Pentimenti Redux

by David Galloway

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On November 8, 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered rays capable of penetrating material and providing an image of structures invisible to the naked eye. Because they were previously  unknown, he dubbed these simply “x-rays,” as they are still known today in most of the world. (In tribute to its gifted native son and first recipient of the Nobel Prize for physics, Germany prefers to use the term Röntgenstrahlen.) Little more than a month after his initial discovery, Röntgen produced a radiograph of his wife’s left hand, complete with her ill-fitting wedding ring, and mailed the results to several colleagues. That radiograph was exhibited in a public announcement of Röntgen’s discovery on January 24, 1896. Fully aware of the significance of his research, especially for the field of diagnostic medicine, the physicist declined to patent his discovery, in the hope that other researchers would further refine the technique. The wide-reaching applications of radiography would quickly extend far beyond diagnostics to include geology and meteorology, engineering, botany, biology, art, architecture, archaeology, analytical chemistry, and, in our own day, security technologies. 

Accustomed as we are to the speed with which information travels in a digital age, it nonetheless seems astonishing that on Valentine’s Day, 1896, only a matter of weeks after the publication of Röntgen’s revolutionary discovery, his technique was applied by the Frankfurt physicist Walter Koenig to the analysis of a painting. (A Dresden colleague, Alexander Toepler, soon followed suit.) Despite the relative primitiveness of the equipment employed, the heavy concentration of lead in the undercoating of most paintings facilitated the production of strikingly detailed images of the “inner life” of the works being examined, thus offering unprecedented insights into the sheer craft of painting itself. 

Even more important than what such imaging reveals of an artist’s individual gestus—his handwriting—such imaging may well document the evolution of a composition. This typically includes underlying sketches and the consecutive layering of colors with which particular effects have been achieved, as well as corrections, often extensive ones, made during the painterly process. Particularly valuable for stylistic analysis and authentication are the so-called pentimenti—a word based on the Italian penti (to repent) and derived, in turn, from the Latin paenitere (to regret). Pentimenti reveal alterations made by the painter during the course of his work—most often for purely formal reasons, but sometimes as the result of personal or political motivations. A painting entirely devoid of pentimenti is likely to be a copy or an outright forgery, though for that very reason adept forgers often employ older paintings as ground for their inventions.  Radiographic analysis is an essential tool for the restorer, who can detect later additions to a work—which are sometimes the result of exaggerated prudery.  Such analysis can also reveal hidden treasures, revealing earlier versions of the finished painting or even unrelated previous compositions. Beneath Rembrandt’s masterly Tobias and the Angels (1652), for example, there slumbers the portrait of an unknown man. Another small painting on wood, Old Man with a Beard (1630), previously accepted as an authentic Rembrandt, was recently discovered to conceal a convincing self-portrait of the painter himself as a young man. 

Artists may be so dissatisfied with a work that they choose to recycle it, or so short of materials that they feel they have no other choice. Experts estimate that fully one-third of van Gogh’s early works are overpaintings of other, finished works that may well have fallen victim to the artist’s chronic penury. Beneath his Patch of Grass (1887) x-ray technology has rendered visible the head of a peasant woman—probably part of a portrait series. But there may even be political as well as monetary reasons for the “burial” of an earlier composition. Francisco de Goya’s Portrait of Don Ramon Salué  (1823), a depiction of a famous Spanish judge, conceals the elaborate but unfinished portrait of a French general, in all probability Joseph Bonaparte, who ruled for a brief time as King of Spain. Goya was Bonaparte’s court painter, and when the monarchy was restored in 1813, the artist clearly had no desire to document the close relationship to his previous patron.

Whether an aesthetic decision, a matter of expediency, or even a form of censorship, pentimenti obviously have much to tell us about an artist’s motivation and technique—even, in some cases, about his biography. Yet I know of no single precedent to the technique that Harding Meyer has evolved over the course of his immensely productive career, in which the “evidence” from the substrata of a work becomes an integral part of the final composition. Although he renders his subjects with a splendid technical virtuosity, he also repeatedly “attacks” the surface of the painting in a manner that negates any hint of photorealism or simple “prettiness.” (In some more recent works, the faces of Meyer’s subjects are grotesquely distorted in a manner reminiscent of Francis Bacon.) In a complex process that may take as many as six months to complete, a single image is built up in ten to fifteen successive layers, often involving major changes in coloration and detail. During this process, still-damp upper layers may be intentionally “streaked” with a damp brush or even scraped away, fresh layers added, and those in turn partially scraped away again. What remains visible in the finished work is thus an amalgam, a blending of painterly information, including traces of underlying pentimenti that have been exposed. This contributes, in turn, to the intricate, tapestry-like texture of Meyer’s works and to their somewhat diffuse, veil-like surfaces.

