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Manet and His Influence

Overview

When Edouard Manet began to study painting in 1850, Paris' familiar, broad, tree-lined streets did not yet exist, and the life of the city was not a subject artists explored. Young artists could expect to succeed only through the official Academy exhibitions known as Salons, whose conservative juries favored biblical and mythological themes and a polished technique. Within twenty-five years, however, both Paris and painting had new looks. Renovations had opened the wide avenues and parks we know today, and painting was transformed when artists abandoned the transparent glazes and blended brushstrokes of the past and turned their attention to new techniques and to life around them. Contemporary urban subjects and a bold style, which offered paint on the canvas as something to be admired in itself, gave their art a strong, new sense of the present.

More than in his teacher's studio, Manet learned to paint in the Louvre by studying old masters. He was particularly impressed by the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, contrasting his vivid brushwork with the "stews and gravies" of academic style. Manet began to develop a freer manner, creating form not through a gradual blending of tones, but with discrete areas of color side by side. He drew on the old masters for structure, often incorporating their motifs, but giving them a modern cast.

Several artists had already begun to challenge the stale conventions of the Academy when Manet's Olympia (today in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was accepted for the Salon in 1865. It caused a scandal. Critics advised pregnant women to avoid the picture, and it was re-hung to thwart vandals. Viewers were not used to flat space and shallow volumes in painting. To many, Manet's "color patches" appeared unfinished. Even more shocking was the frank honesty of the courtesan: her boldness—not nudity—offended. Her languid pose copied a painting of Venus by the Italian artist Titian, but Manet did not cloak her with mythology.

Manet's succès de scandale made him a leader of the avant-garde. In the evenings at the Café Guerbois, near his studio, he was joined by writers and artists, including Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and others who would go on to organize the first impressionist exhibition. Manet's embrace of what Charles Baudelaire termed the "heroism of modern life" and his bold manner with paint inspired the future impressionists, though Manet never exhibited with them.

Edouard Manet, French, 1832 - 1883, Olympia, 1865, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

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Against a hilly landscape and on a patch of dirt, five people wearing tattered clothing gather around a bearded man who holds a violin in his lap in this horizontal painting. Most of them have pale skin. Starting from the left is a barefoot young woman holding a blond baby to her chest. She faces our right, and her chestnut-brown hair hides her profile. She wears a black shirt over a calf-length skirt streaked with slate and aquamarine blue. To the right two young boys face us. The boy on the left of that pair wears a loose white shirt tucked into tan-colored pants and an upturned wide-brimmed hat. The boy next to him has short brown hair and is dressed in a black and brown vest and pants over a bone-white shirt. His right arm, to our left, is slung across the shoulders of the blond boy and he looks off to our right with dark, unfocused eyes. The man who holds the violin is to our right of center. He sits on a stone with his body facing our left, but he turns to look at us with dark eyes under heavy brows. He has tan skin, dark gray, curly hair, and a trimmed silvery gray beard. A wrinkle under one eye suggests he may smile slightly at us. He wears a loose brown cloak with a ragged bottom hem, teal-blue stockings, and black shoes. He holds a violin on his lap like a guitar. One hand fingers a chord on the neck of the violin, which comes toward us, and the other hand holds the bow and plucks a string. A sand-colored bag with a strap lies at his feet. Two men stand to our right of the musician. One wears a tall black top hat, a brown cloak, gray pants, and black shoes. His face is loosely and indistinctly painted but he has a beard. Finally, the sixth person is a man who stands along the right side of the painting and is cut off by that edge. He wears a turban, a black polka-dotted scarf, and a long black cloak or coat. One hand clutches the scarf and the other rests on a wooden cane by his side. His chin and long, light-colored beard tuck back against the scarf, and he looks off to our left with dark eyes. There are loosely painted olive and forest-green leaves in the upper left corner. The landscape beyond is painted with indistinct areas of muted green, blue, and brown. Bits of azure-blue sky peek through puffy white and gray clouds overhead. The artist signed and dated the lower right, “ed. Manet 1862.”

"It was the homeland, at ten pence a night, of all the street organ players, of all the monkey tamers, of all the acrobats and of all the chimney sweeps that swarm the streets of the town." Such was a contemporary description of the neighborhood of Petite Pologne, close to Edouard Manet's studio.

Here Manet has painted characters from this area he called "a picturesque slum." Most are real individuals. The seated musician is Jean Lagrène, leader of a local gypsy band who earned his living as an organ grinder and artist's model. The man in the top hat is Colardet, a rag-picker and ironmonger. At the right a man named Guéroult is cast as the "wandering Jew," the prototypical outsider. In their poses and dress, several figures recall those of Velázquez or the peasants painted by French seventeenth-century artist Louis Le Nain, whose works Manet would also have seen during his studies in the Louvre.

