Spectacle and Spectator in Édouard Manet's "Execution of Maximilian"

For artists of Édouard Manet's generation, new visual technologies and the advances in mass production changed the way in which art was perceived and, equally important, by whom. With the work of art multiplied and fragmented into many meanings, they sought to create new ways of seeing that would provoke a transformation of both spectator and artist. This essay proposes a re-reading of Manet's "Execution of Maximilian" series (1867-1869), focusing in particular on the relation between the internal spectators and the actual observer of the work. Seemingly peripheral but nonetheless important enough to have been included by the artist in three of the five versions of the series, this reading considers the emotional response of this perfunctorily sketched public as a sign of presence. Because these spectators, this audience, are also witnesses, the scene's theatrical distance (or barely diffused horror, if we recall that Manet would return to the scene with the Barricade sketches) suggests a reading of the Execution as a powerful statement that denies empathy with any one perspective precisely to break the illusion of linear history, the ideology of progress upon which the legitimacy of the French Second Empire depended. Through these multiple positions and the polyvalent ways of seeing they imply, Manet's canvas suggests an unmistakably modern approach to historical representation, an aesthetic of perception that invites the actual spectator to admit that perceived reality, and truth itself, is always subjective and unstable.