The burial 1867

Curator: Oh, it feels somber. All greys and browns and heavy with...something lost, would you say? Editor: Indeed. We're looking at Edouard Manet's "The Burial," painted around 1867. Note the rapid brushstrokes in oil on canvas. They give the whole scene an unfinished, almost ghostly quality. Curator: Ghostly, yes! Like a memory half-forgotten, hanging in the air. Look at the buildings on the hill, they seem monumental but dissolving, barely held in place by those assertive daubs of paint. Editor: And notice the figures down below, the funeral procession. It's hard to distinguish faces, they're just blobs of pigment enacting a social ritual. Manet seems less interested in the specific event and more concerned with the physical act of portraying it. Consider, too, the availability and standardization of oil paints by this time. Mass production allowed for greater experimentation and these rapid techniques, making paintings like this possible. Curator: I can see that. I almost feel as though he's scooped the colours directly from his own emotions onto the canvas, there is so much vulnerability and humanity there! Is he observing the act of remembering or is he exploring the materiality of memory? Editor: It challenges our perceptions. Here we have what could be categorized as a landscape and a historical painting fused with this exploration of paint, of applying the materials themselves. Is Manet mourning something specific? Perhaps the passing of old traditions. Curator: I can feel it. There’s almost a sense of elegy within that raw landscape. It resonates even without knowing exactly who is gone or what those heavy stones might stand for. I would say he achieves what he set out to do. Editor: Certainly. Manet takes this very tangible medium of oil paint, embraces industrial advancements that enabled these techniques and uses it to hint at these ethereal questions of memory and societal change. A very clever material exploration to finish on.