Mallarmé’s poetry joins Manet’s painting

Abstract

Within the scope of the critical works that Mallarmé has dedicated to painting in his early phase, “The Impressionists and Édouard Manet” (1876) is probably the less known, even though it stands as the most important. In this essay, Mallarmé comments his impressionist colleagues’ practice, and Manet’s above all; he establishes an analogy between poetry and painting patches throughout late nineteenth century French art. The present study seeks to explore Mallarmé’s analogical approach in “The Impressionists”. It gives a closer look to the poet’s thoughts on Manet and the impressionists in order to investigate how his ideas about painting find a match in his own poetical works. In 2011, Bertrand Marchal points out four guidelines (open air, simplification, perspective, and deconditioning of the look) through which Mallarmé would read such painters activity in “The Impressionists”. From this point of departure, the goal here is to confront his analysis with some aspects of his own poetics. To do so, we will come across texts as distinctive as La Musique et les Lettres (1895) and “Don du poëme” (1866), without losing sight of these works historicity. Briefly, the attempt of this paper is to show where poetry joins painting, in that fin de siècle, through the comparison of Mallarmé’s and Manet’s œuvres.