Self-portrait with palette (Manet)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Self-portrait with a palette (Autoportrait à la palette) (Édouard Manet)
Self-portrait with palette (autoportrait à la palette)
Édouard Manet , 1879
Oil on canvas
83 × 67 cm
Private collection

The self-portrait with a palette (French title Autoportrait à la palette , Portrait de Manet par lui-même, en buste or Manet à la palette ) is a painting by the French painter Édouard Manet . The 83 × 67 cm picture, painted in oil on canvas, was created by Manet in 1879. It belongs to the artist's late work, influenced by Impressionism . Self-portrait with a palette is one of the few paintings in which Manet depicted himself. A self-portrait by Diego Velázquez is regarded as a model for the painting . The painting is in private hands.

Image description

The 83 × 67 cm painting shows a half-portrait of the painter Édouard Manet. In this self-portrait as a painter, he portrayed himself as a fashionable boulevardier against a dark background. The person pictured wears a black bowler hat and a brown jacket, underneath a white shirt, of which only the collar can be seen. The neckline of the suit jacket is covered by a black silk tie that is held in place with a tie pin. In his left hand, which is only indistinctly shown, he holds a long wooden brush with red paint on the bristles, the right hand holds a palette and three other brushes. No other accessories are used. The figure is illuminated from the right, which creates shadows below the right arm and in the left half of the face. Due to the posture that appears to be turned slightly to the left, the left half of the body is also darker than the front, right half of the body. The painter's gaze is directed forward to the viewer.

However, since Manet was almost certainly not left-handed, the painter's picture is an image in the form of a reversed representation, as it appears in a mirror image .

Self-portrait by Diego Velázquez as part of Las Meninas , 1656
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Portrait of Claude Monet , 1875

Origin and interpretation

As determined by X-ray analysis , Édouard Manet painted over a profile portrait of his wife Suzanne with his self-portrait with palette . In this picture she was shown in a pose similar to that in the painting Madame Manet at the piano (1868, Musée d'Orsay).

The dating of the picture goes back to Manet's friend Théodore Duret , who asked Léon Leenhoff , the son of Manet's wife, about this after Manet's death . In addition, Manet used the suit jacket in a self-portrait with a palette, also in the painting Beim Père Lathuille from 1879 , in the open air to depict the son of the restaurant owner.

The painting Las Meninas from 1656 by Diego Velázquez , in which the artist also presents himself with a brush and palette, is regarded as a model for the self-portrait with a palette . Here, however, the painter stands in the background of his studio, while his model, five-year-old Margarita Teresa of Spain and her servants, occupies the foreground . Manet took from this the painter's pose and the painting utensils, which, unlike Velázquez, made himself the thematic center of the picture. At the same time, however, he is active and leaves the design of his surroundings as well as the idea of ​​a painting in the making to the imagination of the viewer. Manet himself painted the Spanish painter in a studio scene between 1865 and 1870 in a pose similar to Velasquez's self-portrait.

Usually, painters do not wear going out clothes at work, as these could easily be soiled by the oil paints. Manet's self-portrait as a painter in fashionable city clothes has various models. Velázquez already wore the costly clothes customary at court in the painting Die Hoffräulein . In 1870 Manet sat as a well-dressed artist model for the painter Henri Fantin-Latour in the painting Un atelier aux Batignolles . Wearing a hat in an interior room also had a direct role model when portraying a painter. Pierre-Auguste Renoir portrayed his painter colleague Claude Monet in a suit and hat as early as 1875. Just as Velázquez underscores his closeness to the Spanish court through his clothes, Manet's clothes show his role as a fashionable and successful Parisian artist, who not only in his artistic attitude, but also in his appearance and appearance completely resembles the model of the> peintre de la vie modern <by Baudelaire

What is striking in the painting is the unfinished-looking left hand with the painter's brush. Victor Stoichiţă recognizes Manet's intention here and interprets it as follows: Although it is an act of painting that is shown here, the painting revolves around itself like a whirlwind. According to Françoise Cachin , this design is explained with the intention of concentrating the light and the thoughts on the essential aspects of the picture. Suzanne Manet, the artist's wife, referred to both this picture and the self-portrait with a cap (French: autoportrait , 1878/79) as sketches.

