Realism

Edouard Manet was born in Paris in 1832, and it was at the annual Paris Salon that for over 20 years that he sought academic and public acceptance for his original, brilliant, and enigmatic canvases. Because of the furor that his works created at the Salons, he became the first major artist in whose career both the journalists and the general public played vital roles.

Directed to a career in law by his father (who was the head of staff at the Ministry of Justice) Manet chose the navy instead. He traveled to South America as a naval cadet in 1838. However, after twice failing his entrance examinations to the naval college (in 1848 and 1849), he was allowed to enroll at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the studio of Thomas Couture, then highly respected for his academic historical compositions. Manet is said to have quarreled frequently with Couture, but nevertheless studied with him for six years and acquired the basis of his later technique.

Manet was 26 when he first submitted to the Salon his Absinthe Drinker (1858-9), depicting a cloaked, top-hatted bohemian figure, which was rejected in 1859. In 1861, however, his large Spanish Singer was accepted, given an honorable mention, and widely acclaimed. An admirer stated that the painting represented a stand between Realism and Romanticism. Manet worked throughout 1862 and began the year of 1863 by showing 14 canvases at a dealer’s art gallery and sending three major works to the Salon. All three were rejected. But that year artists were allowed, by Imperial decree, to show their rejected work separately at the "Salon des Refuses". In 1863 his famous Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was shown at the Salon des Refusés, a new exhibition place opened by Napoleon III following the protests of artists rejected at the official Salon. Manet's canvas, portraying a woodland picnic that included a seated female nude attended by two fully dressed young men, attracted immediate and wide attention, but was bitterly attacked by the critics, it became the object of press ridicule and attracted crowds of sightseers. Hailed by young painters as their leader, Manet became the central figure in the dispute between the academic and rebellious art factions of his time.

From that time on, Manet’s new canvases were the focus of popular attention. In 1864 the official Salon accepted two of his paintings, and in 1865 he exhibited his Olympia (1863, Musée d'Orsay), a nude based on a Venus by Titian, which aroused storms of protest in academic circles because of its unorthodox realism. The following year, his Fifer was rejected. So, in 1867, when he was not invited to exhibit at the Paris World Fair, Manet erected his own pavilion to show 50 works. Later that year the authorities forbade him to exhibit The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian.

If like Chardin before him, Manet had confined himself to still life and small subject pictures, he might have been excused or even accepted. But his canvases of the 1860s were large, challenging comparisons with the great art of the past. And Manet was aware of the great masters, as he had spent six years copying their work. He did not simply paint what he found around him; he painted modern versions of old subjects. Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbre was a version of Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre; Olympia was based on Titian’s Venus of Urbino, and almost every canvas of the decade had its precedent in earlier art. But in Manet’s variations, traditional motifs became enigmatic, even ambiguous. Giorgione’s naked nymphs and Titian’s Venus looked frankly indecent in modern settings.

Nor did Manet just set up his models for traditional poses. His vision was itself original. He analyzed and simplified his motifs, eliminating half-tones, using a frontal light that flattened planes and reduced shadows to outlines, thus creating bold patterns of colored patches. In this he was guided by an odd range of earlier examples -- the works of Frans Hals and Velasquez, but also Japanese woodcuts. His broad simplifications at last led to the Fifer in which the flat heraldic colors of the boy’s uniform are set off by an almost back background.

For almost a decade, Manet challenged the Salon with a sequence of heroic versions of works by artists ranging from Mantegna to Goya. He was controversial, which meant he did have considerable supporters. By 1860, he had been befriended by the Romantic poet Charles Baudelaire, and for a time the poet and painter seem to have shared a vision of modern heroism, as Baudelaire described in his essay "The painter of Modern Life". Manet met Degas in 1862, and soon afterwards Pissarro, Renoir, and other painters later to become the Impressionists. In 1867, he was championed by the novelist Emile Zola.

With the end of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and the coming of the Third Republic, the tide had turned for Manet. His work was usually, though not always, accepted for the Salon, and in 1873 his Le Bon Bock, a portrait of a jovial beer drinker, enjoyed a very real popular success. Still, public attention had been diverted to the latest artistic scandal: Impressionism.

Although the Impressionists respected Manet, who were sometimes called "la bande de Manet", he never exhibited with them nor painted a truly Impressionist work. Nevertheless, his paintings of the early 1870s do seem influenced by Impressionism, or perhaps by Berthe Morisot, who had become his pupil in 1868. Morisot later became his model, and, in 1874, his sister-in-law. His canvases became smaller, his motifs less monumental, and his touch more broken. There were fewer set pieces, and even the largest of those do not match the scale of his earliest works.

It was in the second half of the decade that Manet developed his final style. This was a sequence of portraits of contemporary life, which developed hints of his own earliest canvases and of some of Degas’ portraits. These paintings showed characteristic types of the period in their settings. In 1881, at the age of 49, Manet had his triumph at the Salon. His portrait of the big-game hunter Pertuiset was awarded a second class medal, and with it the right to exhibit at future Salons without the approval of a jury.

Unfortunately, at this time Manet was already suffering from locomotor ataxia. He was in pain, walked with difficulty, and worked more with pastel as his condition deteriorated. But he painted a final masterpiece: The Bar at he Folie-Bergère which in its motif – that of a radiant young woman typifying contemporary life -- in its monumental composition and its new brilliant technique, unifies the various strands of his earlier works. It was a success in the Salon of 1882.

Early in 1883, Manet, already bedridden, had a leg amputated and died soon after the operation on April 30, at the age of 51.

Pertinent Literature:

"Die Ausstellung der Berliner Secession," Kunst und Künstler, May, 1903.

Bex, M. Manet, Paris, 1948.

Bumpus, J. Impressionist Gardens, Oxford, October 1990.

Colin, P., Edouard Manet, Paris, 1932.

Colin, P., Manet, Paris 1937.

Daix, P., La vie de peintre d’Edouard Manet, Paris, 1983, p. 293.

Duret, T. "Edouard Manet et les Impressionistes," Histoire du Paysage en France, 1908.

Duret, T. Histoire d’Edouard Manet et de son oeuvre, Paris, 1902.

Duret, T. Manet and the French Impressionists, London, 1910.

Florisoone, M., Manet, Monaco, 1947.

Gonse, L., "Manet," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Feb., 1884.

Haendcke, Dr. B., "Die Historischen Grundlagen der Helt und Freilichtmalerei," Die Kunst, Jan. 1, 1911.

Herbert, R. L., Impressionism, Art, Leisure and Pa ...

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