Although he has occasionally painted three-quarter and even full-length figures, the works for which Harding Meyer is best known are portraits of mass-media “models” whose faces are cropped 

in such a manner that focus is on the area between hairline and chin. When he left behind an earlier abstract phase by taking family photographs as a source of motifs, Meyer found ways of focalizing human physiognomy. “I didn’t have to look for models,” he recently reflected. “I realized soon that painting an unknown person permitted me to be free to develop my own style.”1 In deriving much of his imagery from advertising, fashion magazines and the Internet, along with stills of television talk shows, Meyer demonstrates a certain affinity to Andy Warhol, who monumentalized and memorialized found imagery in his silk-screened paintings. One is perhaps tempted to think of Meyer’s portraits as giving his subjects the “fifteen minutes of fame” that Warhol had once promised. One can also view Meyer’s mass-media models from a radically different vantage point: as images rescued through art from the flood of visual information that threatens to engulf our perception of reality.

While Meyer, like Warhol before him, utilizes photographic sources, there remains an essential difference in their approaches. Few of Warhol’s subjects were in fact anonymous. Even when Warhol was a sickly child constrained to spend long periods of time in bed, he was a passionate fan of movie magazines. It comes as no surprise, then, that his most popular subjects would include such stars 

and celebrities as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Marlon Brando, Mick Jagger, 

Elvis Presley, and Jackie Kennedy—along with Mickey Mouse and Mao Tse Tung. Meyer’s subjects, on the other hand, are not only nameless, but many are also purely fictional. They are constructed by combining images and modifying them with various electronic tools, including Photoshop. (Here, too, antecedents can be found in what Warhol called his own “romance” with tape-recorder, Polaroid, and film-camera.) Meyer’s exploration of medial perception was documented in his installation of in-direct paintings at the Kunstverein Emsdetten in 2011. In his essay “Negationenen der Positivität” (Negations of Positivity), the critic Gerhard Charles Rump has analyzed this interplay of video with negative and positive images from public as well as private sources, including Meyer’s own paintings.  It was a conceptual-perceptual experiment that Rump describes as an exploration of meta-reality.2 

The technique of addition and subtraction, of concealing and revealing, contributes to the enigmatic quality of Meyer’s portraits. At first glance his subjects seem oddly, even tantalizingly familiar, yet they rapidly recede into anonymity; remote and estranged, they project a mysterious, introspective air that belies their seemingly “blank” expressions. It is as though these faces are simultaneously recorded with sharp-focus and soft-focus lenses, combining literalness and idealization (the latter, of course, being a common device of traditional portraiture). In her Grammatologie der Bilder (Grammatology of Pictures),3 the cultural historian Sigrid Weigel has argued that the en-face, as opposed to the popular three-quarter or the profile portrait, derives from the tradition of the Greek mask, which expressed a persona that was often radically different from the actor beneath the mask. (Since 1888 the full-face photograph—the so-called “mugshot”—has been regularly employed by law-enforcement agencies in compiling criminal records.) 

Harding Meyer’s unique idiom draws its strength from precisely such contrasts: revealment and concealment, intimacy and reserve, tradition and innovation, portrait and landscape, figuration and abstraction. There is scarcely a segment of a canvas that, if extrapolated from the whole, might not be read as an abstract composition—above all, of course, the non-illusionist backgrounds, which eschew any suggestion of context or locale. The marriage of abstract and figurative elements was already signaled in Meyer’s debut exhibition in 1995, two years after the completion of his studies at the Karlsruhe Art Academy, where he studied with the painters Max Kaminsky and Helmut Dorner. Today he describes his Karlsruhe show as “my favorite exhibition.”4 On view were three distinct groups of works: mini-format watercolors on paper (some no more than 5 x 4 cm), slightly larger works in gouache on wood, and a large-format series employing acrylic on raw cotton. All were the promising work of a young artist finding his way, experimenting with styles and materials, yet the show nonetheless offered hints of things to come. The gouaches, rendered in a kind of art brut style, all depict distorted human heads, as do the watercolors. The canvases, measuring as much as 203 x 154 cm, are lyric abstractions that suggest the influence of color-field painting. As in Lace (1994), their effects are achieved through a process of layering thin coats of paint, often leaving earlier layers visible in the finished composition.

