Picture the predicament. She is 18, working-class, poor, with a secret ambition to become an artist. He is 30, rich, aristocratic, and a painter. The year is 1862; the setting, his studio in Paris. She is modelling for him, and, as they talk, their ideas merge. Two of the paintings he produces with her will become among the most famous in the world. But the majority of his biographers will ignore her influence. They will say that she was a prostitute and an alcoholic who died young. And, with that damning description, her contribution will be erased from art history.
It was more than a century after Edouard Manet's death that the art historian Eunice Lipton discovered that his model, Victorine Meurent, had actually lived to be 83. And it seems unlikely that she was his grisette - a young woman in a casual relationship with an artist - let alone a prostitute. Manet died at 51 from complications related to treatment for syphilis, then an incurable disease. If there had been a sexual relationship, Meurent would probably have died far earlier than she did.
Most importantly, Lipton realised that Meurent had fulfilled her painting ambitions and exhibited at the 1876 Salon - in the same year that Manet's work was rejected. And Meurent's story has a very recent postscript. It was thought that all her work had been lost but, just yesterday, a museum in Colombes, France, took possession of one of her paintings - another fascinating piece in the puzzle of her life.
The question remains: why was Meurent so dismissed by the painter's biographers? After all, Manet's inner circle seems to have recognised her importance. The artist's close friend Antonin Proust noted in his memoirs that Meurent was Manet's favourite model (she posed for nine of his canvases); Jacques-Emile Blanche, who also knew the painter, was moved to ask, "How often does a chance meeting between a painter and a model decisively influence the personality of his works?"
But while Meurent's contribution was recognised by Manet's friends, her willingness to pose naked made her a notorious figure to the general public, undermining her hopes of being taken seriously. In 18th- and 19th-century art, female nudes were highly appreciated, as long as they represented goddesses or mythical figures. In contrast, the women in Manet's most famous paintings, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe and Olympia, both modelled by Meurent, clearly belonged to contemporary Paris. And they weren't idealised goddesses; several critics commented that Meurent's body was far from perfect.
Le Déjeuner is such a strong painting that it inspired me to research its model and write a novel based on what is known of her life. The painting is a feminist work: it presents a powerful woman, offered for male inspection, but not objectified; the model's challenging stare meets the viewer's gaze in a way that thwarts desire. The female figure is disconcerting, exploding the stereotype of an anonymous, passive woman. In both Le Déjeuner and Olympia, Meurent refuses to collude with the spectator; her sexuality is all her own.
The challenging nature of the Meurent portraits was not immediately appreciated by the public, and at a time when poor women were often forced to sell themselves, a woman whose naked body could be seen in public - albeit in an oil painting - was straight-forwardly perceived as a prostitute. When Le Déjeuner was first exhibited, at the 1863 Salon des Refusés, the public's response ranged from laughter to outright violence: more than one visitor expressed his outrage by hitting the image with a stick. Men would hurry their wives and children past the painting, only to return later to stare at it alone. The critical reception was no different to that of the public. Meurent acquired notoriety and became known by name, unusual for a model at the time.
Writing in the 1940s, Manet's biographer, Adolphe Tabarant, acknowledged that Meurent exhibited at the Salon, but remained as judgmental of her private life as his 19th-century predecessors. He wrote that by the age of 40 she was a wreck, that she had been selling her drawings to her "companions of the night", and had fallen into drunkenness and depravity, before disappearing.
What we know of Meurent's life is fragmented, but the reality is probably quite different from Tabarant's portrait. Born in Paris in 1844, Meurent came from a working-class family - her father is thought to have been an engraver and her mother to have owned a laundry shop. We know that she started modelling for Manet in 1862, but accounts vary as to how they met. It might have been at Thomas Couture's studio, where she apparently worked as a model, or through Victorine's father. Some have speculated that they met on the street near the Palais de Justice: there is a record of her address -17 rue Maître Albert - in one of Manet's notebooks.
In the early 1870s, she is believed to have travelled to America, perhaps engaged by an art dealer to accompany some paintings. By 1875, she had returned to Paris and was attending evening classes at the Académie Julian. Her self-portrait was shown at the Salon in 1876, and after that her work appeared there in 1879, 1885 and 1904. In 1903 she was elected a member of the Société des Artistes Français.
