I’m not finished yet

I wrote before Easter about the perils of being a famous contemporary artist, such that anything you make is put on show, without the critical stages through which a lesser artist might need to fight their way. But, I was reminded this weekend that this is a danger for dead as well as living artists.

Manet: Portraying Life is the current show at the Royal Academy, closing next Sunday (14th). It brings together Manet's 'portraits' to present his work as the result of a series of friendships and acquaintances in nineteenth-century Paris. A whole room is given over to L. Sonnet's 1870s map of Paris showing all the localities important in Manet's life. Another features his painting Music in the Tuileries Gardens from 1862, with a key of all Manet's famous contemporaries there featured. These under-used spaces are indicative of the filler nature of the exhibition, I felt. There are undoubtedly some stunning paintings, notably The Luncheon and Manet's portrait of Emile Zola, which are set beautifully against the exhibition's charcoal grey walls. But the vast majority of the portraits are recognised on their labels as 'not exhibited in the artist's lifetime'. Most are unfinished and clearly not what Manet himself would have wished held up for posterity.

I have no problem with seeing unfinished works, some are beautiful, subtle paintings. I was particularly drawn to the painting of The Monet family in their garden at Argenteuil. But, the exhibition's argument is that these are interchangeable with the 'finished' paintings because of the varying levels of finished detail that Manet applied. To me this misses the point. Those paintings that were displayed during Manet's life might have unfinished areas, but are finished as a whole composition. A quotation in Room 5 from Stéphane Mallarmé in 1874 puts it perfectly 'what is an unfinished work, if all its elements are in accord, and if it possesses a charm which could easily be broken by an additional touch?' The question is when Manet felt no further touch was needed.

Moreover, I am dubious about the bringing together of these paintings as 'portraits.' Is a portrait of Zola, exhibited as such, the same as a painting which uses a model as a representative figure, unnamed. We might recognise the sitter, but is it a 'portrait' of them in the sense which the curators seem to want? The exhibition is, in fact, more a portrait of Manet himself, if anything. It would have worked well as such, but as the story of him 'portraying life' seems, itself, unfinished.