The Execution of Emperor Maximilian

Judged on the configuration. The squad cannot go, nor its closeness: the muzzles almost touch the men they kill, and the range is the argument, killing done at arm’s length by men who do not look. The sergeant cannot go: apart and indifferent, preparing the shot that follows, he is the routine after the event, set at the right edge outside the volley. The wall cannot go: it shuts off the landscape of the Boston canvas, presses the action forward like a stage and turns the world into spectators. The smoke cannot go: it hides the victims’ faces, so the picture refuses the martyrdom it shows. What gives: the onlookers on the wall are too many and too summarily placed to be compelled one by one, the slope at the upper right is a permitted addition, and the third of the condemned is barely needed.

Score: 8.3 / 10

What is disclosed can be stated. A modern state kills as a procedure: a uniformed squad, faces turned away or shadowed, a sergeant tending his weapon, no hatred and no glory. Responsibility is hidden in dress: the soldiers wear what reads as French uniform, and the painting says, by costume and without a word, that the emperor who sent Maximilian is a party to his death. And the public is placed: the onlookers on the wall watch as the picture’s viewers watch, at a safe height, from the far side of a barrier. These hold outside 1867. Held below the gate because the meaning is carried by a cool manner that can read as indifference as easily as indictment, and the strongest proposition, French guilt, depends on context the viewer must bring; Goya’s Third of May 1808 states its condition with less ambiguity.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The elevation is dreadful and deliberately muted. The white smoke of the volley at point-blank range is one height: the instant of death taken as a puff of smoke in front of three faces, the event made almost invisible at its centre. The wall is a second, a grey barrier across the whole width under a pale sky, closing off any escape. The sergeant’s calm is a third and colder kind, the horror of routine. But the painting withholds the transport it might have had: no lantern, no lifted arms, no crowd of the dead as in Goya; the light is flat and even, and the palette of greys, blacks, ochre earth and white belts is sober. The restraint is the point, and it costs the axis: height is reached a few times and at low pitch. The work is great without being elevated, and it chose not to be.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Partly built. The grouping of the condemned is the Golgotha group: a central figure flanked by two companions, executed outside a wall before onlookers, the wide sombrero framing Maximilian’s head like a dark halo. The archetype of martyrdom is load-bearing in that grouping. The second pattern is inherited: the execution by firing squad as Goya fixed it, the faceless line of soldiers against the victim. But the painting works against both. It hides the martyr in smoke and gives the executioners the centre of the canvas; the myth is invoked to be denied, and its particulars, the kepis, the cocking rifle, the Mexican hat, keep the scene a news report. The figure stays below the gate because the archetype, built in the grouping, is deliberately left unfulfilled in the whole.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The inheritance is history painting, the grand machine of the Salon, and, in this subject, its modern exemplar, Goya’s Third of May 1808. The departure: a contemporary political event, reported in the press weeks before, painted at the scale of history in the deadpan manner of Olympia, with the pathos withdrawn, the victims hidden and the killers made ordinary. The turn from Goya is precise: the same squad, but no lantern, no heroic victim and no moral lighting. The stake is plain in the record: the subject attacked the regime, the painter worked through four versions over about two years and changed the uniforms to French, and the canvas was not shown in France while he lived. Held at the gate rather than above it because the manner was already Manet’s, staked in full in Olympia and the Déjeuner, and here carried into new territory rather than invented.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that killing has become impersonal, and it is known through the form: the flat, even light that singles no one out; the smoke over the victims’ faces; the squad seen from behind, a row of backs and rifles; the absurd closeness of the muzzles, which no realist staging would allow and which makes the act a matter of reach rather than aim; the wall that turns the space into a shallow stage. Paint it as Goya did, with a lantern, a lifted white shirt and a face, and the work knows Goya’s thing, the martyr and the brute machine. The Boston canvas, warmer and looser, in Mexican dress and open landscape, is a controlled experiment, and it shows the final form carrying the accusation. Held below the top because the onlookers on the wall and the slope at the upper right are conventional.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over promise: about 157 years, and a literature that has grown rather than closed. The questions stay open: whether the cool manner indicts or merely records; Georges Bataille’s reading of Manet’s indifference to the subject, the subject destroyed, against the political reading through the French uniforms; how far the painter knew Goya’s canvas, and whether he had seen it in Madrid in 1865; why the London canvas was cut up, and what Degas’s gathering of its fragments makes of it; who the sergeant is and what he means, read by some as a likeness. The versions themselves make an argument across canvases that rewards return. Held below the top because the single canvas yields less on its surface than the literature yields around it: the debate lies in the series as much as in Mannheim.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real. The canvas shows that history painting could be done in the manner of modern life, of the newspaper, without rhetoric; that the line of executioners could be the subject; that a political charge could be made by costume rather than allegory. It is the link between Goya and the twentieth century’s images of state killing. The reach was delayed and narrow: not shown in France in Manet’s lifetime, then kept in Mannheim, out of the daily view of the Paris canon; French painting of the 1860s and 1870s moved toward landscape and modern life, not toward a modern history painting, and few took up this road. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a named line rather than a field, in which Picasso’s Massacre in Korea of 1951 answers Goya and Manet together. The force stands above the figure, the reach below it.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about 157 years. Form: the Mannheim canvas is whole, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost; the cutting up of the London canvas belongs to that version, not to this one. Presence: suppressed at birth and kept from exhibition in France in its maker’s lifetime, then held in a public museum in Mannheim; known since the later twentieth century through exhibitions and the literature of Manet, and less visited than the Paris canvases. It has outlived the regime it accused, the political occasion and the scandal that hid it, and it is read now as a painting rather than a pamphlet. Fabric: not weighed beyond the whole of the image. The span of 70 years to two centuries is the row this figure sits in; a presence narrower than the widest holds it at the foot of that row.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of oil at the scale of history. The making is load-bearing: the coolness is done with the brush. The squad is a row of near-black tunics against grey, the white belts and gaiters a cadence of bright marks across the dark; the smoke is laid in a few broad passages of white that sit on the surface; the sergeant, painted in profile with a bravura economy, is the canvas’s finest passage. The earth is a plain ochre, the wall a flat grey plane: modelling reduced to large values, learned from Velázquez and the Spanish, at full command. The costs are charged: the space is uncertain, the distance from squad to victims implausible on purpose and awkward in fact; the onlookers are drawn small and summarily; the half-hidden victims are thinly realised. The Boston and London canvases show a struggle that this one only partly resolves.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the sergeant at the right, alone, attending to his rifle, and the onlookers above the wall, crowded and curious. One law holds them: everyone in the picture looks elsewhere than at the death, and no one, the painter included, raises his voice. The squad looks along its barrels; the sergeant looks down at his gun; the onlookers lean in; the victims are hidden in smoke. Manner and meaning obey one physics: the even light, the flat values and the absence of a privileged face are the same law as the indifference of the act. What resists is twofold: the scale and placing of the onlookers on the wall, which belong to another, more anecdotal register; and the spatial logic, which breaks to put the muzzles at the victims’ chests. A law held over a moderate range, with two strains.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The orders held in one canvas: the state, as an army and as two empires, the French by uniform and the Habsburg in the condemned; history, as an event of a named day reported in the press; death, at the instant of its making; the sacred, in the martyr’s grouping and its denial; labour, in the soldiers’ duty and the sergeant’s routine; and the public, in the onlookers who watch as the viewer does. The wall and the line of rifles integrate them, setting each in its place. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is kept out: no consciousness inside the scene, no family, no natural order beyond a slope and a sky, and the victims, the persons the history happened to, kept from view. For a single painted moment the range is wide; the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.6 / 10