While figuration would become Meyer’s trademark, abstraction was never entirely rejected, as plainly documented by headhunter, his first show at Düsseldorf’s Gallery Voss in 2001. In the accompanying catalogue, Renate Puvogel insightfully remarked that the works “are first painted in rich colors with protruding features, but afterward the well-formed head is covered with broad, radical strokes, which cross out its individuality, almost bordering on the abstract.”5 The process of “revision” that Puvogel describes was made possible by the artist’s shift from fast-drying, opaque acrylics to malleable, slow-drying oil paint. Hence, a mere six years after his debut, Meyer had found his subject, his trademark style, his material, and his technique. Furthermore, his command of those elements was strikingly self-assured. Yet the initial Voss exhibition differed in a number of aspects from the works Meyer would create over the following years. First, most of his subjects were children, and some were portrayed in a three-quarter pose—two of them even in a reclining position. Of those portrayed en face, several are looking aside and not, as in later works, directly into the viewer’s own eyes. In keeping with the theme of innocence that emerges here, the palette is lighter, more pastel than that of the artist’s later compositions. Furthermore, a kind of veil seems to hang over the pictures, lending them a hazy, dreamlike air, not unlike that created by Gerhard Richter in his own blurred, photo-based paintings—above all, in his famous Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) from 1966. All in all, the headhunter series conveys the intimate air of snapshots in a family album.

Perhaps the most significant change signaled by headhunter was in the choice of a horizontal format over the vertical proportions of traditional portraiture. The change was rooted in the artist’s fascination with images from cinema screens, television sets, and the Internet: all of them horizontal sources of pictorial information. In favoring the classic “landscape format,” Meyer had to radically adjust the proportions of his compositions. Portraying the entire head on a horizontal canvas would have made the background considerably larger and perhaps more dominant than the subject itself. Meyer chose the other alternative: to foreground his subjects by pulling the heads forward, often cropping them in such a manner that focus is on the area between hairline and chin. Yet something 

of the landscape aesthetic remains. Meyer creates a pictorial “horizon” delineated by the eyes of his subjects and accentuated by the horizontal structure of the eye itself. The total composition is thus indeed structured like a landscape, while the textured surface, typically free of any explicit spatial reference, stretches unbroken across the entire canvas.

In their collection of essays The Iconography of Landscape, the cultural geographers Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels have described landscape painting as “an ordered expression of human perception”—hence, a function of seeing. “Landscape,” they argue, “is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads.”6 In using the human eye as a structuring device for his compositions, Harding Meyer follows in the tradition of the great English portraitist Lucian Freud, who always began a new work by painting the sitter’s eyes. In response to a question by Leonie Schilling in an interview for Arte Al Limite, Harding Meyer responded, “First, I look in the eyes of the subject to find something to hold onto, the need for empathy.” Then Schilling posed a question that points directly to a paradox at the heart of Meyer’s oeuvre: “How do you take something beautiful per se, change its context and turn it into a portrait that appeals to emotions that weren’t there before?”7 According to the painter, the answer rests in part in the extended production process, the artist’s extended communion with his subject, which extends to the later exhibition of the work. Meyer’s paintings are ideally so installed that viewer and subject are vis-à-vis, literally seeing “eye to eye.” (The latter is one of the more common of 269 English idioms that employ the word “eye.” German offers eighty-two idioms for the equivalent “Auge.”)