Despite this success, Meurent struggled for recognition, and never had the privilege of proper training - women were not admitted to the teaching studios until the late 1860s. Yet she was ambitious and financially independent. In the years after Le Déjeuner and Olympia, one of her lovers was Alfred Stevens, the Belgian painter, but she never actually lived with a man. For the final 20 years of her life, she shared a house with Marie Dufour, a piano teacher, in Colombes, just outside Paris.
In August 1883, four months after Manet's death, Meurent asked his widow for financial help. She claimed that years earlier he had promised her a small gratuity, which she had refused, on the understanding that she would remind him of his offer if she ever needed to. "That time has come sooner than I expected," Meurent wrote. Madame Manet, who had inherited most of her husband's paintings and was in the process of organising a sale, ignored the letter.
Tabarant wrote that Meurent was a strange girl of many faces, and he was right in at least two senses: she was strange because she was working class and longed to be a painter and because she was a woman and independent. The painting acquired by the Musée Municipal d'Art et d'Histoire de Colombes is Le Jour des Rameaux, which shows a young woman holding a palm leaf, and leaves one in no doubt that it was painted by an accomplished artist. It provides tangible proof that Meurent, marginalised because of her gender, was much more than just a woman with no clothes on. Perhaps the painting, currently under restoration, might prompt a much-needed reassessment of Meurent - the artist.
Sunday 19 October 2008
The French painter Manet
Édouard Manet;January 23,1832-April 30,1883) was a french painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.
His early masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism—today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.
Édouard Manet was born in Paris on January 23,1832 to an affluent and well connected family. His mother, Eugénie-Desirée Fournier, was the daughter of a diplomat and the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince, Charles Bernadotte, from whom the current Swedish monarchs are descended. His father, Auguste Manet, was a French judge who expected Édouard to pursue a career in law. His uncle, Charles Fournier, encouraged him to pursue painting and often took young Manet to the Louvre. In 1845, following the advice of his uncle, Manet enrolled in a special course of drawing where he met Antonin Proust, future Minister of Fine Arts, and a subsequent life-long friend.
At his father's suggestion, in 1848 he sailed on a training vessel to Rio de Janeiro. After twice failing the examination to join the navy, the elder Manet relented to his son's wishes to pursue an art education. From 1850 to 1856, Manet studied under the academic painter Thomas Couture, a painter of large historical paintings. In his spare time he copied the old masters in the Louvre.
From 1853 to 1856 he visited Germany,Italy, and the Netherlands, during which time he absorbed the influences of the Dutch painter Frans Hals, and the Spanish artists Diego Velazquez and Francisco Jose de Goya.
In 1856, he opened his own studio. His style in this period was characterized by loose brush strokes, simplification of details, and the suppression of transitional tones. Adopting the current style of realism initiated by Gustave Courbet, he painted The Absinthe Drinker (1858-59) and other contemporary subjects such as beggars, singers, Gypsies, people in cafés, and bullfights. After his early years, he rarely painted religious, mythological, or historical subjects; examples include his Christ Mocked, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and Christ with Angels, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Music in the Tuileries is an early example of Manet's painterly style, inspired by Hals and Velázquez, and it is a harbinger of his life-long interest in the subject of leisure.
While the picture was regarded as unfinished by some, the suggested atmosphere imparts a sense of what the Tuileries gardens were like at the time; one may imagine the music and conversation.
Here Manet has depicted his friends, artists, authors, and musicians who take part, and he has included a self-portrait among the subjects.
A major early work is The Luncheon on the Grass(Le dejeuner sur l'herbe). The Paris Salon rejected it for exhibition in 1863, but he exhibited it at the Salon des Refuses (Salon of the rejected) later in the year. Emperor Napoleon III had initiated The Salon des Refusés, after the Paris Salon rejected more than 4,000 paintings in 1863.
The painting's juxtaposition of fully-dressed men and a nude woman was controversial, as was its abbreviated, sketch-like handling—an innovation that distinguished Manet from Courbet. At the same time, Manet's composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) based on a drawing by Raphael.
