Starving, Harnessed: An Experiment with Edward Middleton Manigault

Rarely does a work of art’s placard serve both as an epitaph and a mystery unto itself. Two winters ago I saw one serving as both in the St. Louis Art Museum. A sign like every other in the upper room of the American Art wing reads:

Edward Middleton Manigault, Canadian (active United States)
1887 - 1922
Landscape with a Horse
Oil on canvas, 1912

The golden, glowing sky sets the tone for this visionary scene. A horse, castle, and foliage emerge from the darkened, jewel-toned landscape, whose trees form anxious silhouettes. Edward Middleton Manigault is known for his insistent experimentation. His works are remarkable for their decorative sense and imaginative, other-worldly spirit, as seen here.

Manigault served as an ambulance driver in World War I (1914 - 1918), where he was exposed to mustard gas. In the years following his discharge, he began fasting as an attempt to “approach the spiritual plane and see colors not perceptible to the physical eye.” This practice exacerbated his poor health and at the age of 35 he collapsed and died.

I knew I would see this painting again—hungry.

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Manigault was born 1887 in Ontario, Canada, to a well-to-do family. They had no direct affinity for painting , but his family’s relative comfort allowed his exposure to and practice with the visual arts. The earliest of Manigault’s sketches show a young man in repose at an easel in pen and ink around 1899, and in 1905 he was commissioned by London, Ontario to create a series of postcards depicting public buildings. His move to New York City later that year signaled his commitment to painting as a career.

At the New York School of Art, Manigault fell under two competing tutelages—Robert Henri, a critical component of the Ashcan School—and Kenneth Hayes Miller, whose use of color would prove to be the greater influence on the young pupil. Of his surviving paintings, Manigault begins with more traditional landscapes like Poplars at Dawn, which is mostly naturalistic, or Digging Cabbages Early Morning, which veers into a more Impressionistic style. (While the Impressionist revolution had come and gone in Europe, its influence was still burgeoning across the Atlantic—paintings by Matisse could be seen at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery starting around 1908.)

A theme of Manigault’s life was a refusal to be sorted into neat groupings or genres. Adherents of the aforementioned Ashcan School, for example, wished to paint New York naturalistically, snubbing Impressionism and Pointillism as exercises too reliant on style, embracing landscapes of the poorer parts of America as a kind of rebellious act. Manigault escaped orbit from this philosophy in spectacular fashion, beginning with The Rocket (1908), a sparkling array of blue clouds, yellow fireworks, and red streamers all arranged over a single dark boat illuminated by the scene. Across the Park (1910) depicts a princely brick apartment building (one that would, in New York, pass for a castle), in the wintertime defined by vivid blues, reds and whites, in the style of the burgeoning “American Fauves”. And the viewer can’t help but draw breath when viewing Christ Appearing to Mary (1910), in which the starkly white-clothed column of Christ appears behind a Pointillist background of predominant bright yellows, blues, and greens.

Manigault would not continue in this vein for long—his palette became more traditional again starting around 1910—but by now he had developed his major themes: constant experimentation, a dazzling command of color, and deep, Symbolist landscapes. A trip to Europe in 1912 found him studying at the British Museum and the Louvre, which renewed his love of fine sculpture and architecture: many of his works feature architectural details or framings, especially on his return to the United States. His star rose in the New York art scene, culminating in two of his works (Six Women, Adagio and The Clown) displayed at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in 1913, better known as The Armory Show.

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Although Edward Middleton was born in Canada, the Manigaults were an old colonial family belonging to South Carolinian stock, and it was his grandfather’s service in the Civil War that likely inspired his enlistment in World War I, as an ambulance driver in the British Expeditionary Forces. He would last only five months.

His friends, patrons, and wife (they married in relative seclusion just before Manigault left for the front in 1915) would gradually piece together some of what affected Manigault’s output in his postwar period—the casualties, the everyday tedium, the dirt, the grime—culminating in an exposure to mustard gas and a total nervous breakdown.

Manigault would never quite be the same—abandoning his project of American / European syncretic styles, he moved rapidly from one method to another. And he moved geographically just as often—scholars believe that he learned to make ceramics at what was left of the Oneida Community in New York and may have even made decorative objects for the manufacturing group Oneida Limited. In 1919 he would move to Los Angeles in an attempt to reinvigorate his painting—which worked, briefly, as he began to return to a more Impressionist style in works like Greyhound and Churchyard. This would not last—in 1921, as one last desperate measure to restore his peak condition, he moved again to San Francisco and began his practice of fasting. In a fit of melancholy he destroyed over two hundred of his works at this time (we know this as Manigault kept a detailed record of every painting and sale in a slim notebook, recovered by his family). It was that year that he would finally succumb to whatever remnants of the war plagued him. The official cause of his death was a combination of starvation and “neurasthenia”, or weak nerves, a common early 1900s psychological diagnosis that would later be linked with “shell shock” and PTSD.

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Manigault’s obscurity cannot be wholly attributed to this wholesale destruction of his own work. Before the war, his paintings were widely circulated among famous galleries in New York like the Daniel Gallery, where he exhibited with fellow artists Charles Prendergast and William Zorach. He was friends with or adjacent to many leading American art movements at the time. And it is not as though artistic reticence is a guaranteed trip to the dustbin—Hieronymous Bosch has only twenty-five confirmed paintings to his name, Vermeer only thirty-four. Between private collections and galleries across America, Manigault’s works across all media must number in the forties or fifties.

