Eight little things (a scene, a joke, a building, a pizza, a dance, a painting, a lyric, a sound) worth your time.
Have You Seen
This 
?
THIS SHOE APPEARS in Édouard Manet’s “Mademoiselle V … in the Costume of an Espada.”
The painting hangs in Gallery 810 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve been looking at it for years.
Manet is my artistic lodestar, the man who reminds me that great works of art always seduce both the mind and the eye at once.
And in this painting, as in all of his mature works, even the smallest details affirm that art is ultimately about what’s right in front of your face.
Completed in 1862, when Manet was only 30, the painting depicts a young woman dressed up as an espada: the bullfighting participant who slays the beast after the matador is done. But its caressed brushstrokes and bold passages of slablike color hint that this painting aims to be something other than a faithful depiction of a real Spanish corrida.
Take first those shoes,
which float oddly, as if the figure were untethered from the ground.
Manet had trained in the studio of the academic painter Thomas Couture, and learned like every student how to scale figures and model shadows to create an illusion of space between foreground and background.
That is to say, he knew how make those feet stand on the ground.
But he didn’t.
Her trousers are strangely flat too, blocky against the deeper background of the corrida:
And though it may be tough to perceive in a jpeg (digital images tend to dull the texture), there’s a stark contrast between the hard, unmodeled black of the figure’s bolero and the brushy, wet-on-wet strokes of the yellow kerchief:
But placing these discordant elements side by side, without transition, is part of what made Manet modern.
The woman’s fellow bullfighters appear in a wholly different realm of depiction to the principal portrait. (He borrowed the arrangement from a print by Goya.) A matador in blue is jumping into the stands for safety; other toreros gather in the shadows — but they’re barely sketched in:
Look again, and her whole figure, against the background of the corrida, looks flat and unconvincing. She appears like a cutout, or as if she’s standing in front of a theatrical backdrop:
Here are the first steps toward a new kind of painting: one that ceases to pretend the canvas is a window on the world, and instead presents itself as something more like what it is — paint on a two-dimensional surface.
Manet’s paintings of the early 1860s helped set the stage for Impressionists like his younger friend Claude Monet,
who would elevate the capriciously brushy color Manet at times employed into one of the new fundamentals of modern painting.
Have a look at the pink cape she’s holding: cloudier and daintier than the stiff ones used in the bullring. You can see some of the similarities in Monet’s “Water Lilies,” which hangs in a room nearby, painted nearly 60 years after “Mademoiselle V.”
In the mid-20th century, American critics looked at the matter-of-factness of a painting like “Mademoiselle V” as the first steps in some inevitable progression toward abstract art. If you follow the party line, the flatness of our bullfighter here leads directly to the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and the all-over abstraction of Jackson Pollock.
Compare with this Picasso from 1913-1914, also in the Met’s collection, which translates a woman in an armchair into a simplified, collage-like arrangement of flat planes.
Easy to see now. But back in the 1860s, many critics took Manet’s flatness as proof of unsophistication. “Mademoiselle V” was rejected from the official Salon of 1863 and shown instead in a new parallel exhibition, the Salon des Refusés.
Only a few of Manet’s contemporaries, above all Émile Zola and Charles Baudelaire, could see that the flatness expressed something essential about the modern, alienated Paris, where real lives get confused with appearances.
That too was in the shoes,
which are brown, not black, and far too dainty for tangling with 1,500-pound bovines.
Why such unconvincing footwear? By kitting his model out in shoes so inapt for bullfighting, Manet went out of his way to advertise that the painting’s subject is herself an artificial creation. This is not a painting of a Spanish bullfighter. This is a painting of a French woman posing as an espada, and Manet doesn’t want you to forget it.
Manet kept a box of costumes in his studio, and several of his Spanish portraits repeat the same hats, shirts and boleros. In fact, the exact same tassled trousers appear in the painting hung across the room:
The Mademoiselle V of the title is 18-year-old Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model and later a painter herself, though none of her own works survive. She’s the one picnicking in the nude in Manet’s masterpiece of the same year, “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.”
Three years later, in 1865, she appears in “Olympia,”
where she play-acts the goddess of love as a common prostitute.
In “Mademoiselle V,” Victorine appears fully clothed, but she is essentially lampooning a traditional portrait, in which the sitter’s interior life is revealed. Her chalky red-head’s skin, big black eyes and poker-faced expression
are both particular and unyielding. They grant no insight into a “true self,” but seem only to affirm that no amount of close-looking will unlock her secrets.
And this is the genius of Manet, an accomplishment so staggering I still struggle to reconcile it: he saw that dressing up a woman like a bullfighter and flattening out the picture of her were part of the same project.
Both illusions — the illusion of three dimensions and the illusion of truly authentic persons — get scrapped at once.
Welcome to the modern world, harsh but exhilarating, where a bullfighter is really just a model, and that model is really just paint.
Is that the studio floor?
Or is it the corrida?
Or is it just color on a piece of fabric?
Images: “Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair”: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; “Olympia” and “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe”: Musée d’Orsay; “Mademoiselle V … in the Costume of an Espada,” “Water Lilies,” and “Young Man in the Costume of a Majo”: Metropolitan Museum of Art
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