Edouard Manet

Manet’s Art

“ Modernism is not a break with the past, but a continuation of the past. Titian, Giorgione, in modern dress. And Velasquez, always Velasquez.”—Edouard Manet

Edouard Manet, born in Paris on January 23, 1832 and died April 30, 1883, was the first modernist. In our post post-modernist age, one of his paintings sold in 2000 for 20 million dollars. Manet was criticized during his life as being a painter of fragments. The 1860’s were a time of social fragmentation as more people flooded into Paris brought by the new railway system. It was a time of physical fragmentation as well. Baron Haussmann, the prefect (mayor) of Paris, tore down medieval slums and widened tortured streets for the Parisian grand boulevards we know today. There was economic fragmentation, with the rich getting richer and the poor relegated to the outskirts of the city.

Manet perceived all this and depicted it on canvas, combining influences from the Old Masters with inspiration from contemporary sources. Manet’s paintings were considered fragmented because they lacked chiaroscuro, the shadowing that had been in use since the Renaissance. Chiaroscuro was eschewed by Manet to evoke the fragmentation of social relations in the city. His use of stark white and straight black were shocking to academically trained artists. This also served to fragment his paintings into flat areas. Think of late twentieth century art. Fragments are to be found in Picasso to Jasper Johns to Frank Stella and onward. It started with Manet.

Manet painted the pictorial space with truth, not wishing to fool the viewer, to pretend that he is looking in on a scene, but to truthfully say, “This is a canvas. We both know it. This is a model posed in a studio. I’m not going to lie to you. She is standing in a studio and I’ve painted in a background scene of the outdoors.” This was so revolutionary that very few people of his time understood what he intended. That is the fate of genius-- to wait for the rest of the world to catch up. This was Edouard Manet.

Manet’s Charm
Charles Baudelaire, the poet, was a great friend of Manet. He wrote, “The artist of modern life has…sought after the fugitive, fleeting beauty of present day life…Often weird, violent and excessive, the acrid, or heady bouquet of the wine of life.” His friends, Claude Monet, Frederic Bazille, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Jacques Offenbach, among other illustrious personalities of the Second Empire, considered him witty and charming, the quintessential “flaneur.” He was a dandy and often seen strolling boulevards tapping the pavement with his jaunty wooden walking stick.

Manet’s Family
Manet was born into an upper class bourgeois family with a stern father and doting mother. He was extremely intelligent, but bored in school. His father expected him to enter one of the professions, sent him to be a naval officer with the merchant marines, but his heart was not in it. Manet preferred art and painting to almost anything else. Thanks to his mother’s intervention, he was allowed to attend the atelier of Thomas Couture, a renowned artist and studied the Old Masters at the Louvre to learn his craft.

Presently, he ventured out on his own to make a name for himself. An inheritance enabled him to support his new wife, Susanne Leenhoff, a chubby, plain faced older woman who had cajoled him into marriage. She was pregnant at the time they wed although the paternity of her child was never proven. Manet married her out of chivalry and supported her and the child. By nature, he was an incorrigible flirt who often fell in love with his models, though he was technically married to Suzanne.

Manet’s Legacy
Manet revered beauty and saw it everywhere. He once said, “A thing is beautiful because it is human. Forget all ideas about ‘perfection’ and the ‘absolute’. A thing isn’t beautiful because it’s perfect according to certain physical and metaphysical precepts. A thing is beautiful because it lives.”

In his later years, Manet watched his younger acolytes, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Morisot, launch the Impressionist movement. He is not considered an “Impressionist” but inspired and supported them in their cause. Not a “joiner” by nature, he stayed outside their official circle. He was awarded the Legion of Honor late in life, continued to paint brilliantly until his death from syphilis in 1883 and is today recognized as one of the greatest painters of his time.

©2007 Debra Finerman. All Rights Reserved. Website design by Chris Costello