Scholars also cite two works as important precedents for Manet's painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe,Pastoral Concert, 1508, (col. the Louvre) and The Tempest both of which are famous Renaissance paintings attributed variously to Italian masters Giorgione or Titian (circa 1508). The Tempest is housed in the Gallerie dell'Accademia of Venice, Italy. The mysterious and enigmatic painting also features a fully dressed man and a nude female in a rural setting. The man is standing to the left and gazing to the side, apparently at the woman, who is sitting in the grass, partially nude, breastfeeding a baby; darkening clouds and distant lightning herald an approaching storm. The relationship between the two figures is unclear. The painting Pastoral Concert, c.1508 in the collection of the Louvre depicts what appears to be two seated men, both fully dressed and gazing intently at each other in a pastoral setting; the figure on the left plays a lute while the figure on the right gazes attentively at him. In the foreground two naked women accompany the two seated male figures, drapery wrapped around bare legs; one nymph has a flute, the other a pitcher of water. In the background may be seen a distant house, a copse of trees and a shepherd who appears to be playing a pipe.
As he had in Luncheon on the Grass, Manet again paraphrased a respected work by a Renaissance artist in the painting Olympia (1863), a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs, but whose pose was based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538). The painting is also reminiscent of Francisco Goya's painting, The Nude Maja (1800).
Manet embarked on the canvas after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display. The painting was controversial partly because the nude is wearing some small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, all of which accentuated her na***kedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of se**uality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed. That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece.
The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture - also another s**x symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work. The alert black cat at the foot of the bed strikes a sexually rebellious note in contrast to that of the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal of the goddess in his Venus of Urbino. Manet's uniquely frank (and largely unpopular) depiction of a self-assured prostitute was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865. At the same time, his notoriety translated to popularity in the French avant-garde community.
"Olympia" immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso,Paul Gauguin,Gustave Courbet,Paul Cezanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance.
As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raised the issue of prostitution within contemporary France and the roles of women within society.
The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in these works was seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works Manet copied or used as source material. His work is considered 'early modern', partially because of the black outlining of figures, which draws attention to the surface of the picture plane and the material quality of paint.
He became friends with the Impressionists Edgas Degas,Claude Monet,Pierre-Auguste Renoir,Alfred Sisley, Paul Cezanne, and Camille Pissarro, through another painter,Berthe Morisot, who was a member of the group and drew him into their activities. The grand niece of the painter Jean-Honore Fragonard, Morisot's paintings first had been accepted in the salon de Paris in 1864 and she continued to show in the salon for ten years.
Manet became the friend and colleague of Berthe Morisot in 1868. She is credited with convincing Manet to attempt plein air painting, which she had been practicing since she had been introduced to it by another friend of hers, Camille Corot. They had a reciprocating relationship and Manet incorporated some of her techniques into his paintings. In 1874, she became his sister-in-law when she married his brother, Eugene.
Unlike the core Impressionist group, Manet maintained that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Paris Salon rather than abandon it in favor of independent exhibitions. Nevertheless, when Manet was excluded from the International exhibition of 1867, he set up his own exhibition. His mother worried that he would waste all his inheritance on this project, which was enormously expensive. While the exhibition earned poor reviews from the major critics, it also provided his first contacts with several future Impressionist painters, including Degas.
Although his own work influenced and anticipated the Impressionist style, he resisted involvement in Impressionist exhibitions, partly because he did not wish to be seen as the representative of a group identity, and partly because he preferred to exhibit at the Salon. Eva Gonzales was his only formal student.
He was influenced by the Impressionists, especially Monet and Morisot. Their influence is seen in Manet's use of lighter colors, but he retained his distinctive use of black, uncharacteristic of Impressionist painting. He painted many outdoor (plein air) pieces, but always returned to what he considered the serious work of the studio.
Manet enjoyed a close friendship with composer Emmanuel Chabrier, painting two portraits of him; the musician owned 14 of Manet's paintings and dedicated his Impromptu to Manet's wife.
Throughout his life, although resisted by art critics, Manet could number as his champions Emile Zola, who supported him publicly in the press,Stephame Mallarme, and charles Baudelaire, who challenged him to depict life as it was. Manet, in turn, drew or painted each of them.