Ultimately, something about Manigault's condition made him wish to not be known. His erratic movements after his return from the war disconnected him from the nerve center of American art. He also engaged in zero self-mythologizing—he gave no lectures, wrote no treatises, and left behind no sense of what his philosophy behind his painting was (if he had one at all). He refused to capitalize on his 1910s fame, choosing instead to pursue whatever he felt he had lost out on the front. Only through great effort could his trail be taken up decades later.

Then there is the matter of the war itself, which had tremendous destructive capacity—ending movements by killing their adherents (in the case of Vorticism) or by making their dreams reality (in the case of the Futurists). New ideas were born out of contact with the war or suffered through it, some works making it a central part of their identity (The Waste Land). Manigault opted not to be part of a movement, and was not blessed with the longevity to reintegrate into American art culture. His wide range allowed for little collaboration or group exhibition on his return.

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After learning all this, my imagination was not so easily satisfied. I was looking for an essential experience to connect me to the artist—scholarship was not enough. And through Manigault’s biography, I could see that great suffering—both of the body and a general restlessness—could aid me in my quest. I could still see that white horse nestled in green when I closed my eyes. I wanted to arrive with Manigault to that horse.We feel a special aura when we visit historic sites, a certain shine: I wanted to feel that same way about Manigault’s painting. In this sense I sought a “lived experience”—but history abstracts me from time and place; ability from the method of Manigault’s art. The only path left to me was emptying my stomach.

Fasting for twenty-four hours lent me no special abilities besides a certain headiness, focus, and awareness of my body. I didn’t do any better on online color-matching tests, nor did I focus better on matching different strips of colored paper to each other (the Josef Albers benchmark). On my sojourn back to the painting one Saturday morning, the day was bright and clear—but I felt no visual experience that lent that brightness and clarity a different timbre. Certainly I trembled and felt the psychological effects of beginning a fast—a certain spiritual edge, a lightness or clarity like an LCD screen. But as far as physical perception—looking out over the lawn, the roads, the fountain, the statue—nothing so different as to take my breath away. Looking at the painting gave me nothing beyond a gnawing feeling that the landscape looked like the inside of a stomach. What was I missing that Manigault achieved in exile? How could I unlock the secrets of this starving vision, one that had produced such beautiful scenes?

I returned a quote in which Manigault stated [We]… “approach the spiritual plane and see colors not perceptible to the physical eye.” The colors he and I were seeking do not belong to the physical eye and cannot be “seen” in the traditional concept of “seeing”. The solution is no Magic Eye Picture trick or any other kind of body manipulation that can activate sense-beyond-sense—based on our records of his painting, Manigault had mastery of color all throughout his life. Hunger is a sense—we can call it the gastric sense—that, when deprived, enhances or changes the other senses just as the blind develop better hearing and the deaf develop better sight. Our senses work seamlessly with one another to develop a picture, weave a tapestry of our immediate reality, and if one of those senses is deprived, the others work harder, strive to deliver more information to our perception. In the same way, when we continually deprive the gastric sense, smell / touch / taste / hearing / sight are imbued not with extrasensory powers, but with slightly different perceptive faculties. The tapestry displays the same colors, but the threads are woven differently. This in turn influences our creative capacity and imaginative capabilities. The places Manigault was trying to reach with his fasting could only be seen with spiritual eyes—not his real ones.

The experiment grapples with a dangerous precedent: is it only through similar suffering, physical or otherwise, that we can know the Other? Certainly holding a baseball bat in my apartment will not give me the “experience” of Aaron Judge or Ichiro Suzuki, but neither will wearing a baseball uniform, using a strict diet, practicing every day, visiting their corresponding stadiums, etc., because there are a myriad of other life circumstances that are impossible for me to replicate (like being adopted or Japanese). The imitation of the other is now an old modern topic (Girard, Nathan Fielder, DeLillo’s The Body Artist in a more subtle sense) and my final observation in the experiment was that of the typical scientist: that I had failed, but it was well worth doing. Though my sense-input changed by fasting, I was no closer to “seeing” the magic in Manigault’s painting than I had if I had stood on my head. This is a relief. As stated, Manigault’s powerful use of color existed well before his experience in the war, and his starving may well have been an attempt to re-right his psyche through extreme means. Fasting altered my vision, but it didn’t make me Manigault or even let me see like him. It would be, and is, better to seek my own kind of suffering.

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The sky in Landscape with a Horse is practically the color of sulfur, the deadly agent in mustard gas. Manigault painted it before his war service, and while the painting is darkly colored, it sparkles in person, drawing your eye around the blues and greens of the fertile landscape back to the ochres and yellows of the sky. Only the horse is white—and not even a pure white—a mottled blue / white, like a child’s marble. In the middle of the landscape, in darker colors than the sky, sits a castle with no signs of life. The landscape speaks of anxiousness, an opposing force, borders of fecundity and acrid corrosiveness meeting—a tension that lends the landscape its particular beauty.

The suffering of the artist is unique—preserved in that amber we call frames—dangerous little insects that snap at us if we draw too close. These pieces of suffering—in Manigault’s case, maybe even a presupposition of his fate—slip by us day by day—in museums, books, computers—we reassemble the pieces, and in a cracked mirror we see both ourselves and someone we do not yet know.

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Will Ballard lives in St. Louis and is the publisher behind Farthest Heaven.