Edouard Manet, b. Paris, Jan. 23, 1832, d. Apr. 30, 1883, has often been called the first modern artist to conceive of a painting as a flat surface covered with pigment, and purposely to draw attention to the process of painting. Although he was not completely unconcerned with subject matter, Manet used the traditional concept of content only as a point of departure--one that led him in many different directions.
Manet was a member of an aristocratic family, and his father, a government official, only reluctantly countenanced his son's avowed intention of becoming a painter. After completing his academic studies and failing in a half-hearted attempt to win a commission as a naval officer, Manet studied painting under Thomas Couture and later traveled (1856) to Holland, Germany, Austria, and Italy to visit art collections. His early works, such as The Spanish Guitarist (1860; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), reveal a debt to Diego Velazquez and Francisco de Goya, but they also display the two-dimensional directness that would mark Manet's more controversial paintings.
Once he moved away from Spanish subjects and the general influence of baroque art to explore themes that gave a quick and vivid sense of the passing social scene--a street singer coming out of a cafe, gatherings of people in the Tuileries gardens--he embarked on a series of provocative challenges to the official Salon art of the day. The first of these unconventional works was the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (1862; Musee d' Orsay, Paris), refused by the Salon of 1863 but given a showing that year when the outcry about the rejection of experimentalist works led to a special exhibition to accommodate them, the famous Salon des Refuses. Although Manet manifested his admiration for past art by basing the Dejeuner poses on Marcantonio Raimondi's print (c.1525-30) after Raphael's lost cartoon for the Judgment of Paris, the general public was shocked both by the bohemian candor of the subject matter and by the very summary way in which the brushwork suggested lighting and textures. The painting looks unfinished and gives the impression of an informal moment captured as if by a camera--features that would serve as a stimulus to the younger impressionists.
Manet again caused public scandal with his Olympia (1863; Musee de Orsay)
a candid presentation of a courtesan posing naked on her bed. The
homage paid here to Titian's famous Venus of Urbino (c.1538; Uffizi
Gallery, Florence) only aggravated the outcry created by the suggestive
props accompanying the nudity and by the use of bright color-patches that
are juxtaposed without any graded transitions of modeling.
Manet's thoroughly unconventional treatment of traditional subjects
represents a turning point in modern painting. Even more than the
proponents of realism, led by Gustave Courbet, Manet devalued the importance
of what was painted in favor of stressing the process by which a painting
was created. His later works ranged in subject matter from beach
and outdoor subjects to city scenes, all of which he rendered with increasingly
free brushstrokes and bolder use of color and light. Although he
maintained close contacts with the emerging impressionists, his predilection
for strong black-and-white contrasts and his feeling for clear outlines
kept him outside the mainstream of IMPRESSIONISM. The crowning masterpiece
of his last years, A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881-82; Courtauld Institute
Galleries, London), acknowledges the triumph of impressionism in its use
of quick, vibrant strokes to enhance the fall of light onto textures and
surfaces, but it also testifies to Manet's personal, inventive brilliance
in the way in which different aspects of visual experience are combined
in startling and illogical ways. By the time of his death, in 1883,
Manet had passed from being the abomination and source of outrage of mid-19th-century
French art to being recognized widely as a pioneer of the modern movement
in painting.