Through this confrontation of subject and viewer, the artist plays with the notion of the eyes as a window to the soul—a surprising twist in works whose “sitters” may not only be anonymous but also composites. (Some, indeed, are distorted with the aid of false teeth, wigs, tape, and electronic manipulation.)  Normally, the eyes of Meyer’s models stare so directly into those of the viewer that an uncanny feeling arises: are we seeking to peer into the depths of the subject’s eyes, or is the subject peering into ours? What results is a kind of two-way voyeurism: a mutual peep-show. The compelling power of such an unflinching gaze is evidenced 

by the logo for Tatort, the longest-running crime series on German television. The show’s opening, featuring a pair of eyes caught in crosshairs, has remained virtually unchanged since the series debuted in 1970. (Horst Lettenmeyer, the young actor whose eyes still dramatically signal unknown dangers, received 400 Marks for his contribution.) As contemporary systems of biomorphic identification demonstrate, eyes are anything but anonymous; the complex and random patterns of the human iris are not only unique but can be identified from a considerable distance. 

In Meyer’s case, of course, we are dealing with extreme close-ups not unlike those with which filmmakers signal a character’s emotions. Indeed, the Golden Age of Hollywood saw the development of a special “eyelight” to lend dramatic emphasis to such revelations by putting a sparkle in an actor’s or actress’s eye and frequently offering clues to his or her intentions. The painted portrait had long since employed such highlights to lend vividness to the sitter’s gaze, and the works of Harding Meyer are no exception. With such classic techniques he lends his figures a compelling individuation that belies their anonymous origins, integrating them into the family of man through the sheer, transmogrifying force of his art. 

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1 Unpublished interview with David Galloway (Karlsruhe, September 8, 2016). 

2 See Gerhard Charles Rump, “Der Mensch im Überformat,” Die Welt (August 5, 2006), p. 19.

3 See Sigrid Weigel, Grammatologie der Bilder (Berlin: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 2015). 

4 Telephone conversation with Harding Meyer (November 12, 2015). 

5 Renate Puvogel, "Heads - Horizontally," in the exhibition catalogue Harding Meyer: "headhunter"  

(Düsseldorf: Galerie Voss, 2001), p. 9.

6 Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, 

Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 108. 

7 Leonie Schilling, “Harding Meyer,” Arte al Limite (November–December, 2014), p. 19. 

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Text 2

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Painted Datasets (2002)

by Michael Hübl

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Nowadays, faces are huge quantities of data stored in high-performance computers, or piece goods, sold by the yard and disgorged by passport-photo booths in train stations and shopping malls. They are “material,” to be picked up, used, and potentially subjected to fresh appraisal. 

Think of the eponymous protagonist of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film Amélie, retrieving the scraps and fragments of a stranger’s torn-up photos from underneath one of those photo booths, in order to painstakingly reassemble them afterwards. Or think of Harding Meyer, who selectively pins down the photographically and electronically prepared glut of images, extracting and isolating individual elements in order to reconstruct them on canvas. With a digital camera, Meyer records television pictures: the everyday small-screen mixture of warlords and advertising babes, poker-faces repre-senting the interests of the state, street urchins exploited for propaganda purposes, perps and the traumatized, terror victims and tourists. From this batch of images subjected to a twofold technological processing—first edited in studios and cutting rooms, then filmed from the screen—Meyer picks out the motifs which he later turns into paintings: large-format likenesses of young women, or intimate portraits of serious, bright, mischievous, quizzical, self-confident, or sometimes even prematurely aged children. He also trawls the Internet as a source. Furthermore, Meyer sometimes paints people from his immediate workaday surroundings. In such cases, however, the faces are adapted to the conditions of media technology. Before Meyer mixes his oil paints and begins to apply the first strokes to the canvas, he prepares a C-print even smaller than a postcard to serve as a reference as he paints. 

In terms of craftsmanship, Meyer follows a process developed, handed down and modified over centuries. In several working steps, individual layers of paint are applied one on top of the other, resulting, at the end of the painting process, in a seemingly uniform whole—the picture. With painters such as Giorgione or Jean Siméon Chardin, Peter Paul Rubens or Tintoretto, these layers consist of open, loosely engaging structures, so that, on closer inspection, the figures and objects portrayed dissolve into a web of lines, planes, blobs, or graphic abbreviations. Meyer does not take a significantly different approach. Even if his paintings often come across as calm and harmonious in the final analysis, these downright meditatively balanced views of human physiognomies are always the result of several consecutively linked acts of painting. In a first approximation to the motif, Meyer marks out the contours and significant parts of the painting, subjecting its surface to a calculated compositional organization. In terms of characteristic style, this stage would be comparable, for instance, with the prismatically constructed works of Paul Cézanne—only Meyer does not attempt to break down spatial perception  into individual image particles and facets of color. Rather, he keeps the image in the categories of  two-dimensionality, constructing it from distinct planes emerging from finished painting processes  and lying one on top of another like transparencies.  

