“Luncheon Lunacy”
The realm of the arts has become
saturated over the previous centuries and artists have become less considerate
of “copying” and “copyright laws”. In this day and age it is difficult to
produce a work that has not been influenced by what has come before it and
appropriation has risen to new heights. Édouart Manet’s “Déjeuner sur
l’Herbe” or “Breakfast in the Open Air” painting that was originally titled “Le Bain” or “The Bath”
is a large oil-on-canvas painting produced in 1863. This canonic piece possessed a revolutionary
power and shock value that inspired many to concoct their own work stemming
from this very canvas. Among the many, a 1980’s
New-Wave
band created by Malcolm McLaren appropriated this artwork some a hundred years later. The
"African-derived drum sound" (Russell
A. Trunk’s Excusive Magazine) style band was named “Bow Wow Wow” and they
produced a CD cover that also caused controversy in their time. The scandal
mainly revolved around the lead singer Annabella Lwin taking over for the 19th
century Victorine Meurent. “Le Déjeuner” was
and still is a multi-faceted artwork that can spark a heated discussion, and
for this very reason Bow Wow Wow chose to appropriate it in 1981.
Manet’s original piece was a mixture of
all three genres of painting: landscape, still life, and portrait. All of these
aspects of the piece are stunning though striking all at once since they all
don’t fit proportionally together. The image appears unreal and even dreamlike.
This was due to the scale of the landscape not matching the scale of the
figures. They didn’t match up for the single reason that the whole painting was
conceived indoors in Manet’s atelier, although the current style at the time
was for painters to take their easel outdoors. Manet’s painting is considered
controversial and even scandalous to some extent. For the 19th
century, something so liberated and advanced was “regarded as crude and even
unfinished.”(The Private Life of a
Masterpiece) To Manet contents were of secondary importance, he left behind
the thematic focal point and concentrated on form and esthetics. He was
interested in producing appealing compositions, attractive contrasts, and a
play of colors. To him the “how” overpowered the “what” in his creations. “Le Déjeuner” was
immediately refused when Manet applied for the 1863 annual exhibition of the
Academy Royale in Paris and was sent to be exhibited in the Salon des Refuses.
This was a gallery put together by Napoleon the third to expose the outstanding
number of works that were rejected that particular year. Although at first it
was not allowed to be seen, the second the critics laid eyes on the piece they
scolded and immediately gave it bad judgment. The canvas’ size was considered far
too large for such a mundane subject, being four people having an everyday
picnic. What shocked the viewers was that the work had no allegorical or
idealized figures in it. It was obscene and no one could possibly make any
sense of it. It puzzled many as they pondered on a hidden meaning and tried to
figure out the implied narrative. Some came up with the theory that the posing
nude, that was a depiction of Manet’s favorite model Victorine Meurent, could
be a well-regarded prostitute in the midst of an orgy. This was backed up by
Manet’s subtle painting of a frog in the grass of his landscape, given that in
the nineteenth century “frog” was a common term for “prostitute”. Also, it was
outrageous to see common faces in the piece. Manet’s future brother in law and
brother posed for the male figures in the canvas, and the female in the
foreground was just an ordinary woman. She wasn’t a symbolic representation for
something grander such as Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the People” seeing as
her clothes were disposed of next to the delightful fruit basket. People could
now identify with the hero in paintings and find the hero in themselves. In
sum, with this masterpiece, which was said to be a gem of the nineteenth
century French culture, Manet became the chief of impressionism and paved the
way for future modernist painting.
The work finally entered pop culture in the
1980’s when the pop group “Bow Wow Wow” appropriated it, who also claim that
they made viewers more aware of the original. The creator of the group, McLaren,
purposely desired to create uproar with the CD cover of the popular album “See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah!
City All Over, Go Ape Crazy!”
hence the effect the original painting had on the population at its first
exhibition. This technique not only worked out to the band’s advantage, but
also was named one of the best album covers of all time. On the contrary with
“Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe”, the 80’s photographed CD cover focused more on the
work’s content over its form. They opted the recreation of this masterpiece for
what it represented thematically: confusion, controversy, and lack of
correspondence. They attempted to give a creative and even more modern spin on
the original by placing themselves in Manet’s cinematic scene. "It was a
beautiful album and meant to be done in good taste – and I of course had my
hesitations about [the album cover] because I was underage! And that was
obviously what the uproar was all about because I was being accused of posing
nude for other reasons. But I did it because at the time it felt to me that
this would be a brilliant re-creation of this painting”, claims Annabella
Lwin in her interview with Russell A. Trunk. The photographer in charge of this appropriation, Andy Earl,
knew that chaos awaited him even as he was shooting the band. He assured the
young nude teen that the image would not turn out in away way sexual; she would
look beautiful. The photograph therefore didn’t contradict the conventions of
beauty like the front-lit Victorine that was made to look flat and have all her
defects made visible. The creator of the group was searching for public
attention while demonstrating his affection towards the arts. He certainly got
it with this album cover, especially with it getting banned in the UK and in
the US.
To conclude, Édouart Manet’s “Déjeuner sur
l’herbe” was a canonic realist painting of the 19th century that
stood as a muse to following artists and fueled their art work. Even though
bathed in lukewarm praise at its first appearance, the piece took the world by
storm and inspired the pop group Bow Wow Wow to appropriate the painting with
the means of photography. They took the challenge to re-shock the people and
push them out of their comfort zone for a second time. Manet and McLaren were
visionaries who searched to create analytically with a conscious and the desire
to explore the possibilities of the art world.
WORKS
CITED
Fiero,
K. Gloria. The Humanistic Tradition,
Fifth Edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2006. Print.
The Private Life of a Masterpiece. DVD
Annecarlini.com/ex_interviews.php?id=635,
80’s – Bow Wow Wow ‘Putting The Wow Back Into Music’. Russell
Trunk’s Excusive Magazine. Web
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