptly recruited by Manet and first adored Ellen Andrée , who was young and delightfully dressed and posed for Degas' absinthe in 1876 and (presumably) for Manet's plum as early as 1876 . For the third session, however, Andrée did not appear, so that Judith French, a relative of Jacques Offenbach, took her place from then on.

Interpretations

While there is agreement about the identity of the models, what the images describe in relation to reality is far less the case. One sees a contemplative marriage scene in the winter garden , in which the partners do not speak to each other and, apart from the bank, appear distant and absent. For the other Manet has made the conversation of the two present in a perfect way and to prove his impression he quotes Théodore de Banville , who raved in the National in 1879 that looking at the winter garden one believed to be witnessing the conversation. And the third sees an interplay of affection, distance, openness, behavior and isolation in relation to the people. Just as the view of the winter garden diverges, so do the Père Lathuille . For one, the couple's inner impulses are plausibly aligned with one another, for the other, cheating is involved, as a gigolo with a self-satisfied expression and interest in profit ensnares a woman of mature age under the mocking gaze of the waiter. Perhaps in art it is also the case that every picture is a symbol with so many facets that in the imagination of every viewer a possibility appears that only describes the truth in coexistence with other perspectives. And maybe, as Heidegger thinks, the actual art of the artist is not the work, but what the work provokes in the viewer in terms of reaction. So it may well be that when Manet was working on the figure of the Mature Lady in the Père Lathuille inn, he thought of Marie Colombier , who had made a place in the gossip columns through her flirt with the young writer Paul Bonnetain , or of Méry Laurent which he painted with a black hat in the same year as The Bar in the Folies-Bergères . This is important for those whom Manet's art meets, but not.

Reception with the criticism

The winter garden was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1879. The Nationalgalerie (Berlin) acquired the painting in 1896 and became the first museum, even before France, to purchase a painting by the painter, who was generally perceived as provocative. Together with other French masters such as Paul Cézanne , who were also acquired for the first time for a museum , Im Wintergarten shaped German impressionism .

Incorrectly assigned as looted art

No Nazi-looted art

At the end of the war in 1945, the painting , which had been in the ownership of the Berlin National Gallery since 1896, was evacuated from Berlin along with other holdings of the Berlin State Museums and stored in a mine in Merkers . It was recovered and secured there by Monuments Men after the end of the war . In the process, some photographs were taken that show the US Army soldiers recovering the picture in the mine. These photographs have now become iconographic and are often incorrectly used to illustrate articles on the subject of looted art , even used by renowned media such as Deutsche Welle , the Washington Post of the New York Times and even in specialist publications on the subject.

literature

  • Gilles Néret: Manet , Taschen GmbH Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-8228-1947-6 .
  • Ina Conzen et al .: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists , Hatje Cantz Verlag 2002, ISBN 3-7757-1201-1 .
  • Hajo Düchting: Manet, Pariser Leben , Prestel Verlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-7913-1445-9 .
  • Pierre Courthion: Manet , DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7701-2598-3 .
  • Willi Hirdt: Manet and Zola: on the symbiosis of literature and art . Tübingen: Francke, 2001 ISBN 3-7720-2781-4

Web links

Commons : In the winter garden  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the older Manet literature it is often noted that the painting was made in the winter garden of the Swedish painter Otto Rosen. This information has its origin in the Manet biography of Adolphe Tabarant ( Manet et ses oeuvre , p. 326). He explains that from July 1, 1878 to April 1, 1879, Manet used the studio of the painter Georg von Rosen on Rue d'Amsterdam. However, recent research suggests that the picture was created in 1877 and that Manet used the studio of the Polish painter Jan Rosen at 77 Rue d'Amsterdam for this purpose. For this, Juliet Wilson-Bareau: Edouard Manet dans se ateliers in Akiya Takahashi: Manet et le Paris moderne , Tokyo 2010, p. 309; Leah Lehmbeck: L'Esprit de l'atelier: Manet's Late Portraits of Woman in MaryAnne Stevens: Manet, portraying life , London 2012, p. 203; Gloria Groom: Foregrounding Manet's Backgrounds in Scott Allan, Emily A. Beeny, Gloria Groom: Manet and Modern Beauty , Los Angeles 2019, pp. 78–79.
  2. ↑ a b Gilles Néret: Manet . Taschen, Cologne 2003, ISBN 978-3-8228-1949-4 , pp. 86 .
  3. ^ A b Pierre Courthion: Manet . DuMont, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7701-2598-3 , p. 112 .
  4. ^ Pierre Courthion: Manet . DuMont, Cologne 1990, ISBN 3-7701-2598-3 , p. 114 .
  5. ^ Hajo Düchting: Manet, Paris life . Prestel, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-7913-1445-9 , pp. 106 f .
  6. ^ A b Katharina Elvers-Svamberk: Edouard Manet and the Impressionists . Ed .: Ina Conzen et al. Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-7757-1201-1 , p. 186 .
  7. ^ Hajo Düchting: Manet, Paris life . Prestel, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-7913-1445-9 , pp. 110 .
  8. ↑ Philipp Demandt: School of seeing. The National Gallery and Modernism . In: Angelika Wesenberg (Hrsg.): Impressionism - Expressionism. Art turn. Hirmer, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-7774-2343-2 , pp. 14 .
  9. ↑ Dr. Greg Bradsher: Wintergarden by Manet was NOT Looted by the Nazis. June 25, 2014, accessed April 24, 2017 .
  10. ↑ Deutsche Welle: Affäre-Gurlitt: Central Council of Jews complains about handling Nazi looted art. November 21, 2013, accessed April 24, 2017 .
  11. ↑ Susan Fisher Sullam: Monuments Men: A Baltimore writer learns her father helped in the search for Nazi plunder. The Washington Post, June 19, 2014, accessed April 24, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Tom Mashberg: Returning the Spoils of World War II, Taken by Americans. The New York Times, May 5, 2015, accessed April 24, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Oliver Meier, Michael Feller, Stefanie Christ: The Gurlitt complex. Bern and looted art . Chronos, Zurich 2017, ISBN 978-3-0340-1357-4 , pp. 76 .