Value in Art

Manet and the Slave Trade

Henry M. Sayre

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780226809823
• eBook ISBN: 9780226809960
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term "value" in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet's art.

How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, "high in value" and "low in value"? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history's most famous and racially charged paintings, Édouard Manet's Olympia.

Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Émile Zola who introduced the new "law of values" in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola's essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola's usage of value was intentionally double coded—an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet's painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire's complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas.
 
Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet's painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism's roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

1

Olympia’s Value

In what was the first defense of Manet’s painting, “Une nouvelle manière en peinture: Édouard Manet” (A new manner of painting: Édouard Manet)—a few months later, expanded for the brochure Ed. Manet: Étude biographique et critique that accompanied Manet’s “exposition particulière” at the Place de l’Alma—Émile Zola insisted that the painter was indifferent to his subject matter, and, since the novelist and the painter were very close friends, we have had little reason to doubt the veracity of Zola’s claim. Zola writes that if Manet “assembles several objects or figures, he is guided in his choice only by the desire to obtain a set of beautiful spots of color and light, a set of beautiful oppositions” (s’il assemble plusieurs objets ou plusieurs figures, il est seulement guidé dans son choix par le désir d’obtenir de belles taches, de belles oppositions).1

Manet observes, with the utmost fidelity, what Zola calls la loi des valeurs, “the law of values.” What is this law of values? “If a head is placed against a wall, it is nothing more or less than a white spot against a more or less gray background. . . . From this results an extraordinary simplicity—almost no details at all—an ensemble of precise and delicate spots of light and color” (Un tête posée contre un mur, n’est plus qu’une tache plus ou moins blanche sur un fond plus ou moins gris. . . . De là une grande simplicité, presque point de détails, un ensemble de taches justes et délicates qui, à quelques pas, donne au tableau un relief saisissant).2 Directly addressing Manet, Zola continues: “A picture for you is simply an excuse for analysis. You needed a nude woman and you chose Olympia, the first-comer. [fig. 2] You needed some clear and luminous patches of color, so you added a bouquet of flowers; you found it necessary to have some dark patches, so you placed in a corner a Negress and a cat. What does all this amount to—you scarcely know, no more do I” (Un tableau pour vous est un simple prétexte à analyse. Il vous fallait une femme nue, et vous avez choisi Olympia, la première venue; il vous fallait des taches claires et lumineuses, et vous avez mis un bouquet; il vous faillat des taches noires, et vous avez placé dans un coin une négresse et un chat. Qu’est-ce que tout cela veut dire? vous ne le savez guère, ni moi non plus).3 “In conclusion,” Zola writes, “if I were being questioned and were asked what new language Édouard Manet speaks, I would reply: he speaks a language of simplicity and exactitude” (En somme, si l’on m’interrogeait et si on me demandait quelle langue nouvelle parle Édouard Manet, je répondrais: il parle une langue faite de simplicité et de justesse).4

Figure 2 Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Oil on canvas, 4 ft. 3 in. × 6 ft. 2 ¾ in. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photograph: Scala / Art Resource, New York.

It was through Zola’s words that modernist art history learned to see the painting—as a play of light and dark on a flat surface, a study in what Zola called “the law of values.” In fact, to speak of light and dark in terms of their respective values is a usage relatively rare in the French language in 1867. It is hard to say just who first used the term in this way to speak of light and dark—Sir Joshua Reynolds uses it twice in his Discourses, and Goethe employed something like it in his Theory of Colors. In a lecture delivered on December 10, 1778, to imbue the graduates of the Royal Academy with a summary sense of the principles of art, Reynolds had summarized the “indisputably necessary” rules of composition:

This only is indisputably necessary: that to prevent the eye from being distracted and confused by a multiplicity of objects of equal magnitude, those objects, whether they consist of lights, shadows, or figures, must be disposed in large masses and groups properly varied and contrasted; that to a certain quantity of action a proportioned space of plain ground is required; that light is to be supported by sufficient shadow; and we may add that a certain quantity of cold colors is necessary to give value and lustre to the warm colors.5

Reynolds’s rules are not entirely remote from Zola’s summary of Manet’s disposition of light and shadow in Olympia—the Discourses were first translated into French by Henri Jansen in 1787 and were widely known6—but by and large, Reynolds uses the word value in the more usual sense of relative merit or worth, economic or otherwise: “This leads us to another important province of taste,—that of weighing the value of the different classes of the art, and of estimating them accordingly.”7

In part 6 of his Theory of Colors, “The Effect of Color with Reference to Moral Associations,” Goethe speaks of the Renaissance practice of painting with transparent colors in order to allow the white ground to shine through: “The artist could work with thin colours in the shadows, and had always an internal light to give value [werth] to his tints.”8 But Goethe most usually refers to light and dark in terms of music—tones, notes, and scales—a usage we still employ when we speak of the “gray scale.” Two sections on “Genuine” and “False Tones” occur just a few paragraphs before his use of the word value just quoted. This is the first, in its entirety:

If the word tone, or rather tune, is to be still borrowed in future from music, and applied to colouring, it might be used in a better sense than heretofore.

