Art and Friendship

"It is humanity that interests me" (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867) 

Thirty years before he risked his own safety and reputation in the Dreyfus case, Zola had taken up his pen in another passionate public defence, in this case of the painter Manet, whose early works were misunderstood and condemned by the art establishment for their alla prima technique and stark realism of their subject-matter, flouting the academic rules and allegorical ideals that had determined post-Revolutionary French art.

Manet's paintings were geuninely shocking to a respectable bourgeoisie unused to seeing a nude looking like a real woman just before or after having sex rather than a neo-classical goddess representing an unattainable virtue or abstract idea. For Zola, they represented a new analytical truth in art, the visual counterpart of the literary realism first introduced to the reading public in the 1830s by Balzac.

Manet's 'Olympia', 1863:When our artists give us a Venus, they 'correct' Nature, but Edouard Manet has asked himself, 'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' He has made us acquainted with Olympia, a contemporary girl, the sort of girl we meet every day on the pavements... 

(Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867). Image source: Wikipedia

As a Realist novelist and art critic, Zola dismissed preconceived and philosophically pompous ideas about absolute beauty in his sweeping rhetoric - "It is humanity that interests me" - and argued that all kinds of artistic interpretation of reality were valid, contributing to a vast and varied "epic of human creation"....

TRUTH part 2

Monet: "Water-Lily Pond," c.1915-1926.Oil on canvas, diptych in the Chichu Art Museum. Image source: Wikipedia
ART AND CONSCIENCE

"I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness" (Zola, J'accuse).

 

Glass vase "Les hommes noirs" by Émile Gallé and Victor Prouvé, engraved with monstrous mutations coming out of the darkness of human nature displayed in Paris at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. 

Image source: Wikipedia Commons.

Within two weeks of the publication of J'accuse in the newspaper L'Aurore, edited by Clemenceau ('le tigre' of French republican politics and future war leader, who was also an admirer of the Impressionists), Zola was prosecuted by the government for libel on 23 February, after a trial described at the time by the Manchester Guardian as "a mockery of justice", he was condemned to the highest penalty of a year's imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. There was a further humiliation when he was removed from the Légion d'honneur.  He avoided hearing his final sentence at a second trial in July by fleeing to England, where he stayed in exile until June 1899, returning when he saw signs that "truth was marching on" under the pressure of the Dreyfusards, with the government's collapse and the appointment of a more sympathetic president. His prime objective, the retrial of Dreyfus, was ordered at last....

Imaginary Palaces and Garden Theatres

Giuseppe Valeriani's set of designs for a stage set. 

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Theatres were built to look like palaces, and palaces looked like theatres....

Truth

7th February,1898: opening day of Zola's tumultuous libel trial in Paris after the publication of J'accuse....

Art and Conscience

'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867)  

Truth appears as a plastic commodity to people in power as it does to most of us in our everyday life. This is one of the reasons we need art, including fiction and history: to correct a short circuit in our moral brains. We despise liars in fiction, and we expect dramatized accounts of real life to be true. 

Manet's 'Olympia', 1863:When our artists give us a Venus, they 'correct' Nature, but Edouard Manet has asked himself, 'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' He has made us acquainted with Olympia, a contemporary girl, the sort of girl we meet every day on the pavements... (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867). 
Image source: Wikipedia

Truth wouldn't mean so much to any of us if we hadn't been conditioned to think of it as a deity, secular and spiritual, personified as a solid figure, often paired with Justice; without it our human experience would descend to scrabbling about without a compass in primal mud. We are far more worried about whether other people are being truthful than if we are, because we are not in control; our own adjustments of the truth do not count as lies; they are corrections. We have our eye on a greater truth transcending ordinary means, whether it's saving our careers or the peace of mind of someone we love; we think a self-constructed truth, made up of our intentions and deletions, is as valid as the actual truth.  Like successful businessmen and ambitious politicians, we end up feeling that the more virtuous duty is not to be found out.

It is true that a lie can save lives. It is true that a lie can cost lives. Dr David Kelly was a casualty of "reasons of State". Hundreds of badly cared for hospital patients are casualties of institutional lies, and everywhere in government and businesses there are managements inciting or covering up lies and making scapegoats....

Winter

Through the window I see ghostly rain 
blown like a mad woman trailing veils across the lawn

under an exhausted sky;

contrary man-made wet and cold, out of rhythm,  
confuses birds and plants,  
dispirits us.
My mother’s old hibiscus plant, totem I have tended,  
is alight with amber flames for a day,
magnificat that leaves me cold.

Extract from At World's End © Pippa Rathborne 2013 written for and included in the anthology End of Days - A Collection of Poetry, to be published by Forward Poetry in April, 2013.