Manets Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets

A sense of stillness and silence pervades Manet's works, whose flattened, sometimes fragmented figures appear to exist absentmindedly in a world entirely lacking speech. It is this silence that James Rubin explores in a essay that shows Manet as we see him - naturally, in pictures that articulate their own purely visual terms. Manet's figural works, whether the early bohemian subjects or the elusive portraits and modern-life themes of the later 1860s and 1870s, depend on visual exchanges and confrontations, or patterns of gazes, not on narrative. The "aesthetics of silence" to be found in these works is poetically embodied in the displays of evocative flower-studies and other still-lifes that Manet worked at throughout his career. Incorporating insights into Manet's achievement, and into certain writings of three literary associates - Baudelaire, Zola and Stephane Mallarme - the book sets out to explain why Manet's paintings continue to fascinate and elude us more than a century after his death.