Manet's paintings of cafe scenes are observations of social life in nineteenth century Paris. People are depicted drinking beer, listening to music, flirting, reading, or waiting. Many of these paintings were based on sketches executed on the spot. He often visited the Brasserie Reichshoffen on boulevard de Rochechourt, upon which he based At the Cafe in 1878. Several people are at the bar, and one woman confronts the viewer while others wait to be served. Such depictions represent the painted journal of a flaneur. These are painted in a style which is loose, referencing Hals and Velazquez, yet they capture the mood and feeling of Parisian night life. They are painted snapshots of bohemianism,urban working people, as well as some of the bourgeoisie.
In Corner of a Cafe Concert, a man smokes while behind him a waitress serves drinks. In The Beer Drinkers a woman enjoys her beer in the company of a friend. In The Cafe Concert, shown at right, a sophisticated gentleman sits at a bar while a waitress stands resolutely in the background, sipping her drink. In The Waitress, a serving woman pauses for a moment behind a seated customer smoking a pipe, while a ballet dancer, with arms extended as she is about to turn, is on stage in the background.
Manet also sat at the restaurant on the Avenue de Clichy called Pere Lathuille's, which had a garden as well as the dining area. One of the paintings he produced here was, At Pere Lathuille's, in which a man displays an unrequited interest in a woman dining near him.
In Le Bon Bock, a large, cheerful, bearded man sits with a pipe in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, looking straight at the viewer.
Manet also painted the upper class enjoying more formal social activities. In Masked ball at the Opera, Manet shows a lively crowd of people enjoying a party. Men stand with top hats and long black suits while talking to women with masks and costumes. He included portraits of his friends in this picture.
Manet depicted other popular activities in his work. In Racing at Longchamp, an unusual perspective is employed to underscore the furious energy of racehorses as they rush toward the viewer. In Skating Manet shows a well dressed woman in the foreground, while others skate behind her. Always there is the sense of active urban life continuing behind the subject, extending outside the frame of the canvas.
In View of the International Exhibition, soldiers relax, seated and standing, prosperous couples are talking. There is a gardener, a boy with a dog, a woman on horseback -— in short, a sample of the classes and ages of the people of Paris.
Manet's response to modern life included works devoted to war, in subjects that may be seen as updated interpretations of the genre of "history painting". The first such work was the Battle of the Kearsarge and Alabama (1864), a sea skirmish from the American Civil War which took place off the French coast, and may have been witnessed by the artist.
Of interest next was the French intervention in Mexico; from 1867 to 1869 Manet painted three versions of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, an event which raised concerns regarding French foreign and domestic policy. The several versions of the Execution are among Manet's largest paintings, which suggests that the theme was one which the painter regarded as most important. Its subject is the execution by Mexican firing squad of a Habsburg emperor, who had been installed by Napoleon III. Neither the paintings nor a lithograph of the subject were permitted to be shown in France. As an indictment of formalized slaughter the paintings look back to Goya, and anticipate Picasso's Guernica.
In January 1871 Manet traveled to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees. In his absence his friends added his name to the "Fédération des artistes" (see : Courbet) of the Paris Commune. Manet stayed away from Paris, perhaps, until after the semaine sanglante. In a letter to Berthe Morisot at Cherbourg(June 10,1871) he writes :" We came back to Paris a few days ago...".(the semaine sanglante ended on 28 May).
The Prints and Drawings Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts(Budapest) has a watercolour/gouache (The Barricade) by Manet depicting a summary execution of Communards by Versailles troops based on a lithograph of the execution of Maximilian. A similar piece (The Barricade), oil on plywood, is held by a private collector.
