Le Dejeuner Research Articles

Dos momentos en De Ánima de Juan García Ponce: Ecfrasis y apropiacionismo

Este artículo analiza dos momentos en la novela De Ánima (1984) de Juan García Ponce, en los cuales se utiliza el recurso de la ecfrasis y el apropiacionismo. Me aproximaré a estas estrategias con el objetivo de observar su funcionamiento en la estructura narrativa, además del efecto de sentido que producen en una lectura que los considere. También pretendo detallar algunas cuestiones de la relación pintura-escritura para observar el tratamiento intermedial establecido por el autor. El primer momento revisa la relación de una obra del pintor Lucas Cranach el Viejo y el procedimiento narrativo utilizado por García Ponce para articular a Paloma, protagonista femenina. El segundo momento contempla el análisis de dos ecfrasis, cuyo origen es Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe de Édouard Manet, desde dos perspectivas de la misma representación visual. Asimismo, prestaré atención al tratamiento apropiacionista y su efecto de sentido derivado. El artículo se apoya en la noción de ecfrasis de Luz Aurora Pimentel, Irene Artigas y James Heffernan; la estructura abismada de Helena Beristáin; el apropiacionismo de Juan Martín Prada; y el concepto ánima-animus de Carl Jung. Para las imágenes se hace referencia al Cranach Digital Archive.

Nature and Modernity in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe and William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience: a Comparative and Critical Reading

The painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe ( The Luncheon on the Grass ) (1863) by the French artist Edouard Manet (1832-1883) received negative comments for the awkward nude and the puzzling narratives in the painting. After much debate, this work is now considered representative of both the artist’s oeuvre and of the French modern art movement after the 1850s. While Manet and his fellow Impressionists provided their definition of modern art through their quick brushwork representing speed and light, English art from the same period needs its own definition. A Pre-Raphaelite artist, William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), through the painstaking techniques that characterize the style of the group, presented his version of modern art. In his The Awakening Conscience , a mistress is shown stunned by the sunlight and struggling to wake up her conscience. This paper juxtaposes the two paintings and explores two aspects of the paintings that have rarely been discussed and compared before: modernity and Nature. It was investigated how, in both paintings, Nature (as visualized through the image of greenery) is exploited by modern society and how the bourgeois protagonists relate themselves to Nature. In doing so, this paper provides an interpretation of the cultural and social significance of both art works.

Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe de Monet e “De Tarde” de Cesário Verde: Alguns Apontamentos de Intertextualidade e Diálogo Impressionista

The present work aims to present the theoretical basis and essential information in order to establish an intertextual analysis of two works, from a semiotic point of view. The works analysed will be the painting Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, by Claude Monet and the poem De Tarde, a work by the poet-painter Cesario Verde. Thus, I begin by dealing with the concept of intertextuality and talk about how this term emerged in order to reflect on the characteristics of Impressionism, an artistic movement common to the two that will be the subject of analysis. We will observe the relationship between the painting and the poem, through the themes and elements used by the authors.

Mérimée’s Feasts and the Undermining of Cultural Superiority

GIVEN that Prosper Merimee worked for many years as France's inspector of historical monuments, it is not surprising that his fictional narrators manifest what may be considered an unhealthy obsession with ancient practices and beliefs, particularly with their unknowable origins. Antonia Fonyi calls this obsession Merimee's passion pour l'arche--the archE being the inscrutable primordial beginnings of life and culture. Merimee's quest to uncover distant origins is most obviously discernible in events or characters that are clearly linked with the past: the search for the battlefield where Caesar defeated the champions of the Republic in Carmen; the ancient statue of Venus from La Venus d'Ille; Mateo Falcone, whose primitive values lead him to kill his son; a number of historical figures--from Julius Caesar, to Don PEdre I, to Demetrius--that tend toward monstrous behavior reflecting primitive violence. Fonyi remarks, l'arche se revEleetre objet d'epouvante: quiconquel'approche de trop prEs, en meurt (204). I hope to nuance Fonyi's assessment of Merimee and the archE by suggesting that inscrutable and even violent origins are not only associated with obvious symbols of the past but are subversively present in practices that are completely ordinary--practices that remain acceptable and that are considered ubiquitous in French society of the nineteenth century. In other words, Merimee shockingly suggests that modern quotidiana hearken back to primitive disorder, that the mundane is built on forgotten violence. Of all the practices that embody French cultural refinement and superiority, none may be more significant than eating and its highest (or at times lowest) expression: the feast. Over the course of the nineteenthcentury, France's growing consciousness of regional traditions certainly accelerated the tendency to associate French culture with feasting. Food and feasting appear in a large number of Merimee's fictional texts: Federigo, Vase etrusque, La Double meprise, Carmen, Djoumane, and others. In this article I will look primarily at two works, Lokis (1869) and La Venus d'Ille (1837), and suggest that Merimee routinely undermines the prevailing attitudes regarding feasting and cultural capital by showing that dining, a ritualized practice of restraint and refinement, frequently reveals the primitive disorder it seeks to regulate. The narrator of Lokis, Professor Wittembach, an accomplished linguist and a Protestant minister, travels to Lithuania in order to work on a translation of the Bible into Jmoude, a popular dialect spoken in the region. He is so committed to his work that he leaves his fiancee, Mademoiselle Gertrude, and travels to the chateau of Medintiltas, home of the wealthy young Count Szemioth, where he stays while working on his translation. The count, like the professor, is soon engaged to a young woman who lives nearby named, alternatively, Mademoiselle Ioulka and Mademoiselle Iwinska. To be of service to his host, the minister-narrator performs the wedding for the young couple. However, on his wedding night the count disappears, leaving his bride dead, her throat chewed open. One other notable detail: the text states that many years before, the count's mother was carried off by a bear while she was in the woods, and it implies that the count was the offspring of this shocking union. For the purpose of this article, the significant theme of Lokis is that the characters are constantly eating or discussing food. When Wittembach arrives at the chateau of Medintiltas, the first recorded words addressed to him are by the butler: le comte est desole de ne pouvoir diner aujourd'hui avec monsieur le professeur.... Il dinera avec M. le docteur Froeber.... On dine dans une heure (447). Chapter 3 begins, AprEs le ... (461). Chapter 4 starts with the phrase, Le diner fut fort gai (473). Chapter 6 begins exactly like chapter 3: Apres le dejeuner (479). The first paragraph of chapter 8 includes the description of a buffet, garni de gateaux et de toute sorte de liqueurs, and the chapter ends with the count feasting on his new bride's corpse--the story's ultimate feast (485). …

