Manet and the Family Romance

The nude women in Olympia and Déjeuner sur l'herbe and the other self-possessed figures who stare out at the viewer from Édouard Manet's paintings have long been fascinating mysteries to art historians. Other aspects of Manet's work--figures with implausible postures, strange perspectives--have been equally baffling. Add the artist's propensity for portraying street people of his era in a dreamlike manner hardly consistent with the realism you'd expect from "the painter of modern life," and you have the material for a rich vein of speculative academic writing.

In this stiffly written book, Nancy Locke, an associate professor of art history at Wayne State University, proposes a new way of looking at many of these works. Without denying their importance as reflections of society at large, she argues that they also reflect psychosexual aspects of Manet's personal life. Locke attempts to build a case for what she calls "a Freudian drama, complete with Oedipal desires, dilemmas of illegitimacy, and real and imagined deaths and absences" based on a number of intriguing but shaky-sounding suppositions.

The "family romance" centers around Suzanne Leenhoff, whom Édouard's well-to-do father, Auguste, hired as a teacher for his sons. When Édouard was 20, she gave birth to a child named Léon, whom she passed off as her younger brother. The artist, who married Leenhoff more than a decade later, portrayed her in such paintings as La Nymphe surprise. It has long been assumed that Léon, who also appears in several of Manet's works, was Édouard's son. But Locke thinks Auguste was the father, and marshals circumstantial evidence ranging from contemporary letters to provisions of the Napoleonic Code. Of course, the value of Locke's theories rests on their ability to give us useful insights about Manet's paintings. A more forthright and persuasive writer might charm us with the sheer novelty of her ideas--or more airtight arguments. Is La Nymphe Manet's "attempt to imagine his father's desire for the woman who was his mistress"? This reader is not convinced. --Cathy Curtis