Nana (Manet)

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Nana (Edouard Manet)
Nana
Édouard Manet , 1877
Oil on canvas
154 × 115 cm
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Nana is a picture by the painter Édouard Manet . It was created in 1877 and shows a young woman who is half-dressed in her boudoir and putting on make-up in front of a mirror.

Emergence

Manet began with the picture in the fall of 1876 in his studio, which could be heated in winter. The model was actress Henriette Hauser, who was nicknamed "Citron" and who was the cocotte of the Dutch Prince William of Orange-Nassau who was stranded in Paris . The gentleman who sat the model joined them in January 1877. The picture was completed in winter.

description

In the center of the painting, an interior scene in the boudoir , stands a young woman, shown in a full side view. Her body is aligned to the left, her head and especially her gaze turned towards the viewer. She is dressed in a frilled blue corsage , a white underskirt, blue stockings with flower applications and high-heeled shoes. She holds a powder puff in her right hand and lipstick in her left . In front of her, on the left side of the picture, there is a make-up mirror with a tripod, wrought-iron stand and two integrated candlesticks with burned down, extinguished candles. Behind her is a Louis Philippe style sofa with a golden brown frame and burgundy red cover . It fills a large part of the central picture space. Two large cushions, in white and green, cover the left side of this sofa behind the view of the woman and take up the lines of her clothing. On the right side of the furniture, cropped from the edge of the picture, sits a man dressed in a black tailcoat, white shirt and top hat. He holds a walking stick across his left leg, across the right leg. He has a hanging mustache , his gaze is directed to the left, past the woman. The background of the painting is determined by a blue wallpaper , which shows an ibis standing by a body of water and is set off from the otherwise brown background with strips. Further furnishings in the boudoir are visible to the left of the picture, such as a chair with a blue-white piece of clothing, and behind it a table in the same baroque style as the sofa. This is in turn a flower pot with a flowering plant. The image division is determined by the clear horizontal lines between the wallpaper and the room furnishings, as well as the vertical of the mirror stand.

In front of the mirror

Édouard Manet: In
front of the mirror (1876)

The picture is directly related to the painting Before the Mirror , completed by Manet a year earlier , which shows a woman from behind in front of a mirror and shows similarities in the woman's colors and clothes. In contrast to the execution of the Nana, this painting is sketchy and laid out with rough brushstrokes.

Reaction to criticism

Although Manet's Olympia had already outraged the minds in Paris 14 years earlier , Nana was a new scandal . It is therefore not surprising that the Salon de Paris also forbade her entry and Manet placed her on his own in a shop window of the Giroux house on the Boulevard des Capucines. There it was very popular because in Paris everyone knew what was happening in frivolous salons, but to name it in a drastic way was still considered a taboo break. What Tintamarre magazine claimed that Manet 's Nana was inspired by Zola's Nana is at best half true, because Zola's famous novel about a self-destructive cocotte who is as dependent on men as it plays with their desires appeared in the first It was only printed two years after Manet's Nana looked through the shop window on the Boulevard des Capucines to the sensationalism. After all: Zola had already devoted a chapter to his Nana in The Manslaughter (L'Assommoir) , so that despite existing doubts one can assume that Manet's Nana is not just by chance the same as the Nana from Zola's literary world of thought. While some were outraged by impressionistic images, as is so often the case, others were quite enthusiastic. Martold, for example, wrote about the eternalists of their epochs . Until 1877 he counted only two of them for the current century: one had written and was called Balzac , the other he saw in Manet.

Provenance

The painting remained in the artist's possession until Manet's death in 1883. In the following year, at the auction of his works for 3,000 francs, it ended up in the collection of Dr. Albert Robin , who was friends with Manet. He later sold the picture to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel , who sold it to the collector Henri Garnier for 15,000 francs. In 1894 Durand-Ruel bought the painting back for 9,000 francs. This then sold the Nana for 20,000 francs to the margarine manufacturer Auguste Pellerin . In 1910, the painting came to the collection of the Hamburg banker Theodor Behrens through the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer for 150,000 marks . The Hamburger Kunsthalle acquired the painting from his widow in 1924.

literature

supporting documents

  1. ↑ Werner Hofmann: Nana , 1973, p. 17
  2. ^ Hajo Düchting: Manet, Pariser Leben , page 60
  3. ↑ ibid. Page 54
  4. ^ Pierre Courthion: Manet , p. 102
  5. ↑ Gilles Néret: Manet , page 76
  6. ^ Réunion des Musées Nationaux Paris, Metropolitan Museum of Art New York (ed.): Manet . Exhibition catalog, German edition: Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88725-092-3 , page 396.