Édouard Manet, “Les Courses à Longchamp,” 1866

A racehorse is done when it reaches the finish line. Of course, the animal does not know when its task is accomplished. It cannot count the remaining laps or intuit when it reaches the final stretch. Only the jockey knows these things. The horse just runs. Édouard Manet’s Les Courses à Longchamp (1866) captures this sense of hurtling forward without a destination, self-reflexively contrasting two practical epistemologies: that of racing as a sport and of painting as an art. We face a group of competitors as they speed toward us. Earth-toned streaks of opaque paint define a mass of horses and riders, human and equine animals who appear as though suspended between two worlds, depicted and depictive. The men are mostly faceless. On the third jockey – I’ll number them left to right – the artist conveys the convexity of a helmet with a coagulated dab in the shape of a visor, a glob that lifts palpably off the canvas to define a passage of elevated relief. The rider’s face, by comparison, feels like an afterthought. A streak of blue from his uniform bleeds onto his chin, the ochre of his face lies flat and drab between the impasto commas of his shoulders. Not to say that Manet privileged the equine. On the contrary, it is even less articulated, legible as a horse only thanks to its context. All this effectuates a sense of extraordinary speed, as though the competitors were moving too fast for their features to be legible except en masse. So too for the way the fourth horse’s legs ­disappear into a cloud of dust, which Manet renders in strokes no less palpable than those of the figure’s flesh. And, of course, for the painting’s most striking feature: its accelerated perspective. Two orthogonal fences define a vanishing point on the horse with the yellow rider, oh so slightly dislodged from the painting’s literal center, yielding a disquieting sense of compositional instability.

Édouard Manet, “Les Courses à Longchamp,” detail, 1866

It hardly needs saying that this sense of speed exemplifies a defining quality of the style soon to be dubbed Impressionism, which (one critic quipped in 1879) seemed to render the world “as seen from the window of a train rushing at full speed.” [1] But if Manet wanted to show a race as though glimpsed from a sprinting horse, why place the viewer on the stationary track? As is, we are not rushing through the world so much as the world is rushing toward us. The painting thus reflects upon the fixity of a fully realized work. About to be trampled, we cannot leap out of the way, because the picture is static. We remain rooted to the spot. This literal feature of our beholding evokes the transfixion of a person facing impending catastrophe, the impossible attenuation of time that precedes the fatal instant.

The race is already over. The horses have passed the poteau, the pole with a circular top that marks the finish line. Manet’s painting is over, too. He is dead, and the work is done, fait. This word meant something specific in the vocabulary of his time, contrasted with finished, fini, as two ways of being ended. [2] To call a painting “finished” meant that it met the standards of accomplishment upheld by Academic officials. A finished painting had to be crafted step-by-step, composed from pencil drawings and oil sketches. When satisfied with these preliminaries, the artist would take up their full-scale canvas, applying thin ­layers of paint and blending their strokes to form a smooth, continuous surface before subsuming the whole under a uniform varnish sheen.

By this measure, Manet’s painting fails. In some places (e.g., the rider’s helmet), its facture is carefully keyed to the referent; in others (his blue chin), it seems to lack any depictive motivation. To contemporary viewers, this handling would have classified the work as a preliminary sketch rather than a finished painting. And, indeed, it may have been intended as such before the ­artist decided to sign, date, and sell it. [3] As though investigating the implications of its own unfinishedness, the painting insinuates this tension between completeness and indeterminacy into its depicted fiction, for the horses continue to charge after the race has ended. They must gallop out their momentum before coming to a stop. But because the painting is done, fait, they can never cease running but must remain forever caught in their interrupted action.

Édouard Manet, “Les Courses à Longchamp,” detail, 1866

The work’s non fini is most evident in the crowd. For the most part, it lacks individualized figures, the whole rendered as a flurry of dabs. On the other hand, look at the top left, where a man in a tan jacket lifts himself up to look through binoculars. Once again, Manet motivates the texture of his marks, placing a concave dab where the glasses’ left lens would be. This detail raises the question: How closely are we supposed to look? With magnifying lenses like these, so that we can see such textural sleight of hand? Or does focusing on minutia constitute a kind of myopia, preventing us from seeing the whole? We see this figure from the front as he watches the race from the side. The view through his binoculars must be like the one shown in more traditional pictures of racing, such as those found in popular lithographs, images that emphasize the drama of the order, of one competitor pulling ever so slightly ahead to win by a nose. [4] That format exploits the European reader’s habit of reading left to right, equating the fictional motion of the horses with the literal scanning of the eye. It goes back to ancient times – as in an Attic amphora dated 510 BCE that shows three horses galloping past a post, its curvature suggesting that of the track, as though we could rotate the vase to keep the race going. Joining this tradition, Manet opens himself to comparison with other renderings of the subject and, consequently, invites competition akin to the one that he depicted. Yet as was typical of this artist, the painting exhibits an unusually self-reflexive regard to the structure of beholding. Shifting the viewpoint to the front, he analogizes facing the horses to facing the painting, prompting a comparison between the forms of visual attention required by art and racing. [5]

