The nude women in Olympia and Déjeuner sur l'herbe and the other self-possessed figures who stare out at the viewer from Édouard Manet's paintings have long been fascinating mysteries to art historians. Other aspects of Manet's work--figures with implausible postures, strange perspectives--have been equally baffling. Add the artist's propensity for portraying street people of his era in a dreamlike manner hardly consistent with the realism you'd expect from "the painter of modern life," and you have the material for a rich vein of speculative academic writing.

In this stiffly written book, Nancy Locke, an associate professor of art history at Wayne State University, proposes a new way of looking at many of these works. Without denying their importance as reflections of society at large, she argues that they also reflect psychosexual aspects of Manet's personal life. Locke attempts to build a case for what she calls "a Freudian drama, complete with Oedipal desires, dilemmas of illegitimacy, and real and imagined deaths and absences" based on a number of intriguing but shaky-sounding suppositions.

The "family romance" centers around Suzanne Leenhoff, whom Édouard's well-to-do father, Auguste, hired as a teacher for his sons. When Édouard was 20, she gave birth to a child named Léon, whom she passed off as her younger brother. The artist, who married Leenhoff more than a decade later, portrayed her in such paintings as La Nymphe surprise. It has long been assumed that Léon, who also appears in several of Manet's works, was Édouard's son. But Locke thinks Auguste was the father, and marshals circumstantial evidence ranging from contemporary letters to provisions of the Napoleonic Code. Of course, the value of Locke's theories rests on their ability to give us useful insights about Manet's paintings. A more forthright and persuasive writer might charm us with the sheer novelty of her ideas--or more airtight arguments. Is La Nymphe Manet's "attempt to imagine his father's desire for the woman who was his mistress"? This reader is not convinced. --Cathy Curtis


From Publishers Weekly
The rich bibliography surrounding 19th-century painter Edouard Manet includes stimulating books by Anne Coffin Hanson and T.J. Clark that describe Manet's revolutionary and inventive approaches to art with imaginative interpretations. Nancy Locke, an associate professor of art history at Wayne State University, here weighs in with a psychoanalytical view of the paintings, based less on Freud than on more recent French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Unlike more formalist art criticism, which focuses on shapes and brush technique to the exclusion of content, her basis for this approach is that Manet often used members of his family as models, such as his illegitimate son, who pops up in a variety of poses in the artworks. The result, divided into chapters like "Family Romances," "Manet Pere et Fils," and "The Promises of a Face," is presented in deadly solemn academic prose, but with a common sense that shines out from behind her Gallic forebears: "For Manet, every act of painting was grounded in resistance to everything for which his family name stood: there was the authority of the judge [his father], the property, the income, the receptions, tradition, the family honor." Balancing personal influences with social meanings, the paintings have a variety of resonances, which Locke brings out in a language mainly suited for academic art historians, although civilian art lovers may want to give it a try for its unusual perspectives. Illus. (May)Forecast: University libraries are this book's natural market, and the price may well prove prohibitive elsewhere. But the volume's idyllic and well-laid-out cover, and its biography-based title could attract some high-end browsers.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Richard Brettell, The Art Bulletin
I think that Locke's study of Manet is indispensable. . . . She challenges received ideas with real gusto and brilliance.


Kristin Makholm, Ruminator Review
" her superbly researched and argued study posits new avenues for reading the work of Manet".

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Edouard Manet's paintings have long been recognized for being visually compelling and uniquely recalcitrant. While critics have noted the presence of family members and intimates in paintings such as Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, Nancy Locke takes an unprecedented look at the significance of the artist's family relationships for his art. Locke argues that a kind of mythology of the family, or Freudian family romance, frequently structures Manet's compositional decisions and choice of models. By looking at the representation of the family as a volatile mechanism for the development of sexuality and of repression, conflict, and desire, Locke brings powerful new interpretations to some of Manet's most complex works.

Locke considers, for example, the impact of a father-son drama rooted in a closely guarded family secret: the adultuery of Manet père and the status of Leon Leenhoff. Her nuanced exploration of the implications of this story—that Manet in fact married his father's mistress—makes us look afresh at even well-known paintings such as Olympia. This book sheds new light on Manet's infamous interest in gypsies, street musicians, and itinerants as Locke analyzes the activities of Manet's father as a civil judge. She also reexamines the close friendship between Manet and the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who married Manet's brohter. Morisot becomes the subject of a series of meditations on the elusiveness of the self, the trnasience of identity, and conflicting concerns with appearances and respectability. Manet and the Family Romance offers an entirely new set of arguments about the cultural forces that shaped these alluring paintings.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The rich bibliography surrounding 19th-century painter Edouard Manet includes stimulating books by Anne Coffin Hanson and T.J. Clark that describe Manet's revolutionary and inventive approaches to art with imaginative interpretations. Nancy Locke, an associate professor of art history at Wayne State University, here weighs in with a psychoanalytical view of the paintings, based less on Freud than on more recent French thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Unlike more formalist art criticism, which focuses on shapes and brush technique to the exclusion of content, her basis for this approach is that Manet often used members of his family as models, such as his illegitimate son, who pops up in a variety of poses in the artworks. The result, divided into chapters like "Family Romances," "Manet Pere et Fils," and "The Promises of a Face," is presented in deadly solemn academic prose, but with a common sense that shines out from behind her Gallic forebears: "For Manet, every act of painting was grounded in resistance to everything for which his family name stood: there was the authority of the judge [his father], the property, the income, the receptions, tradition, the family honor." Balancing personal influences with social meanings, the paintings have a variety of resonances, which Locke brings out in a language mainly suited for academic art historians, although civilian art lovers may want to give it a try for its unusual perspectives. Illus. (May) Forecast: University libraries are this book's natural market, and the price may well prove prohibitive elsewhere. But the volume's idyllic and well-laid-out cover, and its biography-based title could attract some high-end browsers. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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