On 18 March 1871 he wrote to his (confederate) friend Felix Bracquemond in Paris about his visit to Bordeaux, the provisory seat of the French National Assembly of the Third French Republique where Emile Zola introduced him to the sites: " I never imagined that France could be represented by such doddering old fools, not excepting that little twit Thiers..." (There followed some colorful language unsuitable at social events. See "Manet by himself" 1991/2004.) If this could be interpreted as support of the Commune a following letter to Bracquemond (March 21 ,1871) expressed his idea more clearly: "Only party hacks and the ambitious, the Henrys of this world following on the heels of the Milliéres, the grotesque imitators of the Commune of 1793..." He knew the communard Lucien Henry to have been a former painters model and Millière, an insurance agent. "What an encouragement all these bloodthirsty caperings are for the arts! But there is at least one consolation in our misfortunes: that we're not politicians and have no desire to be elected as deputies". (The letters are published in Julliet Wilson-Bareau, ed., "Manet by himself" UK: Times Warner, 2004.)
Manet depicted many scenes of the streets of Paris in his works. The Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags depicts red, white, and blue pennants covering buildings on either side of the street--another painting of the same title features a one-legged man walking with crutches. Again depicting the same street, but this time in a different context, is Rue Monsnier with Pavers, in which men repair the roadway while people and horses move past.
The Railway, widely known as The Gare Saint-Lazare, was painted in 1873. The setting is the urban landscape of Paris in the late nineteenth century. Using his favorite model in his last painting of her, a fellow painter,Victorine Meurent, also the model for Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass, sits before an iron fence holding a sleeping puppy and an open book in her lap. Next to her is a little girl with her back to the painter, who watches a train pass beneath them.
Instead of choosing the traditional natural view as background for an outdoor scene, Manet opts for the iron grating which "boldly stretches across the canvas" (Gay 106). The only evidence of the train is its white cloud of steam. In the distance, modern apartment buildings are seen. This arrangement compresses the foreground into a narrow focus. The traditional convention of deep space is ignored.
When the painting was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1874: "Visitors and critics found its subject baffling, its composition incoherent, and its execution sketchy.Caricaturists ridiculed Manet's picture, in which only a few recognized the symbol of modernity that it has become today"(Dervaux 1). The painting is currently displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washinton DC.
He completed painting his last major work,A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère), in 1882 and it hung in the Salon that year.
In 1875, a French edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven included lithographs by Manet and translation by Mallarmé. In 1881, with pressure from his friend Antonin Proust, the French government awarded Manet the Legion d'honneur. In 1863 Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch-born piano teacher of his own age with whom he had been romantically involved for approximately ten years. Leenhoff initially had been employed by Manet's father, Auguste, to teach Manet and his younger brother piano. She also may have been Auguste's mistress. In 1852, Leenhoff gave birth, out of wedlock, to a son, Leon Koella Leenhoff.
After the death of his father in 1862, Manet married Suzanne. Eleven-year-old Leon Leenhoff, whose father may have been either of the Manets, posed often for Manet. Most famously, he is the subject of the Boy Carrying a Sword of 1861 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). He also appears as the boy carrying a tray in the background of The Balcony.
His early masterworks The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia engendered great controversy, and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism—today these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.
Édouard Manet was born in Paris on January 23,1832 to an affluent and well connected family. His mother, Eugénie-Desirée Fournier, was the daughter of a diplomat and the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince, Charles Bernadotte, from whom the current Swedish monarchs are descended. His father, Auguste Manet, was a French judge who expected Édouard to pursue a career in law. His uncle, Charles Fournier, encouraged him to pursue painting and often took young Manet to the Louvre. In 1845, following the advice of his uncle, Manet enrolled in a special course of drawing where he met Antonin Proust, future Minister of Fine Arts, and a subsequent life-long friend.
At his father's suggestion, in 1848 he sailed on a training vessel to Rio de Janeiro. After twice failing the examination to join the navy, the elder Manet relented to his son's wishes to pursue an art education. From 1850 to 1856, Manet studied under the academic painter Thomas Couture, a painter of large historical paintings. In his spare time he copied the old masters in the Louvre.
From 1853 to 1856 he visited Germany,Italy, and the Netherlands, during which time he absorbed the influences of the Dutch painter Frans Hals, and the Spanish artists Diego Velazquez and Francisco Jose de Goya.