I remember how, when my dad would take me to the track, he taught me to assess the thoroughbred’s prospects by scrutinizing its body – modeling a kind of connoisseurial looking like the one I now bring to paintings like Manet’s. Yet this likeness between the way we attend to anatomy and artworks disappears as soon as the race begins. Then, we no longer look but watch. One might equate these verbs with alternate temporalities. Not because only the race has duration – it takes time to look at a painting too – but because that duration is specified in advance. Such demarcation is an essential feature of most sports, either as blocks of time (e.g., ­basketball’s four 12-minute quarters) or units of action (­baseball’s 9 innings).

A race tells us when to stop watching; a painting cannot tell us when to stop looking. It lacks criteria for this kind of completeness. Once again, we confront its essential particularity. Whenever we view a painting, we must decide when we have finished looking, when to turn away. This uncertainty adds another layer of significance to the moment that Manet chose to depict: the gallop out after the official race has ended. It points to the possibility of endless excess, of interpretation unbounded, of running without a finish line.

Édouard Manet, “Les Courses à Longchamp,” detail, 1866

If Academic artists were like the jockeys, aware when their work was over, Manet was more like the horses, hurtling toward an unclear destination, unsure when he would reach it or how he would know if he did. Looking retrospectively, we can construct a course that stretches forward from his feet all the way to our present, the course of the avant-garde. Whether we envision its trajectory as a progressive sprint (as in Clement Greenberg’s story of modernist self-criticism) or as lapping repetitions (as in Benjamin Buchloh’s account of the neo-avant-garde), we set forth criteria for what counts as forward motion. In the most canonical story, pioneering his papiers collés, Pablo Picasso leaps ahead. Reviving classicism, he loses his lead. Discovering dripping, Jackson Pollock charges onward. Reinscribing figuration, he stumbles and falls behind. Spraying her paintings with bullets, Niki de Saint Phalle blasts forth. Retrenching to technicolor dolls, she drops back.

I’m not dismissing these stories of forward motion. Just the opposite. Without such retrojected criteria, I could not believe in the avant-garde with the fervor that I do. But modern art is not like a racetrack. Its course could not be paved in advance of the event. It lacks the conditions required not only by racing but by all competitive sports: procedures for determining what counts as a valid play and when the game has ended. Sometimes these rules get quite baroque. Did the receiver have control of the ball with one foot in bounds while making forward progress when pushed by the defender? At the moment the player was fouled, had they begun upward motion, maintained control, and released the ball before returning to the ground? These things get sorted by a referee, whose authority must be recognized. If a controversy arises, they might consult the tape or confer with their colleagues. In the end, however, a decision must be reached no matter what is decided.

It is against precisely this kind of unquestionable authority that the avant-garde defines itself. When Manet painted Les Courses à Longchamp , he contested the self-evidence of official standards such as fini. Given his work’s defiance, it was far from clear that its audience would count it as a painting at all, let alone a good one. [6] It was as though scorekeepers did not know the point value of a goal until assessing each particular shot. For Manet, there was only one way to decide: Paint it and see.

In its embrace of radical uncertainty, art like Manet’s holds the beholder responsible. We cannot passively observe his painting like the spectators watch the race from the stands. It calls on those who will come after, the successive generations of avant-garde artists for whom Manet must be challenged, overcome, but never fully left behind. [7] Because such work acknowledges no ultimate authority that can adjudicate its merits, it can never succeed or fail once and for all. Rather, it must be reassessed by every beholder who is willing to occupy that compressed space in the path of those pounding hooves. Until we render our decision – always responsive to the artwork’s irreducible singularity – it can be ­finished but not complete.

Harmon Siegel is an affiliate scholar at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and author of Painting with Monet (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Image credit: 1–4. The Art Institute of Chicago, Public domain