“Not for Beginners” would make an appropriate subtitle for Therese Dolan’s methodologically varied and critically diverse collection of essays on the master of French modernism, Édouard Manet. Noncommittally and appropriately entitled Perspectives on Manet, the volume presents a picture of Manet that is as thought-provoking and smart as it is fragmentary. Dolan makes no apologies for the sense of noncohesiveness among its nine distinct essays. Rather, she explains that it is a testament to Manet’s genius that such a heterogeneous collection of opinions and investigations could arise, and will continue to arise, from his paintings.

Indeed, Manet’s most enigmatic paintings—particularly the “narrative” pictures that deny any clear reading, such as The Spanish Singer (1860), Le dejeuner sur l’herbe (1862–63), Olympia (1863), The Railway (1873), and Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)—have inspired discussion after discussion ever since Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola began writing about Manet’s work when it was first exhibited. But Dolan is also partly responsible for the eclectic nature of this book, as she has invited a profoundly diverse group of scholars to consider Manet’s oeuvre. While most of them are art historians (Robert Lethbridge, a professor of French language and literature, is the only exception), their wide-ranging approaches reflect the exciting interdisciplinary paths that art historians tread today. By encouraging them to do so for this volume, Dolan has gathered a collection that is both interesting and challenging. And in the end, their distinct viewpoints carry a suggestion that applies beyond Manet, to art history in general, regardless of subject or methodological approach.

Perspectives on Manet is not, nor was intended to be, a neat little monograph about Manet, nor is it a book with a singular viewpoint. That exercise can be left to the vast existing bibliography on Manet that is enlarged every year by both academics and exhibiting institutions alike. (Recent efforts include James H. Rubin’s Manet: Initial M, Hand and Eye, Paris: Flammarion, 2010 [click here for review]; Stéphane Guégan, ed., Manet, inventeur du Moderne, exh. cat., Paris: Musée d’Orsay and Gallimard, 2011; MaryAnne Stevens et al., Manet: Portraying Life, exh. cat., London: Royal Academy, 2012; and Stéphane Guégan et al., Manet. Ritorno a Venezia, exh. cat., Milan: Skira, 2013). Instead of an expansive look, Perspectives on Manet leads the reader down multiple, specific, even mysterious paths, and as such, requires a certain level of understanding, not just of late nineteenth-century France, but also of Manet himself. While all of the authors do an excellent job of developing the context of their individual arguments, it takes a reader who is familiar with Manet’s paintings to fully delight in their various investigations and extrapolations.

Dolan begins with a necessary and welcome discussion that prepares the reader for what is to follow. Next, Nancy Locke introduces the notion of Realism in terms of ethics—not as a moralizing force but as a kind of code that develops from the self and therefore naturally becomes the domain of the modern. Significantly, she posits that the question of whether Manet’s pictures depict what is real distracts viewers from what the artist may be trying to say through paint. To understand Manet’s morality (and therefore his modernism), his pictures should be approached in a manner divorced from their documentary nature. Together with Jane Roos and Stephen Levine, Locke lays the foundation for the book by revealing one of the core challenges in interpreting works by Manet: they look real, but aren’t.

Among these three touchstones (Roos’s essay appears in the middle, Levine’s wraps up the volume) are six discussions that address the notion of Realism in Manet’s paintings in a number of ways. Susan Sidlauskas considers Realism in relation to Manet’s portrait of Victorine Meurent (ca. 1861–62) and contemporary hyperrealist German photography. Here, identity as drawn from a depiction of extraordinary similitude raises the notion of the truth of the picture, or the possibility of a real understanding of the subject. Suzanne Singletary addresses Manet’s relationship with James Whistler vis-à-vis Baudelaire. Her subject is an interesting one, given the issue at the core of the book. Here she traces Manet’s relationship to the American expatriate painter and the writer, whom she situates on the cusp between Romanticism and modernism. Both of these figures loomed large in Manet’s life, particularly in the early part of his career. Singletary suggests that the visible world for Manet was just a departure, and that his relationship to Baudelaire and Whistler made him draw on imagination, nostalgia, and memory at the core of the poet’s definition of beauty. Roos follows and expands on these points by explaining how Manet’s Realism can be deceptive. She writes that it is important to resist the urge to read his pictures as documentary or photographic equivalents. To best understand Manet, Roos argues, he should be recognized as a virtuosic improviser who used the element of chance and embraced creative expression in his work.

The essays of Lethbridge, Rubin, Dolan, and Marilyn Brown compose the second half of the volume, preceding Levine’s discussion. Lethbridge considers Manet’s portrait of Zola (1868) through Zola’s own documentary photograph of the portrait hanging in his home in 1900. Lethbridge uses it, along with the author’s vague (or not-so-vague) allusions to Manet’s paintings in his novels, to address what he sees are parallels in the stylistic developments of Realist author and artist. Rubin’s discussion is appropriately placed next, as he addresses the ostensibly documentary lithographs The Barricade and Civil War (both 1871). His close, more traditional reading of these works through the lens of contemporary politics as well as the art of Honoré Daumier and Eugène Delacroix positions the works as reactions to the events themselves, as well as to issues of censorship. Here, even in images based on actual events, a tension exists between what is real and what is deliberately created.

Portraits abound in this volume, and Dolan employs a lesser-known pastel portrait of the composer Ernest Cabaner (1880) to discuss Manet’s connection with contemporary life. (Here, the lack of color illustrations in the volume is at its most frustrating.) Weaving together Cabaner, Richard Wagner, and Baudelaire, she concludes that the portrait itself acknowledges Manet’s understanding of this sensory superimposition. Her interest in the surface of the picture, however, is largely laid aside in the penultimate essay by Brown, who offers “yet another look at the Bar,” referring to Manet’s perpetually discussed late masterpiece Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Brown attempts to unpack the picture by coupling a psychoanalytic reading with social history in an effort to situate the painting in the mid- to late nineteenth-century context of “the double.” Her worthwhile discussion is a reminder that there is still much to be gleaned from the careful close reading of a picture.

Positioned neatly as a conclusion of sorts, Levine’s essay is not only an apt discussion for a book on Manet, but also carries with it implications for the field at large. It is a historiographic re-visitation of what are arguably the two most influential critical works about Manet: T. J. Clark’s social history, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Michael Fried’s phenomenologically focused Manet’s Modernism: or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). In tracing both authors’ roots back to Clement Greenberg, Levine discusses their overlap, and the necessarily insufficient nature of each approach alone. He also emphasizes the ways in which the differences in scholarly standpoints profoundly affect the meaning of Manet’s art. This is an important factor when considering art and art history—no matter the subject, it is crucial to understand how the dialogue has been framed.

Manet’s oft-quoted, “I put things down on canvas, as simply as I can, as I see them,” nicely characterizes the liminal space between real and imagined in which his works live, as addressed by these essays (Pierre Courthion and Pierre Cailler, eds., Portrait of Manet by Himself and His Contemporaries, London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1960, 7). Certainly, Manet’s pictures have a directness that makes them seem “real,” as his very style naturally binds them to his world. But, as the artist stated, he painted things as he saw them: a direct reference to the personal artistic impulse that makes the paintings more than what they appear to be. The truth is not universal; instead, the truth is Manet’s own. If there is no singular answer, then there are, as in this book, as many different viewpoints as there are approaches to looking. What one can draw from this volume is that the ground staked by art historians has significant ramifications, sometimes decades later, with regard to the critical understanding of the work. The idea of one truth is a clear impossibility, both for art historians, and for Manet—even the most real-est of Realist painters.