In 1856, he opened his own studio. His style in this period was characterized by loose brush strokes, simplification of details, and the suppression of transitional tones. Adopting the current style of realism initiated by Gustave Courbet, he painted The Absinthe Drinker (1858-59) and other contemporary subjects such as beggars, singers, Gypsies, people in cafés, and bullfights. After his early years, he rarely painted religious, mythological, or historical subjects; examples include his Christ Mocked, now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and Christ with Angels, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Music in the Tuileries is an early example of Manet's painterly style, inspired by Hals and Velázquez, and it is a harbinger of his life-long interest in the subject of leisure.
While the picture was regarded as unfinished by some, the suggested atmosphere imparts a sense of what the Tuileries gardens were like at the time; one may imagine the music and conversation.
Here Manet has depicted his friends, artists, authors, and musicians who take part, and he has included a self-portrait among the subjects.
A major early work is The Luncheon on the Grass(Le dejeuner sur l'herbe). The Paris Salon rejected it for exhibition in 1863, but he exhibited it at the Salon des Refuses (Salon of the rejected) later in the year. Emperor Napoleon III had initiated The Salon des Refusés, after the Paris Salon rejected more than 4,000 paintings in 1863.
The painting's juxtaposition of fully-dressed men and a nude woman was controversial, as was its abbreviated, sketch-like handling—an innovation that distinguished Manet from Courbet. At the same time, Manet's composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the Judgement of Paris (c. 1515) based on a drawing by Raphael.
Scholars also cite two works as important precedents for Manet's painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe,Pastoral Concert, 1508, (col. the Louvre) and The Tempest both of which are famous Renaissance paintings attributed variously to Italian masters Giorgione or Titian (circa 1508). The Tempest is housed in the Gallerie dell'Accademia of Venice, Italy. The mysterious and enigmatic painting also features a fully dressed man and a nude female in a rural setting. The man is standing to the left and gazing to the side, apparently at the woman, who is sitting in the grass, partially nude, breastfeeding a baby; darkening clouds and distant lightning herald an approaching storm. The relationship between the two figures is unclear. The painting Pastoral Concert, c.1508 in the collection of the Louvre depicts what appears to be two seated men, both fully dressed and gazing intently at each other in a pastoral setting; the figure on the left plays a lute while the figure on the right gazes attentively at him. In the foreground two naked women accompany the two seated male figures, drapery wrapped around bare legs; one nymph has a flute, the other a pitcher of water. In the background may be seen a distant house, a copse of trees and a shepherd who appears to be playing a pipe.
As he had in Luncheon on the Grass, Manet again paraphrased a respected work by a Renaissance artist in the painting Olympia (1863), a nude portrayed in a style reminiscent of early studio photographs, but whose pose was based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538). The painting is also reminiscent of Francisco Goya's painting, The Nude Maja (1800).
Manet embarked on the canvas after being challenged to give the Salon a nude painting to display. The painting was controversial partly because the nude is wearing some small items of clothing such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, all of which accentuated her na***kedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of se**uality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed. That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece.
The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture - also another s**x symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work. The alert black cat at the foot of the bed strikes a sexually rebellious note in contrast to that of the sleeping dog in Titian's portrayal of the goddess in his Venus of Urbino. Manet's uniquely frank (and largely unpopular) depiction of a self-assured prostitute was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865. At the same time, his notoriety translated to popularity in the French avant-garde community.
"Olympia" immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso,Paul Gauguin,Gustave Courbet,Paul Cezanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance.
As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raised the issue of prostitution within contemporary France and the roles of women within society.
The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in these works was seen as specifically modern, and as a challenge to the Renaissance works Manet copied or used as source material. His work is considered 'early modern', partially because of the black outlining of figures, which draws attention to the surface of the picture plane and the material quality of paint.
He became friends with the Impressionists Edgas Degas,Claude Monet,Pierre-Auguste Renoir,Alfred Sisley, Paul Cezanne, and Camille Pissarro, through another painter,Berthe Morisot, who was a member of the group and drew him into their activities. The grand niece of the painter Jean-Honore Fragonard, Morisot's paintings first had been accepted in the salon de Paris in 1864 and she continued to show in the salon for ten years.
Manet became the friend and colleague of Berthe Morisot in 1868. She is credited with convincing Manet to attempt plein air painting, which she had been practicing since she had been introduced to it by another friend of hers, Camille Corot. They had a reciprocating relationship and Manet incorporated some of her techniques into his paintings. In 1874, she became his sister-in-law when she married his brother, Eugene.