Against Recuperation: The Fictions of Art in L’ɶuvre

The exact status of Zola's has always been problematic. For Pissarro, it was livre romantique, for Edmond de Goncourt, in a no less double-edged judgment, bonne construction du roman vieux jeu. (1) Other early readers moved uncertainly between professed admiration for its emotional power and reservations about ideas expressed by l'ecrivainphilosophe in footsteps of Diderot and Balzac's Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu. Its critical reception, when it was first published, intuitively highlights generic admixture that a modern scholar like David Baguley has analyzed to such revealing effect. Yet Patrick Brady's compendiously titled study of 1968 accommodates its plurality in an exclusively recuperative direction that has seldom been properly challenged L'oeuvre d'Emile Zola- roman sur les arts; manifeste, autobiographie, roman a (2) And, over four decades later, even most authoritative of summations reverts to such terms of reference: S'agit-il d'un roman a clefs? C'est la lecture qui s'impose d'emblee, confirmed by fact that aujourd'hui, le debat critique continue, pour l'essentiel, de tourner autour des cles du roman. (3) Part of reason for this ubiquity of emphasis has been, of course, L'oeuvre's privileged position within attempts by art historians to cross disciplinary boundaries while, paradoxically (or unsurprisingly), losing from sight its fictional specificity. Exemplary in this respect is Kermit Champa's question-begging conclusion that Zola's novel of 1886 is, as he puts it, the most unreliable art-historical text of period (71). Wayne Anderson's apparently more judicious aside that character of Claude Lantier has been recklessly interpreted by many art historians as a portrait of (4) (82) is equally indebted to extraliterary, hors texte of real-life painter's friendship with Zola himself, brought to an end after forty years in famously ambiguous response Cezanne sent to him on receipt of a copy of L'oeuvre; (5) ensuing personal silence has provided not merely biographers with justification for treating novel as a roman a clef. The aim of this article, by contrast, is to alert its readers to properly imaginative processes of its composition. For by exploring from a very different perspective precisely those dimensions of foregrounded by Brady, we can both view this particular novel with renewed clarity and suggest wider implications of out rereading of Zola at some distance from habitual approaches to his aesthetic. Emblematic in this regard are novel's interpolated descriptions of Claude's grand tableau, some five meters by three and titled Plein air, vicissitudes of which play such an important narrative and symbolic role in text. Doubtless further encouraged, beyond approximate analogies of subject-matter and internal geometry, by hypothetical objection (voiced by character of Dubuche) to a depiction of ce monsieur, tout habille, la, au milieu de ces femmes nues (48), which had also scandalized Manet's contemporary critics, modern commentators have too often unhesitatingly identified fictional painting as a transposition of Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe. (6) It is, indeed, instantly recognizable as such, according to a respected Manet specialist. (7) But to look at description of Plein air much more closely is to be struck instead by significant differences between Claude's inventions and Manet's considerably smaller (208 x 264 cm) picture of 1863: Dans un trou de foret, aux murs epais de verdure, tombait une ondee de soleil; seule, a gauche, une allee sombre s'enfoncait, avec une tache de lumiere, tres loin. La, sur l'herbe, au milieu des vegetations de juin, une femme nue etait couchee, un bras sous la tete, enflant la gorge; et elle souriait, sans regard, les paupieres closes, dans la pluie d'or qui la baignait. Au fond, deux autres petites femmes, une brune, une blonde, egalement nues, luttaient en riant, detachaient, parmi les verts des feuilles, deux adorables notes de chair. …