The impression of planning and leveling is particularly evident when the artist removes the final layer of paint with a squeegee. At this moment, Meyer gets to grips, as it were, with the object depicted, definitively taking possession of it. Again, to phrase it metaphorically, he strips the epidermis from the painting—divesting it of its externality, so to speak—by exposing a deeper layer of the picturethat already encompasses everything of importance.  If in some pictures it looks as if the face and background are covered by a veil, viewers are faced with a paradox: at first glance they might infer the necessity of pulling aside a sort of gauze curtain covering the actual portrait. Here, however, they are already a step ahead: by scratching off the outermost layer of paint, the artist has brought viewers one level closer to the construction of the painting, and to its inner structure. 

With this gesture of erasure lying implicitly over the painting, Meyer blazes a hermeneutic path leading back to the beginnings of each specific portrayal. By removing the final painted layer at the end of his process, he provides an example of how the visual message should be deconstructed, and demonstrates how, in analytical backward movements, one proceeds from one layer of paint to the next, and from there, layer by layer back to the white primer of the canvas. Meyer triggers a moment of examination. Reflecting on the creative process, it again becomes plain that no matter how realistic the pictures look, they are constructions, both in terms of how they are made and how they are perceived. Michel Foucault hinted at this connection using the painting of Édouard Manet. Referring to La serveuse de bocks (The Waitress), he remarked: “What does this painting consist of, and what does it represent? In a certain sense it represents nothing, because there is nothing to see.”

The philosopher, who has devoted himself to the study of Manet for twenty years, based his statement on the showcasing of the painting in its Parisian context, which hinges entirely on intimation. The gaze of the protagonist—a waitress—is lost somewhere in the distance; an arm and a piece of tulle, protruding into the scene from the left, indicate that not only beer but also dancing and cabaret are offered here. The nothingness that erupts in Manet, which Foucault was not the first to notice, is the absence of communication between the people who are portrayed, and the absence of revelation that the painter imparts to his figures. Paul Valéry spoke of a “présence d’absence”; 2 here, he had in mind the portrait of Berthe Morisot au bouquet de violettes (Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets), and the slightly forlorn gaze with which the dark, curly-haired woman looks out of the picture. Faced with this presence in nowhere, with the open reserve of the people in Manet’s paintings, every narrative about individual life scripts, dreams, plans and destinies must remain conjecture. The person is the person, the picture is the picture. The painting of Harding Meyer also rests on this premise, though admittedly under changed technological and art-historical conditions. Developments that spread like wildfire in the Belle Époque, which Manet also helped to spur on in his paintings, only really achieved their full effect after the painter’s death, in the course of the 20th century—revolutionizing art to an extent that could not fail to leave its mark on painting. The medium was radically called into question, and its end was repeatedly proclaimed. Nowadays, therefore, every painted picture created on the basis and in the awareness of these historical changes contains a redefinition of the medium. This is because painting nowadays perforce defines itself with reference to a zero point determined by the assertion (now put into historical perspective) that its tools are not appropriate for the modern world, and are bound to fail in the face of the latter.

The painting of Harding Meyer has its place on this side of the zero point. His works bring together two different strands of development that began running their separate courses in Manet’s time, if not earlier. Manet’s paintings were often criticized for being flat and sloppily composed, and for failing to achieve the heightened degree of refined portrayal as celebrated with sweeping dramatics and even morbid nuances by the then esteemed historical paintings of Alexandre Cabanel, Thomas Couture or Ernest Meissonier. Ultimately, however, this criticism of Manet pinpoints the decisive landmark step taken by the painter: the image is no longer used like a proscenium stage for illusionistic productions. Rather, the appearance of the Objective, which the invention of central perspective had imbued with a spatial dimension, is dissolved in favor of a style of painting that renders the peculiarities of the medium visible, because it preserves painting as painting. The discrepancy between a three-dimensional reality and the need to translate this reality into planes—to level it, so to speak—persists in Manet’s paintings. There, not least of all, it highlights the productive difference between painting and photography. From this point on—up to the virtual reality of the Internet—illusionism is a matter of technical devices. 