Unlike the core Impressionist group, Manet maintained that modern artists should seek to exhibit at the Paris Salon rather than abandon it in favor of independent exhibitions. Nevertheless, when Manet was excluded from the International exhibition of 1867, he set up his own exhibition. His mother worried that he would waste all his inheritance on this project, which was enormously expensive. While the exhibition earned poor reviews from the major critics, it also provided his first contacts with several future Impressionist painters, including Degas.
Although his own work influenced and anticipated the Impressionist style, he resisted involvement in Impressionist exhibitions, partly because he did not wish to be seen as the representative of a group identity, and partly because he preferred to exhibit at the Salon. Eva Gonzales was his only formal student.
He was influenced by the Impressionists, especially Monet and Morisot. Their influence is seen in Manet's use of lighter colors, but he retained his distinctive use of black, uncharacteristic of Impressionist painting. He painted many outdoor (plein air) pieces, but always returned to what he considered the serious work of the studio.
Manet enjoyed a close friendship with composer Emmanuel Chabrier, painting two portraits of him; the musician owned 14 of Manet's paintings and dedicated his Impromptu to Manet's wife.
Throughout his life, although resisted by art critics, Manet could number as his champions Emile Zola, who supported him publicly in the press,Stephame Mallarme, and charles Baudelaire, who challenged him to depict life as it was. Manet, in turn, drew or painted each of them.
Manet's paintings of cafe scenes are observations of social life in nineteenth century Paris. People are depicted drinking beer, listening to music, flirting, reading, or waiting. Many of these paintings were based on sketches executed on the spot. He often visited the Brasserie Reichshoffen on boulevard de Rochechourt, upon which he based At the Cafe in 1878. Several people are at the bar, and one woman confronts the viewer while others wait to be served. Such depictions represent the painted journal of a flaneur. These are painted in a style which is loose, referencing Hals and Velazquez, yet they capture the mood and feeling of Parisian night life. They are painted snapshots of bohemianism,urban working people, as well as some of the bourgeoisie.
In Corner of a Cafe Concert, a man smokes while behind him a waitress serves drinks. In The Beer Drinkers a woman enjoys her beer in the company of a friend. In The Cafe Concert, shown at right, a sophisticated gentleman sits at a bar while a waitress stands resolutely in the background, sipping her drink. In The Waitress, a serving woman pauses for a moment behind a seated customer smoking a pipe, while a ballet dancer, with arms extended as she is about to turn, is on stage in the background.
Manet also sat at the restaurant on the Avenue de Clichy called Pere Lathuille's, which had a garden as well as the dining area. One of the paintings he produced here was, At Pere Lathuille's, in which a man displays an unrequited interest in a woman dining near him.
In Le Bon Bock, a large, cheerful, bearded man sits with a pipe in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, looking straight at the viewer.
Manet also painted the upper class enjoying more formal social activities. In Masked ball at the Opera, Manet shows a lively crowd of people enjoying a party. Men stand with top hats and long black suits while talking to women with masks and costumes. He included portraits of his friends in this picture.
Manet depicted other popular activities in his work. In Racing at Longchamp, an unusual perspective is employed to underscore the furious energy of racehorses as they rush toward the viewer. In Skating Manet shows a well dressed woman in the foreground, while others skate behind her. Always there is the sense of active urban life continuing behind the subject, extending outside the frame of the canvas.
In View of the International Exhibition, soldiers relax, seated and standing, prosperous couples are talking. There is a gardener, a boy with a dog, a woman on horseback -— in short, a sample of the classes and ages of the people of Paris.
Manet's response to modern life included works devoted to war, in subjects that may be seen as updated interpretations of the genre of "history painting". The first such work was the Battle of the Kearsarge and Alabama (1864), a sea skirmish from the American Civil War which took place off the French coast, and may have been witnessed by the artist.
