Edouard Manet - Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, 1867
Francsico de Goya - The Third of May 1808, 1814In 1861, President Benito Juárez of Mexico passed a law that ended the repayment of Mexican debts to European nations. Napoleon III responded by invading Mexico and installing the Austrian noble Maximilian von Habsburg as Emperor. The intervention was a disaster. By 1865, the French military was on the retreat, and the end of the American Civil War meant that the United States might intervene on Mexico’s behalf. In February of 1867, Napoleon III withdrew all the remaining French troops. Maximilian was stranded. He was tried for treason by the Mexican government, found guilty, and executed on June 19, 1867. Manet was clearly moved by these historical events and painted five versions of the Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. The best of them was completed in 1869. It is clearly a direct artistic response to Francisco de Goya's painting Third of May, 1808.
Both artists were painting during times of great historical upheaval. Goya responded to the first Emperor Napoleon's invasion of Spain and the subsequent brutality of the French troops. The cultural context for his painting was Romanticism - a reaction to the Enlightenment - a term which describes a set of attitudes to the power of the imagination, a commitment to the truth of feeling and a sensitivity to contemporary political events. The context for Manet's art is the urban expansion of Paris, rapid industrialisation and the emergence of new ways of seeing in response to modern life. 50 years after Goya's celebrated painting, another French Emperor was responsible for distant acts of violence and Manet seems to have drawn on both the newspaper reports of the execution and Goya's composition for his own version of events.
Some art historians claim Manet as the Father of Modern Art because he was so responsive to the texture of modern life. His brushwork is alive. He rejects the super-smooth finish of academic painting, preferring a superb range of effects which suggest the continual flux of life in the modern city. And yet Manet's way of seeing is grounded in art history. We have seen how he responded, controversially, to Titian's example. What I'd like to know is how you feel about these two paintings of an executution. How has each artist composed the scene? How have they dealt with pictorial space? How would you describe the use of light, the roles of the various characters in the paintings (the victims, the soldiers, the onlookers) and each artist's attitide to the events depicted? What, would you say, is the main difference between the two works?
Check out the excellent Museum of Modern Art online exhibition of Manet's Maximilian paintings for further insights into this great series of paintings.
