The Balcony / Manet.

Edouard Manet, in 'The Balcony' represents urban life and the contemporary leisure activities of the Parisians. The painting is unconventional in its subject matter and also the approach towards the concept of viewing. Perception was an important attribute of Impressionist paintings, and Manet, though not an Impressionist in its typical form, shows certain convincing reasons for us to believe he was so.

The painting tells no story or anecdote; the protagonists are frozen, as if isolated in an interior dream, evidence that Manet was freeing himself from academic constraints, despite the obvious reference to Goya's Majas at the Balcony. The painting thus, shows a shift in art where it strives to free itself from teh conventional patterns of being bound to literature and moral responsibilities. The vividness of the colours, the green of the balustrade and shutters, the blue of the man's tie, as well as the brutal contrast between the white dresses and the darkness of the background, were perceived as provocation. The hierarchy usually attached to human figures and objects has been disregarded: the flowers receiving more detail than some of the faces.


It is important to keep in mind that in this painting, Manet painted an image about viewing: the sexuality, anonymity and hierarchy of viewing. As such, the subject of his painting is contemporary urban visual culture. His painting also places the viewer of the painting in the position of being viewed by the figures in the painting, so that the traditional function of the painting, as a world viewed and consciously represented, is reversed. It is precisely Manet's consciousness of the representational efficacy of viewing that characterizes his 'particular' modernism.

'The Balcony' makes clear that, in modern art, the viewer is as important as the viewed, that seeing or perception is itself now the subject of art. The viewer is temporary, the painting is permanent!