Psychoanalyst Jeanne Wolff Bernstein analyzes the works of the French painter Édouard Manet
(1832-1883) from different perspectives. Instead of speculating about Manet's biography she
links only historically available data of the artist's life to his paintings. His numerous
references from the history of painting are subsequently explained as re-interpretations of
these historical works and as interpretations of his painterly genealogy. With this method it
becomes clear how Manet expresses the contradictions inherent in his era and also subtly
criticizes his social milieu at the same time. The primary text for an understanding of the
enigmatic relationship between artist painting and viewer is Freud's essay »The Joke and its
Relation to the Unconscious« (1905) in which the teller of a joke invites his listener to
complete his joke through an absent but imagined third person. In a similar way Manet
incorporates the unconscious processes of his spectators to complete the scenes depicted on his
canvases. Jacques Lacan's theory about the gaze in particular his realization that the picture
is in the eye of the beholder but that the beholder was already fore-seen in the picture is
relevant for an understanding of the identificatory processes taking place between painting
beholder and artist. These three perspectives upon Manet's work open up a new psychoanalytic
approach to the study of painting which can also be used for other fields of aesthetics.
