Manet

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was a leader of the second generation of Realists, following Courbet, and a crucial inspiration to the Impressionists. Primarily interested in form, Manet's canvases represent a movement away from detail and pure surface mimesis toward a more abstract aesthetic. Manet's works display a simplified composition and he observed "Conciseness in art is a necessity and an elegance. The concise person makes one think; the verbose person bores. Always modify in the direction of brevity... In a figure seek out the high light and the deep shadow; the rest will work out naturally; it is often a very small matter. Furthermore, cultivate your memory, for nature will never give you anything more than references."
 
Manet himself was born into wealthy upper middle class family and never abandoned his desire to be accepted by the Salon. His art was heavily influenced by Spanish painters such as Velazquez and Goya, and by Japanese woodcuts. Although he was greatly admired by the younger group of Impressionists - Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Cézanne - he never considered himself part of the group and generally did not exhibit at the Impressionist shows. In keeping with Baudelaire's aesthetic, Manet chronicled modern life and the contemporary urban scene with an unflinching Realist eye.
 
Mademoiselle V... in the Costume of an Espada (1862) demonstrates Manet's dramatic flatening of the picture plane with broad expanses of unmodulated color that owed much to Japanese art. The Spanish intertext is also evident here, both in the subject matter and in the use of light and shadow. The image is determinedly anti-illusionistic, and the title draws our attention to the fact that this is a painting of a French woman dressed up as a Spanish man. Manet makes no effort to make the painting a "realist" representation, and instead insists upon the suggestion of the image's treatment of light, color, contrast and depth. The jarring use of color (pinks, lemon yellow and black) and the aggressive disjunction between the figure in the foreground and the scene behind her all contribute to the radical nature of the canvas. Rejected by the jury of Salon de 1863, Mademoiselle V... in the Costume of an Espada was exhibited at the Salon des Refusés that year.
 
Le Déjeuner sur lÕherbe (1863) created one of the first of many public scandals for Manet. Rejected from the Salon of 1863, it was included in the Salon des Refusés. The critics objected to Manet's inclusion of a nude figure in a modern setting - while a classical, mythological or exotic nude was acceptable thanks to the distance of time or cultural space, a naked woman in a resolutely contemporary setting was considered obscene. In this "shocking" picnic in the grass, Manet portrays the new subculture of leisure, yet the painting remains elusive in its jarring combination of a modern naturalist vision with classical reference to Italian Renaissance masters. The tension between the dressed middle class men and the naked woman that further foregrounded the very modern fact that this was a prostitute - in many ways a symbol for modernity.
 
Olympia (1863) was even more shocking and controversial when it appeared at the Salon of 1865. An updated version of Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538), Manet presents Victorine in the guise of a Parisian prostitute, whose unabashed gaze confronts the viewers as if we were her customers. Unidealized, this Olympia (a common name for prostitutes at the name that nonetheless retains the irony of a classical provenance) is thin, tough and scrappy; she has armpit hair and dirty feet, while the presence of the bed with its rumpled sheets, a bouquet from a client and the cat (metaphorically suggesting what she hides with her hand) all point directly to an unromantic view of her trade. Manet's naturalism, his desire to show modern life in a truthful light, resembles Zola's, whose Nana (1880) similarly portrayed the unadorned life of a prostitute.
 
Woman with a Parrot (1866) is striking in its simplicity, and cool, detached emotion. The pattern formed between the figure in pink and the dark gray background creates a contrast that carries as much weight as the subject itself. In painting the fabric of her gown, Manet appears more interested in the surface application of pigment (note the discernable brushstrokes) than in creating something that looks like "real" fabric. A study in control and simplicity, Woman with a Parrot is another of a series of Manet's portraits of his favorite model, Victorine Meurent, who also appears in Mademoiselle V..., Le Déjeuner sur lÕherbe and Olympia. She is a modern figure inserted into an almost abstract setting, while the toe protruding from the hem of her gown grounds the figure back in reality. By using the same model repeatedly, and by making her absolutely recognizable, Manet further distances his images from a mimetic fantasy of the real and draws the viewer's attention to the constructed nature of the composition. It has been hypothesized that this picture is an allegory of the five senses: taste (the orange), sound (the parrot), smell (the violet), sight (the monocle) and touch (her fingers touching). Given Manet's fascination with classical art, this is a plausible reading; his treatment of the ancient theme in an untraditional form is emblematic of Manet's modernity.
 
In Boating (1874) Manet portrays a fashionable couple engaged in a leisure activity - boating on the Seine. Both the subject matter and the palette of this later picture are more closely tied to Impressionism, while the flattened picture plane refers back to the Japanese prints that so intrigued him. Boating was painted in Argenteuil during the summer of 1874, when Manet frequently worked side by side with Monet and Renoir.
 
Emile Zola met Manet in 1866, when he came to interview the painter for a newspaper article in LÕEvénement. Zola used Manet's many rejections to mount an attack on the Salon system per se, and defended the young artist while at the same time promoting his own personal and political causes. In a subsequent (1867) defense of Manet, Zola insists on the work of art as material object and privileges the experience of vision over the narrative qualities of the canvas. He explains "la femme nue du Déjeuner sur l'herbe n'est là que pour fournir à l'artiste l'occasion de peindre un peu de chair," while he interprets Olympia in a direct address to the painter as follows: "Il vous fallait une femme nue, et vous avez choisi Olympia, la première venue; il vous fallait des taches claires et lumineuses, et vous avez ms un bouquet; il vous fallait des taches noires, et vous avez placé dans un coin une negresse et un chat. Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire? Vous ne le savez guire, ni moi non plus." While many have seen this as a very modern reading of the abstract content of art, it is important to note that the author severs the painter's images from any meaning at all; the subjects are not subjects, they are just "prétextes à peindre."
 
Manet's Portrait of Zola (1868) may constitute the painter's revenge on the self-serving critic, for the image in many ways points more to Manet's own art and interests than to the personality of the sitter. Can you analyze the image and find an encoded critique of the critic?
 
Always the champion of the underdog, Zola's support for Manet and the Impressionists waned as they grew more successful, and in 1880 he wrote "Le grand malheur, c'est que pas un artiste de ce groupe n'a réalisé puissamment et définitivement la formule nouvelle qu'ils apportent tous, éparse dans leurs oeuvres. La formule est là, divisée à l'infini; mais nulle part, dans aucun dÕeux, on ne la trouve appliquée par un ma<ETH>tre. Ce sont tous des précurseurs, l'homme de génie nÕest pas né. In 1886, Zola published L'Oeuvre, a thinly disguised account of a failed painter whose resemblance to Manet and Cézanne was instantly recognized. After reading the novel, Cézanne severed his relationship with Zola, whom he had known since boyhood, and never spoke to him again.