Manet's tangerines

Some of Manet's paintings of the late 1870s seem to be driven by a fascinated participation in the quotidian, and an everydayness focused partially on the consumption of alcohol, on the people and places of this consumption. The painter is close to his subjects, he takes part in the scene, as immersed in the act of painting perhaps as the drinkers are in their solitary pursuits and reveries. In La Prune Manet paints the objectless gaze of his subject, a rapt stare into space, as if alcohol, ennui or perhaps pleasure had absorbed the focus and dissolved the fascism of subject/object relations, the fascism of desire. These are paintings of absorption, or the absorbed gaze, without anxiety. the woman's gaze, like that of the serveuse of the Folies-Bergère, is open to what it sees, not narrowed by focus, just as Manet seems to see what passes and take it in. And this absorption is repeated, again, in our look at the painting. Something very Baudelairean about these scenes, but without the sin or guilt. If Manet paints Baudelaire, he strips him of the hysteria which often accompanies his encounters ('A une passante', 'Les Sept vieillards').

The model of 'La Prune' was the actress Ellen Andrée.

Marcelin Pleynet proposes the 'vigilance politique' of Manet. He says that what was was shocking was the 'absence du point de vue moral' (Le Savoir-vivre, p. 162). So looking again at these pictures from the late 1870s one might have in mind that the everyday life they capture, of Paris, was 7-8 years previously the site of crisis, siege and terror.

'Chez Tortoni' is 1878 catches the glance of the man writing, his pen traversing the page. His gaze, again, is absorbed, replicating the absorption of the gaze he meets, the absorption of the subject in the sensory material of paint, the absence of a moral point of view.

The dissolution of anxiety, perhaps of desire, at least of its agressivity, the absorption of the gaze in the material of paint, is marvellously explicit in the Café-Concert paintings also of the late 1870s; the music of colours, luxuriously given, with such pleasure; then, later perhaps, or at emptier moments, the more muted, isolated figures of the Beer Drinkers, and a Café on the Place du  Théatre français.

On 14 July 1880 an amnesty allowed Communards to return to France, among them one Henri Rochefort, hero of the Commune, who escaped banishment in Nouvelle Calédonie. Manet painted his portrait and two versions of his escape.

The Barricade of 1871 repeats the motif of the Execution of Maximilian of 1868, transposing it to the streets of Paris.

 Manet's 'history painting' finds its true subject in actuality and in the shift from Paris to Mexico. He seems to abandon the painting of history after this. His attitude to Courbet. His comments in a letter to Felix Bracquemond of 21 March 1871. His portrait of Clemenceau.

Later (1879) on the Hotel de Ville and Viollet-le-Duc, he says (as recorded by Antonin Proust), 'our eyes are meant to see with', echoing Baudelaire's comments on Carpeaux's La Danse, once on the facade of the Opéra and now at the Musee d'Orsay, 'How its modernity resounds in the midst of everything and how one longs to do away with everything behind it.' Baudelaire on modernity: 'the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.' In 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne', 1866. Rimbaud, 'Il faut être absolument moderne. Point de cantiques, tenir le pas gagné.' (1873) Manet.

Manet giving mandarins from his pockets to children.

Manet painted 'The Bar at the Folies Bergère' in 1882. He died in April 1883, having been amputated at the leg.