Impassive and silent, these people from the margins of Parisian life are restricted to the narrow plane of the foreground. Presented with neutral detachment, they do not interact, appearing equally unconnected to each other and the vague, undefined setting they inhabit. The urchin and rag picker look toward the seated musician, but he is unaware, focused instead on the viewer outside the picture. The emotional blankness of Manet's painting felt "modern" to contemporary viewers.

Edouard Manet, French, 1832 - 1883, The Old Musician, 1862, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.162

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From a low perspective, we look at a man wearing black and white, lying on the ground with a pink flag beside him in this long, horizontal painting. We look onto the top of his head and his feet reach into the upper left corner of the composition, so he nearly fills the painting. His dark hair is cut short and gleams softly in the light from the upper left. His head has fallen toward his left shoulder, and his eyes are closed. He wears a black jacket and knee-length black pants. His jacket falls open to show white lining, and he wears a wide, white cummerbund and white stockings. His black, loafer-style shoes have pointed toes and possibly a bow at the bridge of each foot. He man’s right hand, farther from us, rests on his chest, and a black-handled sword or dagger is tucked into that elbow. That hand and his white tie are speckled with red blood. More blood seeps on the peanut-brown floor near the man’s left shoulder, closest to us. The man wears a gold ring on the pinky ring of his left hand, which lies along the ground and rests on or near the pale pink flag, which continues off the bottom left corner of the painting. The brown ground is lighter along the bottom of the painting and deepens to peat brown farther back, along the top edge. Brushstrokes are visible in some areas, especially in the white parts of the costume and the flag. The artist signed the painting in the lower right, “Manet.”

In 1864 Manet exhibited a large painting he called Episode from a Bullfight. Critics complained that its image of a fallen matador was out of proportion to the bull that had just gored him. "A wooden bullfighter, killed by a horned rat," one sneered. At some point, Manet cut the painting apart, creating two smaller, more powerful works: The Dead Toreador, here, and The Bullfight, now in the Frick Collection, New York.

Although Manet may have acted in response to the harsh criticism, it was not uncommon for him to rework compositions. He repainted the background, extracting the figure from the context of the bullfight, and in so doing changed the nature of his painting. The fallen matador is no longer part of a narrative but is instead an icon, an isolated and compelling figure of sudden and violent death. From the now featureless background the man's body is dramatically foreshortened, thrusting toward the viewer. Its proximity and isolation are startling. Only the man's costume informs us about him, traces of blood the only signs of a painful death.

Manet's choice of a Spanish subject—he did many early in his career—reflects his interest in the seventeenth-century painter Velázquez, as does the dramatic organization of the composition and his palette of rich, dark tones.

Edouard Manet, French, 1832 - 1883, The Dead Toreador, probably 1864, oil on canvas, Widener Collection, 1942.9.40

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A white rose, grapes and other fruit, a squat gourd, a bottle, and a glass are arranged across a dark wood table partly covered by a white cloth in this horizontal still life painting. The table and its objects fill the width and most of the height of this composition, and are set against a sable-brown background. The rose, bowl, cluster of green grapes, and a peach sit on the shimmering, bright white cloth, which is draped over the left half of the table. The shallow, straw-yellow bowl holds a pile of canary-yellow pears and a few peaches nestled among green leaves. Another peach and a second piece of fruit sit in front of it, partly obscured by the grapes that lie near the front edge of the table. Continuing to the right, the pumpkin-shaped gourd, roughly the size of the bowl and its fruit, is painted with streaks and daubs of lemon yellow and light and forest green. It sits on a gleaming silver tray. A tapered, earth-brown bottle and a small glass with a long stem stand behind the gourd. On the front face of the table, near the lower right corner, a keyhole is outlined with gold, and the top of one table leg is also gold. The objects are loosely painted with some visible brushstrokes, especially in the fruit in the bowl and the gourd. The artist signed the lower right,

Manet is known overwhelmingly for his paintings of people, but he called still life "the touchstone of painting," and it accounts for about twenty percent of his work. Most of his still lifes, like this one, were painted in the 1860s. At the time, still life enjoyed great popularity among the bourgeois citizens of the Second Empire. Dining rooms were filled with depictions of lush bouquets and lavish repasts that suggested their owners' comfortable lives. Bourgeois tastes tended toward the finely detailed and highly finished work of more conventional artists, however. A satirist looked at Manet's painting when it was exhibited in 1867 and remarked, "I do not know much about melons, but this one seems past its prime."