As early as 1870, the painter colleague and friend Manets created a picture entitled Un atelier aux Batignolles , in which he depicted Manet painting with his friends and admirers. In this painting Manet is sitting in front of the easel, holding the brush with his right hand. Fantin-Latour wanted to express the seriousness of Manet's work and that of the young generation of French artists with the painting, which was done in an academic manner. This plan failed, however, and led to ridicule of Manet's central position in the midst of his admirers, which found amusingly expressed in a contemporary cartoon in Le Journal ; there Manet was compared to Jesus in the midst of his disciples. Other paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour depicting Manet included a portrait from 1867 and the Hommage à Delacroix from 1864, in which he also depicted himself and brought together other painters of his generation in front of the portrait of Eugène Delacroix .

Classification in the overall work

Self-portrait with skull cap , 1878/79

The self-portrait with a palette is the only self-portrait by Manet in which he portrayed himself as an artist. He also depicted himself in other paintings: The fishing (French La pêche , 1860/61), music in the Tuileries Garden (French Musique aux Tuileries , 1862) and masked ball in the opera ( Bal Masqué à l'Opéra , 1873); In these pictures, however, he was not shown in the foreground, but as part of an overall composition.

Only the self-portrait with skull cap , a full portrait, made around the same time , is understood as another real self-portrait. It hangs in the Artizon Museum in Tokyo today . The temporal proximity of the two paintings suggests a direct connection between them; accordingly, they are interpreted as two stages of a work process. In the first picture, the self-portrait with palette , the act of painting itself is shown, recognizable by the active gesture of the painter that has come to the fore. The full portrait, on the other hand, shows the painter at a clear distance from the viewer. According to Éric Darragon, it seems as if the painter is taking a step back in order to judge his painting .

After Manet's death, the two pictures hung on either side of the 1877 painting by Jean-Baptiste Faure in the role of Hamlet . From this arrangement, Stoichiţă draws the conclusion that the choice of the Spanish-looking painting should again create a parallel to Velázquez, although the statement of a placement alongside Faures' presentation role as Hamlet could be that with the self-portraits Manet in the role of Manet should be represented. According to Juliet Wilson-Bareau, however, the pictures were probably not so arranged by Manet himself; rather, it assumes that Léon Leenhoff had the pictures framed and then hung them on both sides of the Faure painting.

  • Fishing , 1860/61

  • Music in the Tuileries Gardens , 1862

  • Masked ball in the opera , 1873

  • Jean-Baptiste Faure in the role of Hamlet , 1877

  • The fishing (detail), Manet together with his future wife Suzanne

  • Music in the Tuileries Gardens (detail)

  • Masked ball in the opera (detail), Manet is the man with the blond beard

  • At Père Lathuille, outdoors , 1879, the suit jacket was used almost simultaneously

reception

In terms of importance, the painting was very often assessed as of lesser artistic value. The critic Étienne Moreau-Nélaton wrote in 1926: This work, like the other experiment, is spoiled by a certain cold. The hand carries too much fire, it paints so freely here that the painter cannot possibly concentrate seriously on himself as an object. On the other hand, Theodore Reff emphasized in 1982 the importance of Manet's decision to approach a genre at the height of his career with two self-portraits that he had never tried before. Above all, the clothes chosen, in both cases a fashionable suit, express that Manet saw himself as part of contemporary and modern life; according to Théodore Duret , he was one of the Parisian celebrities and was well aware of it.

Wilson-Bareau provides an alternative explanation for the creation of the self-portraits. After Adolphe Tabarant , his contemporary Théodore Duret asked Léon Leenhoff about the point in time when Manet found out about his syphilis . Leenhoff's answer was 1879, which explains why Manet, who otherwise never worked on a self-portrait in his life, painted two pictures of this genre that year. Obviously, now that he had his own mortality in mind, he wanted to deal with himself again.

Provenance

The self-portrait with palette was not sold during Manet's lifetime and passed into the possession of his widow Suzanne after his death. In the estate auction in 1884, however, both self-portraits were not auctioned, Manet's wife probably did not want to part with them until 1897 on the advice of Antonin Proust , who explained to her in a letter of May 10, 1897 that neither Jean-Baptiste Faure nor Auguste Pellerin are interested in the pictures.

On February 2, 1899, Suzanne Manet bequeathed the pictures to her sister Martina Leenhoff, probably to help her out of financial difficulties. In the same year, Ms. Manet and Proust tried again to sell the two pictures, the German art dealer Hermann Paechter and the French Ambroise Vollard were interested . Paechter received both pictures in the same year at a price of 6,000 francs for the self-portrait with a cap and only 1,000 francs for the self-portrait with a palette . In Théodore Duret's exhibition catalog from 1902, however, the picture appeared as Pellerin's possession.

