Fa Monet, Gare Saint-Lazare, Oil on Canvas, 1877, 75cm, 100cm, Collection of Musée d'Orsay, France.
Manet grew up in a family of middle-class French lawyers. With the encouragement of his uncle, he gave up his conformist life and embarked on the path of a professional artist. As a Parisian with money and leisure, Manet loved to depict Haussmann's planned New Paris and the daily life of the emerging middle class. As a master of modern painting, he visualized this process of modernization and honestly constructed it through the canvas.
Famanet, Gare Saint-Lazare, Oil on Canvas, 1872-1873, 75cm, 105cm, Collection of the Musée d'Orsay, France.
Painted between 1872 and 1873, Gare Saint-Lazare depicts an elderly woman and a young girl in front of a row of black iron railings, their bodies occupying almost the entire canvas. Older women, dressed in long dark blue dresses and delicate black hats, sit upright and gaze at the audience. She holds a book in her hand, a sleeping puppy and a fan in her arms, and the expression on her face is inscrutable. The little girl next to her stood with her back to the spectator, dressed in a pale blue dress, looking out through the railing—a cloud of white smoke and looming railroad tracks indicated that it was a train station. The dress, grooming, and mannerisms of the two figures in the picture reflect the aesthetic taste of the emerging French middle class. It can be seen that the modern aesthetics of their time are being presented through the visual construction of the picture. Let's take a closer look at what they're wearing—the older women seated upright in chic dresses with V-necklines, decorated with large blue buttons and threads at the hem, white pleated lining peeking out from the cuffs and collar, and striking florals on black hats echoing necklaces of the same color. The little girl with her back to the audience wears a sleeveless light blue dress with a large bow tied around her waist. These two gorgeously dressed, fashionable women are likely associated with the concept of "Dandyism". The concept was defined by British fashion icon Beau Brummel as "stylish in behaviour and dress, cold and clever in personality, funny and cool".
Gare Saint-Lazare (detail).
Looking closely at the painting, it is not difficult to see that the expression of the older woman is slightly indifferent. Although she looked ahead, her eyes seemed to be unfocused, and the corners of her mouth did not reveal any emotion. In addition, although she and the little girl were close to each other, there was no indication that they were related or interacted with. Manet's portrayal of these "Danteist" cultural consumers reveals the typical image of the French middle class in the 19th century, that is, the value of appearance, elegance and decency, and the willingness to relax, and the worship of self lurks behind the cold and unforgiving appearance.
For modern painters, the railway is an ideal subject, and its main message is the convenience and efficiency brought about by mechanization and industrialization in the 19th century. The Gare Saint-Lazare was the main station of the first railway built in Paris. Manet's choice of location near the Gare Saint-Lazare is clearly a metaphor for industrial processes and economic change. In the foreground, there is a wooden fence in the upper left corner, where the smoke has not yet cleared, behind which there are two doors and a window. These two doors are believed to have served as entrances to St. Petersburg Street Nos. 2 and 4, and looking out of the window, they are one of the four rooms of Manet's studio used between 1872 and 1878.
Gare Saint-Lazare (detail).
The Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented modern living experiences to the French in the 19th century. In Gare Saint-Lazare, Manet does not choose to depict the railway station directly, but alludes to this imagery by presenting white steam, which emphasizes the concept of industrialization and modernization. It can be said that modernity is another "myth" that the middle class wants to portray, which is different from religious stories. In the new landscape paintings, industrial imagery is becoming more and more recognized.
Through a cross-section of the landscape, Manet constructs the landscape society of modern Paris in a flat two-dimensional space. According to the British art historian Clarke, the steam in Gare Saint-Lazare's is not a peripheral element of the painting, but a "grand theme" within it. Clark explains the intimate relationship between steam and the concept of modernism: "Steam in Manet's paintings is a metaphor for generality, perhaps structure, and instability, because things in modernity are constantly changing their shape, accelerating forward, dispersed, and invisibly developing. In this painting, Manet expresses both the benefits of modern institutions and the fleeting and ongoing uncertainties of modernity.
Gare Saint-Lazare (detail).
Gare Saint-Lazare is a work that not only shows modernity in terms of subject matter, but also shows a break with tradition in the compositional perspective. First, two figures on the same plane face the viewer in opposite poses: the older woman sits, and the little girl stands;The older woman looks forward, and the little girl is attracted by the object in the background of the picture and turns backThe older woman wears a dark blue long-sleeved dress with her hair scattered around her body, and the younger girl wears a light blue sleeveless skirt with her hair coiled. Secondly, neither figure is depicted in its entirety, but rather a bust that is truncated in the position of the legs. Some of the human bodies will shorten the distance between them and the viewer at the ** level, so that they will see the people in the painting as part of their own space. Finally, the missing mid-transition tones and the scenes truncated by the edges of the paintings are influenced by the photographic photographs and camera viewfinders of the time, respectively. In 19th-century Europe, when academic painting was still the mainstream of the art world, not everyone could adapt to Manet's formal innovations. Photography was just emerging in the 19th century. Manet had a keen sense of smell and applied the key elements of photography to his paintings. In this work, Manet also draws on Japanese printmaking techniques that spread in Europe in the 19th century, creating depth by creating a strong contrast between the foreground figure and the background image: in the foreground, two figures are close to the balustrade, and all the objects behind the balustrade are drastically reduced. In the right corner of the background, several figures, possibly railway workers, appear. They are depicted in such small size that they are barely noticeable to the viewer. Through Manet's portrayal, the representatives of the emerging middle class are always highlighted in the picture.
Art is a process of constant flux, and its economic essence is continuous "reproduction", and in the process of continuous transformation, they are looking for the identity of the current era.
Gare Saint-Lazare (detail).
From the above analysis, it can be seen that Manet's schematic construction was born with the establishment of modern French society in the 19th century, just as John Berg guided people to use a new way in "The Way", but did not try to establish a new set of laws. This kind of first-class construction allows people to see the new power and the various new possibilities that are sprouting in the current world.