What contemporary viewers did not like in Manet's painting is precisely what attracts us today: its bold style. Sudden transitions of color—not a gradual modulation of tone—give shape to the objects. Each brushstroke stands independently. They rivet attention on the canvas surface, on the painting itself. The simple tabletop assemblage does not point, either, to any meaning outside itself. Manet's arrangement stands on its own terms, without allegorical allusions—common in earlier still lifes—to abundance or the transitory nature of life. Although his work harkens back to Dutch banquet pictures from the seventeenth century, it has a distinctly modern feel.

Edouard Manet, French, 1832 - 1883, Still Life with Melon and Peaches, c. 1866, oil on canvas, Gift of Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer, 1960.1.1

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A plate of oysters, a halved lemon, an oyster fork and shells, and a dish of salt are arranged on a wooden tabletop in front of a gray wall in this horizontal still life painting. The front edge of the table seems close to us, and the objects span the width of this composition. Six oysters are crowded on the oval plate, which is white and edged with royal blue. The narrow tines of the oyster fork are angled toward the plate as the handle, which is shaped like the blade of a butter knife, angles to our right and seems to jut into our space. The two empty shells are next to the knife in front of the lemon, which has been cut in half through its girth. One cut edge faces our left and the other half rests with its cut edge down on the table. The bowl with salt mounded within is about the same size as the lemon and has a border of brown at the top and near the foot. The entire painting is loosely painted with visible brushstrokes, and some vague lines on the side of the bowl suggest a Japanese or Chinese character.

Oysters, one of Manet’s earliest still lifes, was reportedly painted for his fiancée and remained with them in the family home. The painting was in the artist's studio at the time of his death, however, so this may only be a romantic fiction.

Manet spent long hours in the Louvre, studying and copying the works of the past. Here, cool subdued colors recall seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, while the simple subject and thick application of paint show the influence of the eighteenth-century French artist Chardin.

The heavy yellow paint puckers in imitation of the lemons' pebbly skins, while the wet surface of the cut fruit is smooth and flat, sectioned by a few spare strokes. The oysters, plump and slick from a distance, appear upon closer inspection to be formed by a few swift undulations of a brush laden with thick paint. This work from the early 1860s reveals Manet's developing style. Sudden transitions of color within a limited range—not a continuous and gradual modulation of tone—give shape to his objects. Each color, each brushstroke, stands independently on the canvas; it is in our eye that they blend to create form.

Edouard Manet, French, 1832 - 1883, Oysters, 1862, oil on canvas, Gift of the Adele R. Levy Fund, Inc., 1962.3.1

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We look slightly down onto a baby tucked into an oval-shaped cradle with a woman sitting on the far side looking down at the child in this vertical painting. Both the woman and baby have light skin. The cradle is draped with a sky-blue, scallop-edged cloth decorated with pink flowers and green leaves. A curtain of the same material is tied above so it hangs down behind the head of the cradle from the top center of the composition. The baby’s dark eyes are wide open, and he seems to gaze ahead. His cheeks are flushed peach, and his coral-pink lips are pressed down in a crescent shape. The baby’s head is wrapped in a white hood with a royal-blue bow or decoration over the right ear, to our left. Two loosely painted, round, salmon-pink shapes on either side of the child suggest hands emerging from the under the white blanket. In his left fist, to our right, the baby holds a white drum on a pumpkin-orange stick, with red and white forms, possibly feathers, at the top. The dark green handle of a pinwheel lies across the baby’s legs in the cradle. Another green, vertical form overlapping the edge of the crib suggests that another toy is clipped or propped there. It is difficult to tell if the pinwheel in the crib has canary-yellow and mauve-pink blades or if there are two, overlapping toys. The woman sits with her back to us but is angled so we see her profile looking down at the baby. Her face is painted with broad strokes of sand brown and parchment white. Her dark hair is pulled back under a white cap, and she wears a charcoal-gray and black, vertically striped dress with a white collar. Her back rests against the slats of a wooden chair, which seems to dissolve into the loosely painted, fawn-brown area in the lower right corner. The cradle sits next to a bed, mostly cut off by the left edge of the painting, with a golden-brown blanket or cover. Eggshell-white cloth seems to hang around the bed and along the wall behind the woman. The scene is loosely painted with visible brushstrokes.

Claude Monet was one of the young artists in Paris during the 1860s strongly influenced by Manet, becoming a part of his avant-garde circle. The broad strokes of color and abrupt juxtapositions here are reminiscent of Manet's bold, innovative manner. In this early work, Monet uses black and grays to create shadows, but soon black all but disappeared from his palette.