Shortly afterwards, the self-portrait with skull cap went to Max Linde in Lübeck, Edvard Munch's ophthalmologist . The Norwegian painter Munch may have been inspired by this portrait to create his own full portraits, which he made at the beginning of the 20th century by his psychiatrist Daniel Jacobson (1909), among others , and which came close to the Manet picture in style and mood.

In May 1910, the self-portrait with palette appeared in an exhibition at the Georges Petit gallery in Paris and was declared on loan from the widow of the Marquis Etienne de Ganay . Just one month later, it was shown at an exhibition by gallery owners Paul Durand-Ruel , Bernheim-Jeune and Paul Cassirer, along with all of the Manet paintings previously owned by Pellerin. Pellerin had sold his collection to the dealers, but probably had already sold the self-portrait with palette to Madame de Ganay beforehand, and together with him they wanted to show the former Pellerin collection in full. Madame de Ganay still owned the painting in the 1920s, but in 1931 it belonged to the Berlin banker and President of the Darmstadt and National Bank Jakob Goldschmidt . Goldschmidt emigrated with the collection to New York City in 1936 and died there in 1955. In 1958 J. Summers bought the painting for £ 65,000.

The collector couple John and Frances L. Loeb from New York later bought the painting for US $ 176,800. When the Loeb Collection was auctioned at Christie's on May 12, 1997 , the painting went to an initially anonymous bidder for 18.7 million US dollars. At the time, this was the second highest price ever paid for a Manet. A short time later, the casino owner Steve Wynn was identified as the new owner, and he exhibited the picture in his Bellagio and Wynn Las Vegas hotels in the following years . Since March 2005 it has been part of the Steven A. Cohen Collection . Cohen put the painting up for auction at Sotheby’s in 2010 , in whose London branch it was sold to New York art dealer Franck Giraud on June 22 of that year for £ 22.4 million. At the time, the amount achieved was the highest price ever paid for a work of art by Manet.

Copy

The artist's nephew, Edouard Vibert (1867–1899), made a series of copies of various Manet paintings for Madame Manet shortly before his death as a reminder of the pictures that she had to sell after the artist's death. At the turn of the 20th century, a copy of the self-portrait with a palette that was attributed to him appeared in the art trade .

literature

  • Charles S. Moffett : Self-Portrait with a Palette . In: * Françoise Cachin , Charles S. Moffett and Juliet Wilson-Bareau : Manet: 1832-1883 . Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, German edition: Frölich and Kaufmann, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-88725-092-3 .
  • Theodore Reff : Manet and modern Paris . National Gallery of Art, Washington and University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London 1982, ISBN 0-226-70720-2 .
  • Victor Ieronim Stoichiţă: Eduard Manet: Self-Portrait, 1879 . In: Ulrich Pfisterer, Valeska von Rosen: The artist as a work of art. Self-portraits from the Middle Ages to the present . Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-010571-4 .
  • Gary Tinterow , Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting . Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2003, ISBN 1-58839-038-1 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ a b Theodor Reff: Manet and modern Paris , p. 30.
  2. ↑ a b c d Juliet Wilson-Bareau in Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , p. 502.
  3. ↑ quoted from Hajo Düchting: Manet Pariser Leben München, New York 1985; ISBN 3-7913-1445-9 for self-portrait with palette, page 93
  4. ↑ a b Stoichiţă 2005.
  5. ^ Françoise Cachin: Manet, The Influence of the Modern. New York 1995; ISBN 0-8109-2892-2 for self-portrait with palette, page 109
  6. ↑ a b c After Moffet 1984.
  7. ↑ Darragon: Manet , Paris 1989. Quoted from Stoichiţă 2005.
  8. ↑ Étienne Moreau-Nélaton : Manet raconté par lui-même . Volume II, Paris 1926, pp. 50-51. Translation after Moffet 1984.
  9. ^ After Mikael Wivel: Exhibition catalog Copenhagen 1989: Manet. Charlottenlund 1989; ISBN 87-88692-04-3
  10. ^ Provenance after Moffet 1984.
  11. ^ New York Times , July 5, 1998
  12. ^ David Ebony in Art in America , July 1997.
  13. ^ New York Times , March 3, 2005.
  14. ↑ Scott Reyburn: Steve Cohen's Manet Sets $ 33.2 Million Record as Auction Marathon Starts . Bloomberg, June 22, 2010.
  15. ↑ Kelly Crow: Self-Portrait Stars at Sotheby's . The Wall Street Journal, June 23, 2010.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on June 10, 2007 in this version .