Anatomy of an Execution
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Henri Matisse counted Édouard Manet among his five favorite painters. His admiration for Manet may seem at odds when you consider that the Fauve Matisse, one of the “Wild Beasts” of color, was concerned with exactitude, concision, and getting at essences in his pictures. Conversely, in Manet’s slapdash, almost monochromatic canvases, his forms flatten and space collapses. Shocking imagery is often the key impact of his pictures: “Olympia” and “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” (both 1863) were calculated affronts to morality and to the tradition of painting. And yet Matisse must have understood that Manet, despite their differences of approach, was, like himself, a pioneer who broke essential ground. The Realist and Impressionist Manet, if he did not actually shatter painting — its genres, traditions, space, and form — at least cracked its surface sufficiently to allow artists to see its many parts, to pick and choose and discard them at will.
As an artistic bridge from the 19th to the 20th century, Manet’s importance is immeasurable. As a painter, however, his merit is a little fuzzier. Manet (1832–83) at times seems to have hurried so impatiently through his compositions — some botched areas look as if he had painted them at a dead run — that his canvases suggest that he may have cared less for the tradition of painting than he did for his ability to mock it. And certainly his pictures infuriated his contemporaries. It is almost impossible for us, as viewers with 21st-century eyes in our Postmodern, Impressionist-friendly atmosphere, to see Manet’s canvases for what they once were and to fathom their original political and artistic impact. Yet “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian,” a compelling new show at the Museum of Modern Art that puts Manet in a particular context, has the ability to bring us closer.
Organized by the chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, John Elderfield, the compact, politically driven exhibit about the horrors of war in an occupied foreign country is certainly topical — but it puts art first. Quietly transcending any easy labels of agitprop, the show allows for history and art and viewer all to interact on neutral ground. “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” is almost as powerful for its documentary and historical elements as for its pictures. The show centers on Manet’s depictions, made between 1867 and 1869, of the execution by firing squad of the Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian of Mexico in 1867. And yet, it gives us so much more.
In 1861, Benito Juárez became the first indigenous elected president of Mexico. When Mexico’s economy collapsed, he decided to stop payments of foreign debt to Britain, France, and Spain. France’s Napoleon III, with imperial ambitions, invaded Mexico in 1864, ousted Juárez from Mexico City, and installed Maximilian, a member of the Hapsburg family of Austria, as something of a puppet emperor of Mexico. In less than three years, Juárez’s guerrilla army forced French troops to withdraw, stranding Maximilian, who, along with General Miguel Miramón (who had been president of the Mexican Republic before Juárez), and General Tomás Mejía, a Mexican soldier, was executed on June 19, 1867. As soon as the smoke cleared, news — often conflicting — of the execution trickled into Paris. Manet, hoping to make a political as well as an artistic statement about the events, immediately set to work on a series of pictures of the execution.
MoMA’s exhibit, featuring three large paintings, an oil sketch, and one lithograph by Manet, unites the series for the first time in America and focuses on the evolution from one image to the next. But the show also includes four other pictures by Manet, prints by Goya, paintings and prints by other artists, and numerous photographs, including one of Maximilian’s bloodied, pleated, bullet-ridden shirt, as well as portraits of the firing squad and postmortem portraits of the emperor in his casket.
Not everything in the show is firstrate, but taken together it is riveting for its breadth and for its art historical and biographical research, none of which is heavy-handed, and all of which you can take or leave as the mood moves you.
The main event of the exhibit is a long wall hung with the three large paintings, oil sketch, and lithograph Manet made of the execution. The first painting, from 1867 and on loan from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, is loose and dark and smoky, a blaze of gunfire. The firing squad almost blocks our view of the two condemned figures, which all but disappear in the smoky haze. The executioners’ heads, a Futuristic, cinematic blur, appear to move forward then back as if they were kicking like guns. Facing us is a lone rifleman, who, like the prostitute in “Olympia,” both engages with us, breaking down the barrier between picture and viewer, and, under a watchful eye, keeps us also at bay.
The second large picture, painted during 1867–68 and on loan from London’s National Gallery, was heavily damaged in Manet’s studio. After the artist’s death, his son cut the canvas apart and salvaged what he could. Recently, the painting has been partially reconstructed by the National Gallery. The painting is notable for the silvery, French blues of the executioners’ uniforms and for its palette of blacks, whites, grays, sky-blues, and blue-grays, but its fragmentary condition (four separate rectangles on a linen field) keeps it from having more than cursory appeal.
The third large version, painted during 1868–69 and on loan from the Kunsthalle, Mannheim, at roughly 8 feet by 10 feet, is the most realized and successful of the three. Like the other pictures, it has precedent in Goya’s masterpiece “Third of May, 1808.” In Manet’s painting, the rifles, as if they were being used as sabers, appear to penetrate the condemned, which seem to be elevated above the firing squad on a higher ground plane. The effect is almost eerily like that of the three figures having been skewered rather than shot. The soldiers appear to wobble from side to side in their white spats and boots, and, as if straight out of Goya, a crowd of wailing women peer over the wall, covering their eyes and holding their heads.
Mr. Elderfield has organized the show so that it extends outward, like shockwaves, from the central wall of images. The wealth of supporting materials includes Goya’s prints of bullfights, prints from Goya’s series “The Disasters of War,” as well as a drawing another artist made from his “Third of May, 1808.” It even extends beyond the show’s gallery walls. Outside the exhibit is a group of photographs — including Robert Capa’s “Spanish Soldier Drops Dead With a Bullet Through His Head, July 12, 1937,” Eddie Adams’s “Moment of Execution” (February 1, 1968), and “Warsaw Ghetto” (April-May 1943) — that bring the subject of the show closer to home. Many of the supporting documents do not rise to the level of Manet’s or Goya’s art, but they offer plenty of food for thought in an exhibit that provides us with an anatomy of an execution and, beyond that, a meditation on a theme.
Until January 29 (53 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).