For it would not be unreasonable to compare a painting of powerful effect, with a piece of music in a sharp key; a painting of soft effect with a piece of music in a flat key, while, other equivalents might be found for the modifications of these two leading modes.9

In Zola’s time, the musical metaphor still dominates the literature, and even in his 1867 essay on “A New Manner of Painting: Édouard Manet,” Zola speaks of tones and notes of colors as much as their value.

It may be that Zola’s distinctive use of the word is more indebted to Goethe’s fiction than his theory of color. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of German would have understood the pun on value—or werth—in The Sorrows of Young Werther, to say nothing of the connection between the hero’s moods and the weather, in which the light of a spring sun he finds “wondrous serenity,” while in the darkness of an Ossianic storm he despairs. Werther is, of course, an artist, and this play between light and dark is characteristic of Goethe’s treatment of artists throughout his work. A particularly relevant example can be found in the brief fiction The Good Women, in which a young artist shows some “sketches of naughty ladies” to a group of woman friends. Although they object to them, they appeal to one Seyton, “a man who had seen much of the world,” to judge their worth:

Why should our pictures be better than ourselves? Our nature seems to have two sides, which cannot exist separately. Light and darkness, good and evil, height and depth, virtue and vice, and a thousand other contradictions unequally distributed, appear to constitute the component parts of human nature; and why, therefore should I blame an artist, who, whilst he paints an angel bright, brilliant, and beautiful, on the other hand paints a devil black, ugly, and hateful?10

Indeed, in his Theory of Colors, Goethe had argued that colors exist halfway between the goodness of pure light and the damnation of pure blackness. In the preface to the book, he outlines his basic theory:

We will here only anticipate our statements so far as to observe, that light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general expression is preferred, light and its absence, are necessary to the production of colour. Next to the light, a colour appears which we call yellow; another appears next to the darkness, which we name blue. . . . To point out another general quality, we may observe that colours throughout are to be considered as half-lights, as half-shadows.11

Similarly, Goethe’s most famous character, Faust, discovers himself to be drawn to both Mephisto, the dark side of the universe, and Gretchen, its pure light. He, too, could be considered half light and half shadow.

Valeur as a painting term does, however, seem to have been in circulation in early nineteenth-century France. It appears, for instance, in Jean Baptiste Bon Boutard’s Dictionnaire des arts du dessin, la peinture, la sculpture, la gravure et l‘architecture:

VALUE, s. f. Painting. Degree of elevation [i.e., high or low], effect of a tone of color, relative to neighboring tones. In this sense, one says that a tone lacks value; that certain tones must be suppressed to impart value to others, or that certain tones must be enhanced in order to bring them to a suitable value.

(VALEUR. s. f. Peint. Degré d’élévation, effet d’un ton de couleur, relativement aux tons avoisinans. On dit en ce sens qu’un ton manque de valeur; qu’il faut éteindre certains tons pour donner de la valeur à d’autres, ou bien qu’il faut rehausser ceux-ci pour les porter à la valeur convenable.)12

But in Michel Eugène Chevreul’s De la loi du des couleurs contraste simultané, first published in 1839 and reissued in 1855, the word valeur occurs in this sense only once in its 755 pages. A guide for mixing colored threads in carpet making, Chevreul’s ideas on color harmony, contrast effects, optical mixtures, and legibility would have considerable influence on the postimpressionists. (And might it be that Zola takes his idea of a loi des valeurs from Chevreul’s loi du contraste?) Chevreul, at any rate, uses the word valeur in a section on “Carpets following the system of chiaroscuro [clair-obscur].” A workman who understands how to mix complementary colors without allowing his brilliant (brillantes) colors to be “suppressed” (éteindre) by one another, he writes, will, perforce, know what “most of his fellow workers are ignorant of,—the value of the colors of his palette, and in this value we perceive the knowledge of the resulting color he will obtain, either by mixing a given number of threads of the same scale, but of different tones, or by mixing a given number of differently colored threads belonging to different scales” (emphasis added).13 Again, notice the predominance of musical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• List of Figures
• A Note on Translation
• Preface
• 1   Olympia’s Value
• 2   Prostitution and Slavery
• 3   Sand/Baudelaire, Couture/Manet
• 4   “La Femme” de Baudelaire
• 5   Le Sud de Manet
• 6   Poe
• 7   Two Wars
• 8   Zola’s Olympia
• 9   Value in Art
• Coda
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index