Particularly when getting to grips with the execution of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, when it was a question of increasing the plausibility of the portrayal by incorporating generally known details, Manet no doubt consulted press photos on a number of occasions, using his sources in a highly selective manner. Manet, however, only used photos to supplement information, unlike, for example, Franz von Stuck, who later used them as a means of pinpointing a composition, thereby having access to a forever-unchanging model. Speaking to his communications mentor Émile Zola, he declared: “I’m helpless without a model. I cannot paint from my imagination.”3

Behind this statement, which seemingly only reveals an individual shortcoming, there are already signs that pictures generated with technology will in future increasingly serve as a substitute for reality. This break, this splitting into two realities, is foreshadowed in Manet’s confession: classically trained and belonging to an era in which the new media are just beginning to take root, Manet intimates—admittedly through his broad-brush painting style and spaciously laid-out, ubiquitous flat expanses—that he is acting in a two-dimensional space. Even so, he still understands painting as a conversion of spatial impressions into planes and lines. With him, painting represents a transformation from three dimensions into two. Had Manet referred directly to photographs, he would have remained on the same level of perception and production. Like the fresco painters, who transformed drawings into extended murals, the modification he undertook would only have been aesthetic. Enlargement, arrangement of color and the exaltation of the black-and-white photo through the application of paint would have transformed it into a painting. The product of an optical device and a subsequent chemical procedure would have acquired the values and charms of handcrafted peinture. Moreover, it would have signified a streamlining measure if Manet had based his paintings directly on photographic models. That he did not take this step is remarkable, since he consistently operates within the categories of the plane, and repeatedly reminds us that images are, in the first instance, images—i.e. an abstraction—of the reality they present us with. In his last great work, he even duplicates this effect: Un bar aux Folies-Bergère (A Bar at the Folies-Bergère) just about overflows with sensory impressions, but the bulk of what the viewer sees are the reflections on a huge wall mirror that takes up a good three quarters of the painting. 

The mirrors from which Harding Meyer draws his images are TV screens and PC monitors. Here, similarly to Manet, Meyer stresses the mediality of painting. Like photography or the Internet, television or film, it is only ever a surrogate of what it reflects. And, like Manet before him, Meyer emphasizes in his works that the reality of the images is constituted as a synthesis: of the technical properties and requirements of the medium with its specific materials in each case, of the individual handling of these materials, and of the objects from which they are derived. These factors pertain to painting, as well as to photography or to images from the Internet: for although the pictures generated by a device are deemed—owing to their underlying scientific parameters—to be objective, they are nonetheless subject to the functions according to which they operate, as well as to the intentions coupled with their use. Meyer refers back to this connection. He paints, but with respect to the aforementioned conditions, his painting is merely the continuation of the technologically generated images by other means: specifically, by the tools of painting.  

Although a text on the topicality of painting at the beginning of the 21st century states that painting creates a space—more precisely, “the intimacy of a space that is relevant to the present day as a resonance chamber of my own three-dimensionality”4—there is no tranquil three-dimensionality to speak of in Meyers’ portraits. True, the rise and fall of the facial landscape, its hollows and elevations, are clearly indicated: nose and chin appear to stand out, the eyes seem to be more deeply set. But instead of modeling physiognomy through characteristic brush style, Meyer does everything to keep perception in the plane. The layer-by-layer construction of the painting described above supports this, as does the flattening of the painting’s surface by evenly drawing a squeegee over it. Last but not least, it is the almost totally empty, often ethereally light-blue or neutral gray backgrounds that dismiss any illusion of three-dimensionality, particularly since, in terms of painting technique, they are in any case on a level with the portrayal of the face. Even the materiality of the color allows no latching of the gaze onto the third dimension; any three-dimensional development of the painting’s surface is avoided in favor of homogeneity.

Michel Foucault, Die Malerei von Manet, Berlin 1999, p. 25 (translation from the German).

2 Paul Valéry, “Triomphe de Manet”, in: Manet 1832–1883, Musée de l’Orangerie exh. cat., Paris 1932,  

pp. XIV–XVI (translation from the German).

3 Cf. Manfred Fath/Stefan Germer (eds.), Edouard Manet. Augenblicke der Geschichte, Munich 1992, p. 47 

(translation from the German).

4 Jean-Christophe Ammann, “Kunst unter Tränen”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 16, 2001, p. I