﻿In the 1890s, Edgar Degas was on a mission. To find, acquire and piece
together some parts of a lost painting. This is How a fragmented Edouard Manet painting
would turn into an accidental masterpiece.
Edouard Manet painted some of the most recognizable paintings in art history,
most of which I constantly mention or have made a video about on this channel.
However, my favorite work by Manet was made, surprisingly, by accident and it’s one of his
many iterations of an event that happened on June 19th 1867. It would take two years and 4
different canvases, the biggest canvases Manet had ever worked on, to depict this very event.
Let’s take a look at Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian.
In May of 1864, Maximilian I, Archduke of Austria arrived in Mexico reluctantly. The
Emperor of France, Napoléon the third, convinced him to be his puppet emperor in the Second
Mexican Empire. However, as you may imagine, Mexicans weren’t too fond of having a foreign
monarch leading them, so after much political turmoil and resistance led by Benito Juarez,
Napoléon retreated many of his troops from Mexico in 1866, two years after Maximilian had arrived.
The French Emperor would then try to convince Maximilian to leave and retreat to France,
a proposal he refused. In May 1867, three years after his arrival,
Maximilian was captured and on June 19th, he was executed alongside two generals.
So this made for some newsworthy drama at the time. The French emperor made Maximilian
the emperor of Mexico, to then abandon him and tell him to come back. In a plot twist,
Maximilian wanted to stay, abandoned by the man who gave him power, and was executed.
This was a defeat for both emperors and a victory for the Mexican republicans and,
arguably, the French republicans as well, who could now point out Napoléon’s incompetence.
One of these French republicans was Édouard Manet and he definitely wouldn’t skip out on
the opportunity to highlight this tragic event to the world through one of his paintings.
Manet was already famous, or at least infamous, at the time.
Both his Déjeuner sur l’herbe and his Olympia had already been subjects of many heated
conversations in the art world. However, if his next painting was to be controversial,
it wouldn’t be because it would depict nudity in a way aristocrats didn’t like, or because
it was painted in a way aristocrats didn’t like, but because of the political nature of the work.
He took up a 2.6 meter wide canvas and, with great difficulty, made his first painting.
He didn’t know the features of the Mexican republicans and decided to give them sombreros,
which they weren’t actually wearing. Manet wanted to accurately depict the scene and
information was pretty hard to get by, especially considering the information
about that specific event was heavily censored by the emperor for obvious reasons.
Manet was not satisfied with that painting, so after many tries and sketches, he finally
completed this one in 1869. The information is a lot more clear than his first try.
You actually see the firing squad, their uniform which resembled a lot like the French uniforms,
you see a crowd of bystanders, a stone wall against which the victims are executed and,
finally, the victims themselves. If you’ve seen some of my other videos on this channel,
than you might recognize this composition. The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya heavily
influenced it and its composition is still as strong in Manet’s painting. This composition hides
the executioners’ faces as they all turn their backs to us. They also lose all individuality
as they all wear the same uniform, diluting the responsibility of the murder they’re carrying out.
However, there are many elements differentiating both paintings, the most obvious being that one
is in broad daylight and the other is at night. One has a pile of dead bodies, the other doesn’t.
Goya’s composition is more dramatic in its lighting and in its graphic details,
but Manet’s composition has an element which Goya didn’t include. The soldier on the right.
It’s the only soldier we can identify and it’s the soldier who will deliver the coup de gras,
the coup de gras being the finishing strike in case the execution didn’t work the first time.
The reason why we can identify this soldier and not the others is not a coincidence. Manet
made this executioner look strangely like the Emperor of France himself, Napoléon the Third.
All of this is great, but this final version of the painting is far from being my
favorite. If anything, to me, it’s pretty average.
The version I prefer stands between the first and the last one. Manet gave up on
this version and I’m glad he did because this abandonment made it my favorite Manet painting.
This version of The Execution of Maximilian was cut up to become separate individual
works of art. Some parts were lost, some were damaged, but, after Manet’s death,
Edgar Degas reunited these four pieces together. This is the result and, somehow, this incomplete
painting is the most captivating of the series. By positioning only some of the fragments back
together, Degas, or Manet, accidentally created a work of art of its own. This has always been
seen or considered like a pieced up lost work of Manet, but I believe it’s much more than that.
I believe we can appreciate this work much better by considering it,
not as the remnants of a lost work of art, but as a work of art in itself. It’s creating a whole new
way of narrativizing a painting or a situation. The different elements are all framed for us,
like different scenes from a movie. This was certainly not the intention, but Manet (or Degas)
is zooming in on different aspects of the situation starting with an establishing shot of
a group of soldiers to then show close up shots of the coup de gras soldier, of one of the generals,
and, finally, Maximilian’s hand. Then these close up shots are collaged together and tell a story.
This is all accidental, of course, but these accidents are what allow the viewer to be engaged
with the painting. For example, this painting, which depicts the execution of Emperor Maximilian,
doesn’t show the emperor. All we see of him is his hand clutching his general’s hand. We don’t see
the emperor anymore. He’s dead. All that’s left is an image of his hand holding on to dear life.
The omission of such information wasn’t a choice, but that doesn’t really matter,
the painting still resonates with us. If anything, I’m more compelled by the
narrative Manet’s depicting in this composition than in his final one.
Without wanting to, Manet, with the help of Degas, created a masterpiece, not by showing
a whole scene, but by showing pieces of it, giving to the composition a rhythm
and a tension which you’d expect to feel during an execution. The moment being so fast, so traumatic,
that you’d only recollect some pieces of it, some glimpses, some fragments of images frozen in time.
That’s clearly not what Manet intended, but that’s the effect it has on me and perhaps,
in some cases, it’s the effect of a painting, not its intent, that makes it a masterpiece.