Édouard Manet's "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe" as a Veiled Allegory of Painting

Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1863, has always been seen as enigmatic. This essay argues that the painting's often noted studio atmosphere is one of several keys to seeing it in a new light as a highly idiosyncratic allegory of painting. Other keys to this reading include the indoor hats of the two men, the relaxed attitude of the nude, and the presence of a kind of painting within the painting. Related to this, the reclining pointer in the painting is seen as a stand-in for Manet himself in a way that is similar to other key works by Manet. Finally, the painting is also discussed in relation to paintings by Courbet, Cezanne and Seurat.

Manet et "Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe"

The article is a study of the manner in which Manet uses a fragment from Marcantonio Raimondi's drawing The Judgement of Paris. This manoeuvre has the hallmarks of a citation by means of which the painter stresses the fact that the work, which from the 16th c. served as an academic standard, in his own painting plays the part of an intruder; that it is only a drawing and not a real scene. The particular character of this relationship, until recently considered mainly in terms of dualism, i.e. tradition - modernite, confirms the latest opinion, frequently occurring in literature, that today Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe and La Peche as a pair based on the relationship opposition - complementairite.

The Epic Tableau: Verfremdungseffekte in Anselm Kiefer's Varus

works all have a long history of symbolic use. At best, the identify- ing titles place the objects within a narrower context than the one the viewer might bring to the picture. Identifying the image is only a small portion of the work the titles do in Kiefer's paintings. For the purposes of simple identification, it would be enough to place the title on the wall label next to the painting, with a brief explanation: Varus, first century Roman general, defeated by the German chieftain Hermann in what is widely regarded as the first decisive German vic- tory in the struggle for independence from the Roman Empire. Even in that case, it would not be exactly like identification. In a rep- resentational painting, the title identifies the scene in the straightfor- ward sense of specifying what the picture is of. David's The Oath of the Horatii is a picture of three young men swearing an oath before an older one; Courbet's A Burial at Ornans depicts a funeral procession; Manet's Le Dejeuner sur I'herbe may not present us with a spectacle we are ever likely to come across in a park, but it does show figures in a landscape with the makings of a meal. We are so used to this state of affairs that when presented with an arrangement of planes and curves labelled Accordionist (Picasso, 1911), we immediately attempt to recon- struct the accordion. The matching-up of certain barely recognizable pictorial elements with some real-world or literary referent occurs in some of Kiefer's works as well usually through a combination of metonymic and met- aphoric processes. The golden-colored straw in Margarethe is under- stood to stand in for the blond Margarete of Celan and Goethe. The lead wing in Icarus is taken to represent the doomed youth himself, plunging to his death. But where is there any trace of Varus in Varus? There is only his name. We cannot even assume that this name is meant to refer to the Roman general, since (as with Notung) it also des- ignates the painting per se. There are many other works in which such an ambiguity of reference exists. As Sanford Schwartz notes: When [Kiefer] writes Die Meistersinger in the clouds that are above the field in Die Meistersinger, he may be saying that it's time for Germany to stretch its Wagnerian muscles and take pride in its past once again. Or This content downloaded from 207.46.13.184 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 05:50:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Naked authority: the body in western painting, 1830-1908

The human body, and in recent times particularly the female body, is central to western painting. Images such as Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades and Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe are so well known that the question of how the gendered body functions in them is often overlooked. In this detailed feminist art-historical study of the body in general and the nude in particular, Marcia Pointon explores the narrative structures of a series of major European and American paintings and other images, mapping her interpretations on the historiography of nineteenth-century painting and employing an innovative theoretical methodology to demonstrate how the visual representation of gendered bodies works to articulate power relations that are to be understood in terms of the symbolic and the psychic as part of the historical.

From Macbeth to Macbett

"THE TITLE OF MY PLAY has two t's so that people won't get it confused with that of Shakespeare's, familiar, I imagine, to a good many." When interviewed, Ionesco the Prankster — he who enjoys saying that he belongs to "the cabaret school of literature" — is sure to make his entrance. The author of Macbett, however, though still in command of his great sense of humor, is a serious political thinker. Like Picasso's drawings based on Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Macbett is art on art. Yet the aesthetic aspect here is, if not forgotten, transcended. Politics is lonesco's concern in his latest play, as it was in Rhinoceros, but whereas in the latter the playwright presented a monstrous happening, a moment of savagery, of regression to the beast in the development of civilization, the present play deals with the relentless, cyclic return of destruction, the playing and the playing out of political ambition.