Surface Appeal (Page 2)

By a happy coincidence of scheduling, visitors to MoMA have the opportunity not only to see the end of Modernism, in Marden's exhibition, but its beginning, which Clement Greenberg attributed to Édouard Manet. For students of Modernism, this offers a singular opportunity to examine Manet's The Execution of Maximilian for signs of the great movement Manet opened up. Certainly, Manet could have had no idea that his innovations would lead, in the course of a century, to the gray-in-gray monochrome. He would have said that he was infusing French painting with what he had discovered in Spanish art, particularly in the work of Velázquez and Goya, which he probably saw on a trip to Madrid in 1865. But we, visitors from the future, as it were, can see what it was about Manet's work that led Greenberg to think of him as the first Modernist.

The execution was the result of an ill-advised imperial adventure in 1862 by Napoleon III, seeking to establish a French-backed monarchy in Mexico, which had become an independent republic in 1823. Together with some Mexican conservatives, he persuaded Maximilian, a Habsburg, to accept the throne, promising him military support. There was considerable resistance, and when the United States, emerging from the Civil War, supported the Mexican republicans, Napoleon cut and ran, as we say these days, leaving Maximilian unprotected. He was captured and shot by a firing squad in 1867, despite widespread appeals that he be spared. Napoleon was blamed for Maximilian's death, and it was perhaps because of Manet's antimonarchical politics that he decided to paint the event. He produced three large paintings of Maximilian's execution, as well as a smaller study and a lithograph, and it can be argued that the beginnings of a distinctively Modernist sensibility emerged in the course of this effort, though there were already indications, as Greenberg noted, of a new vision in his work as early as 1863.

Greenberg drew particular attention to the graphic flatness of the pantaloons in The Piper, and Courbet is said to have remarked that Olympia appeared "flat...like the Queen of Hearts coming out of a bath." (Olympia's flatness may explain why it appeared to Manet's contemporaries almost comically inept, and wound up in the Salon des Refusés.) This flatness was, for Greenberg, distinctively Modernist. In classical Modernism, he wrote, "Design of layout is almost always clear and explicit, drawing sharp and clean, shape or area geometrically simplified or at least faired and trued, color flat and bright or at least undifferentiated in value and texture within a given hue." He might as well have been describing the Japanese prints that made such an impression on Manet and the Impressionists. Could the flattening out of forms be the result of bringing into Western art the idiom of the Japanese woodcut?

Along with flatness of composition, Manet introduced a flattening of affect, a new form of cool detachment. The Execution of Maximilian, whose final version was completed in 1869, is a perfect example of this, particularly when set against Goya's The Third of May, 1808 (1814), which Manet presumably saw at the Prado. The Third of May also depicts an execution, an early event in the so-called Peninsular War between France and Spain. Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain in 1808, capturing its royal family and replacing them with his brother, Joseph. The French were as unpopular in Spain as they later were in Mexico, and they encountered a fierce insurrection, which ultimately triumphed. The "Third of May" execution was an indiscriminate killing of civilians by French soldiers in reprisal for a guerrilla attack the previous day. Goya's painting of the massacre, which shows terrified civilians facing a firing squad, was intended to arouse anger and hatred on the part of Spanish viewers. Goya's is a highly romantic picture of a deeply emotional episode.

Manet's painting, by contrast, could hardly be cooler. The three victims, holding hands, face the firing squad with fortitude. The officer standing apart loads his rifle dispassionately, in case any of the victims survives. We do not see the faces of the firing squad itself. The scene is treated dispassionately and journalistically. There was no photographic record of the event, since it was forbidden. Manet shows it the way a photograph would, which was not an option for Goya, since photography had not been invented in 1814.

Manet's successive versions of Maximilian's execution reflect an effort to visualize the story as it unfolded in dispatches by correspondents, which were eagerly read by Europeans, who had no clear picture of what Mexico or Mexican soldiers actually looked like. One wonders if what was to become a Modernist painting, according to Greenberg, was not initially an effort to emulate the camera and produce something like a photographic print. Manet showed it from the perspective of a near eyewitness--so everything was brought forward, and inevitably flattened, the way the camera lens of Manet's time often flattened forms. It was as if photographs showed us with optical veracity how we actually see the world. In America, the photographs of Mathew Brady and Timothy O'Sullivan visually defined the Civil War for distant viewers. Goya, by contrast, drew on the conventions of academic historical painting, however romanticized.

One cannot but wonder whether Modernism was not the combined result of two modes of printing--the woodblock print and the photograph, each of which involved a kind of flattening. There would be a further question of whether Greenberg did not make a mistake in transferring to his analysis of the essence of painting what really defined the medium of the print. Maybe illusion is not that alien to painting after all, and those who feared that the invention of the camera meant the death of painting were barking up the wrong tree! If the progressive flattening of the surface has been the great journey of Modernist painting, abstraction, it turns out, was only one of its destinations, especially in an age of photography.

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