As a Glass Eye

Abstract

Manet painted two groups of flower paintings, the first a series of peonies between 1862 and 1864, the second a larger group, at the very end of his life between 1882 and 1883. Flower painting is no less a barometer of painting's vicissitudes and possibilities than was the more serious and ambitious business of the painting of modern life. Proust's description is so full of words it feels claustrophobic and airless, and yet it paradoxically breathes life into life painting rather than ponders its relation to mortality. The flower paintings rely on a formal dynamic that uses relatively few means in a very concise format. The double-flowered varieties were cultivars with dense and exuberant spurs. Manet's series of flower paintings, though relatively spare, is particularly full of the marks of process, and the glass vases full of entangled strokes and dabs of paint just happen to create a lens through which to see it.