Of interest next was the French intervention in Mexico; from 1867 to 1869 Manet painted three versions of the Execution of Emperor Maximilian, an event which raised concerns regarding French foreign and domestic policy. The several versions of the Execution are among Manet's largest paintings, which suggests that the theme was one which the painter regarded as most important. Its subject is the execution by Mexican firing squad of a Habsburg emperor, who had been installed by Napoleon III. Neither the paintings nor a lithograph of the subject were permitted to be shown in France. As an indictment of formalized slaughter the paintings look back to Goya, and anticipate Picasso's Guernica.
In January 1871 Manet traveled to Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the Pyrenees. In his absence his friends added his name to the "Fédération des artistes" (see : Courbet) of the Paris Commune. Manet stayed away from Paris, perhaps, until after the semaine sanglante. In a letter to Berthe Morisot at Cherbourg(June 10,1871) he writes :" We came back to Paris a few days ago...".(the semaine sanglante ended on 28 May).
The Prints and Drawings Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts(Budapest) has a watercolour/gouache (The Barricade) by Manet depicting a summary execution of Communards by Versailles troops based on a lithograph of the execution of Maximilian. A similar piece (The Barricade), oil on plywood, is held by a private collector.
On 18 March 1871 he wrote to his (confederate) friend Felix Bracquemond in Paris about his visit to Bordeaux, the provisory seat of the French National Assembly of the Third French Republique where Emile Zola introduced him to the sites: " I never imagined that France could be represented by such doddering old fools, not excepting that little twit Thiers..." (There followed some colorful language unsuitable at social events. See "Manet by himself" 1991/2004.) If this could be interpreted as support of the Commune a following letter to Bracquemond (March 21 ,1871) expressed his idea more clearly: "Only party hacks and the ambitious, the Henrys of this world following on the heels of the Milliéres, the grotesque imitators of the Commune of 1793..." He knew the communard Lucien Henry to have been a former painters model and Millière, an insurance agent. "What an encouragement all these bloodthirsty caperings are for the arts! But there is at least one consolation in our misfortunes: that we're not politicians and have no desire to be elected as deputies". (The letters are published in Julliet Wilson-Bareau, ed., "Manet by himself" UK: Times Warner, 2004.)
Manet depicted many scenes of the streets of Paris in his works. The Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags depicts red, white, and blue pennants covering buildings on either side of the street--another painting of the same title features a one-legged man walking with crutches. Again depicting the same street, but this time in a different context, is Rue Monsnier with Pavers, in which men repair the roadway while people and horses move past.
The Railway, widely known as The Gare Saint-Lazare, was painted in 1873. The setting is the urban landscape of Paris in the late nineteenth century. Using his favorite model in his last painting of her, a fellow painter,Victorine Meurent, also the model for Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass, sits before an iron fence holding a sleeping puppy and an open book in her lap. Next to her is a little girl with her back to the painter, who watches a train pass beneath them.
Instead of choosing the traditional natural view as background for an outdoor scene, Manet opts for the iron grating which "boldly stretches across the canvas" (Gay 106). The only evidence of the train is its white cloud of steam. In the distance, modern apartment buildings are seen. This arrangement compresses the foreground into a narrow focus. The traditional convention of deep space is ignored.
When the painting was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1874: "Visitors and critics found its subject baffling, its composition incoherent, and its execution sketchy.Caricaturists ridiculed Manet's picture, in which only a few recognized the symbol of modernity that it has become today"(Dervaux 1). The painting is currently displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washinton DC.
He completed painting his last major work,A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère), in 1882 and it hung in the Salon that year.
In 1875, a French edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven included lithographs by Manet and translation by Mallarmé. In 1881, with pressure from his friend Antonin Proust, the French government awarded Manet the Legion d'honneur. In 1863 Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch-born piano teacher of his own age with whom he had been romantically involved for approximately ten years. Leenhoff initially had been employed by Manet's father, Auguste, to teach Manet and his younger brother piano. She also may have been Auguste's mistress. In 1852, Leenhoff gave birth, out of wedlock, to a son, Leon Koella Leenhoff.
After the death of his father in 1862, Manet married Suzanne. Eleven-year-old Leon Leenhoff, whose father may have been either of the Manets, posed often for Manet. Most famously, he is the subject of the Boy Carrying a Sword of 1861 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). He also appears as the boy carrying a tray in the background of The Balcony.
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