James H. Rubin’s newest book is a luxurious survey of Édouard Manet’s life and work, sumptuous in its three hundred color reproductions and lavish in its generous length of more than four hundred pages that allows the author to elaborate on his ideas about the artist. Intended for both the professional scholar and the non-specialist reader, Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye traces the artist’s impact on his own generation and analyzes the variety of interpretations to which his art has been subjected up to the present day. Rubin decided not to focus exclusively on any one methodology, in order to allow his authorial voice to articulate the historical and aesthetic parameters of Manet’s entire career. Those who espouse a feminist, Marxist, phenomenological, or psychoanalytical perspective on Manet will find these viewpoints considered, but not in the form of any sustained ideological argument. Surely some Manet specialists would have preferred that more generalized knowledge on the part of the reader was assumed (for example, on the structure of the Salon, the controversy surrounding the Salon des Refusés, etc.), and that Rubin had engaged more trenchantly with interpretive strategies. But this is to overlook Rubin’s concentration on Manet’s complex deconstruction of traditional illusionistic painting that reveals itself in subtle details such as the odd placement of a signature on the canvas and the echo of his initial slyly embedded in a motif, or more significantly to ignore how Rubin articulates Manet’s modernism as performative and suffused with irony. Very few scholars have the freedom to expand at great length on any topic, given the severely reduced state of art book publishing today. Flammarion, however, clearly gave Rubin carte blanche and on it he inscribed his Manet, a contrarian who refused to conform to the exigencies of the art world he boldly entered in the 1860s.

Almost thirty years have passed since Françoise Cachin (to whom Rubin dedicates his book) authored the seminal Manet exhibition catalogue (Françoise Cachin, Charles S. Moffett, and Juliet Wilson Bareau, Manet, 1832–1883, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983). Rubin’s book traces in clear prose the trajectory that Manet scholarship has taken since then, and also lays out the extensive research that has emerged subsequently. Rubin does not set out to pick fights and thus has not written a revisionist history of Manet, opting instead to coax fresh insights out of some works while confirming existing ideas on others. This is evident in his footnotes which are largely documentary and only rarely argumentative. In many ways this book resembles a much-extended version of his Phaidon texts on Courbet and Impressionism that serve as straightforward accounts of careers and artistic movements, with the addition here of stunning reproductions, often with details so crisp one can see the craquelure of the paint (James H. Rubin, Courbet, London: Phaidon, 1997; Impressionism, London: Phaidon, 1999). Throughout his text Rubin uses the word interpellate, which is the process by which ideology addresses the pre-ideological individual and produces that individual as a subject. Rubin contends that “Manet changed the silent dialectic enacted by previous painters like Diego Velázquez into a heroic and public struggle for freedom that made rhetorical practices in the arts concomitant with the political rhetoric of modernity,” and concludes that the artist’s “heightened polemic was a compensatory and ironic response to the insecurity engendered by social and political change, leading to deeper questions about the meaning of life itself” (310). This girding provides a reliable basis for beginning to grasp the multifaceted aspects of Manet’s career.

Rubin embeds chronology within chapters, each centered on a theme that reaches both forward and backward to illuminate individual aspects of the works and how they relate to Manet’s mentality. He charts key concepts such as performativity, carnality, dualism, and irony through his chapters, which follow a narration of Manet’s life, but are more devoted to a blend of speculation with examination of the historical context than to a fastidious march through chronology. The titles of his chapters, such as “Global Dialogues: Modernity and Tradition,” “Initial M: Signatures and the Double Self,” and “A Modern Sensibility: The Alienated Eye,” indicate the broad concerns that gird the historical and aesthetic investigation of the works he constellates around a pivotal group of images and ideas. The lens he shines on Manet’s work is one of sharp-eyed reading of images where visual analysis opens onto an expanded view of Manet’s life and times. Manet wanted his work to be seen as a whole, and Rubin accomplishes this goal through a flexible intellectual embrace of the trajectory of the artist’s vexed career, rather than through a sustained probing of a handful of works that fit an ideological construct.

Within his discussions of larger and more familiar themes, Rubin often intervenes with provocative observations such as a reading of the 1862 Cadart album of prints as a parodic emulation of Courbet’s Studio (1855), a description of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) as a farce galante (including his noting of Ferdinand Leenhoff’s hand forming a tail to Victorine’s buttocks in the Déjeuner), and a keen conceptual analysis of Manet’s bookplate etched by Félix Bracquemond (1874). He notes that the wings of the angels in the 1864 Dead Christ with Angels were painted in the blue and gray colors fashionable in women’s clothing in the mid-1860s, then cites Théophile Thoré’s observation that the bizarre wings were tinted with azure more intense than the farthest reaches of the sky, thus highlighting the ironic reach of Manet’s sly grafting of modernist color on a revered iconographic motif. For me, Rubin’s book opens up most richly in chapter 5 with its focus on Manet’s signature. More than just a clever gimmick like Al Hirschfeld’s embedded name of his daughter Nina in his caricatures, Manet’s signature demonstrates that in his artistic conception both touch and tache could be representational and performative. Rubin gives nuanced interpretations of such works as the portrait of Manet’s parents, the Dead Christ with Angels, and the 1878 Self-Portrait with Palette by demonstrating how Manet’s attention to the hands of the figures indexes his painterly and psychological presence in the paintings. Rubin views Manet’s painted hands as sites where his exercise of modernity is most visible, and the pairing throughout the book of enlarged details of hands and faces do justice to his arguments. His bold suggestion that Manet acted as a male lesbian in his relationship with Morisot is one that I wish he had pursued in greater depth as his brief explanation seems to hold wider implications. If the chapter on still life inevitably repeats material from his earlier book (James H. Rubin, Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), it also expands upon works not discussed previously, such as the 1868 Still Life with Salmon, where his knowledge of French puns and table traditions illuminates Manet’s subtle ability to provide intellectual and pictorial nourishment.

The lack of consensus about the meaning of Manet’s art has been an enduring feature in the history of his fame since his work came under public scrutiny, a debate that Rubin’s book deftly handles. Rubin does not as much advance any new theory on Manet’s art as he makes its intricacies and ironies more visible. The strength of the study lies in Rubin’s close readings, his attention to paintings that have been neglected in Manet scholarship, his ability to lead the reader through the thicket of scholarship concerning Manet’s political paintings, and his commitment to opening up questions about how Manet’s images mediate and reflect the cultural and aesthetic discourses of the era. If some will wish that he had looked more closely at the ruts that have developed in the road to understanding Manet’s art, others will be grateful for the smooth ride on the grand tour that Rubin has provided as he keeps to the tache at hand.