In 1867, when this was painted, the Exposition Universelle, or World's Fair, in Paris introduced Japanese woodblock prints to a wide audience. They had first appeared in France in the 1850s, packed around imported porcelains, and now enjoyed a huge vogue. Monet himself became an avid collector. Many years later, after he moved to his last home at Giverny, he hung the yellow walls of his dining room with them. Their distinctive style influenced many impressionist painters. Here that influence is evident in the unusual angle Monet has chosen—as if we peer down into the cradle—and in the abruptly cropped figure of the woman. The bold areas of pattern, in the bedclothes and canopy, for example, that divide the composition and seem to flatten the space are also inspired by Japanese prints.

Claude Monet, French, 1840 - 1926, The Cradle - Camille with the Artist's Son Jean, 1867, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.25

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A bearded man with light skin, wearing a black costume and holding a plumed hat, stands in front of mottled brown background in this vertical portrait painting. His body is angled to our left but he turns to look off to our right from the corners of his dark brown eyes. He has heavy, furrowed brows and high cheekbones. His dark mustache curls up at either end over a full beard, and his wavy chestnut-brown hair is swept back from his forehead. His black jacket has puffed sleeves with narrow ruffles of white at his collar and cuffs, and a peek of the white shirt at his chest where the row of buttons are undone. His puffy pants gather at the thigh over black stockings, and he wears black slippers. He crosses his wrists in front of him, and he wears a gold ring with a square, scarlet-red stone on his right ring finger, to our left. In that hand, he also holds a black hat with a long, feathery plume that falls to knee level. A saber lies on the floor to our left near the man’s feet, with the grip and elaborately twisting guard facing us. The background lightens from coffee brown along the top edge to light beige along the lower edge of the composition. The portrait is loosely painted with visible brushstrokes throughout, especially in the costume and background. The artist signed the painting in the lower right corner, “Manet.”

Philibert Rouvière stands before us as he did before Parisian theatergoers as Shakespeare's melancholy prince of Denmark, isolated on stage during one of the play's great soliloquies. The actor, who had been trained as a painter, modeled his portrayal of Hamlet on engravings of scenes from the play by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). Although critics were pleased with Rouvière's highly pitched, emotional performance, the public was not. He ended his career destitute and discouraged and died shortly before Manet completed this portrait.

There was a long French tradition of painting actors in their most famous roles, but Manet's Rouvière may also owe something to a work by Velázquez that Manet saw in Spain, where he had gone in 1865 following the controversy stirred by Olympia. Here, as in Velázquez' painting, only the angular shadows cast by the actor's legs anchor him to the ground; we concentrate only on the particulars of his posture, expression, and the minimal props around him. His costume is an orchestration of blacks—glossy and flat, tinged with blues, greens, or browns—applied with the kind of energetic brushstrokes that Manet admired in the work of Velázquez, whom Manet once praised as the "painter of painters."

Edouard Manet, French, 1832 - 1883, The Tragic Actor (Rouvière as Hamlet), 1866, oil on canvas, Gift of Edith Stuyvesant Gerry, 1959.3.1

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Holding a bunch of peonies in one hand, a woman with brown skin leans forward, toward us from behind a large basket holding dozens of flowers in this horizontal painting. The basket holding the flowers spans the width of the canvas, and the woman is shown behind it from the chest up. She wears a cream-white, long-sleeved blouse with scalloped trim around the high neck. She wears coral-red earrings, and a plaid cloth in tones of rust red, slate blue, pale purple, and black is tied tightly over her black hair, which is visible over her ears. Her brow is slightly furrowed, and she looks at us with large, dark eyes. Her full mouth is closed, the corners faintly downturned. She reaches her right arm, on our left, toward us with a bouquet of three pink-and-white peonies and greenery. Her basket is filled with yellow and red tulips, pink roses, white and purple lilac, and other white, pink, yellow, and blue flowers, and it takes up the bottom third of the composition. The woman and basket are shown against a dove-gray background. The artist prominently signed and dated the work with red letters near the upper right corner, near the woman’s head: “F. Bazille. 1870.”

Perhaps because he died so young—killed during the Franco-Prussian War only days short of his twenty-ninth birthday—Bazille's name is less familiar than those of the other founders of impressionism. Bazille met Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley as fellow students in the studio of painter Charles Gleyre. The four were unimpressed by the lofty religious and mythological subjects and the polished painting style demanded by the academic tradition. They were attracted instead to the broad "unfinished" brushwork of Manet and also shared his preference for scenes of modern life.

This painting can be seen as Bazille's homage to Manet. The flower vendor appears to be a reference to the black woman with the extravagant bouquet in Manet's infamous Olympia. The flowers themselves, especially the prominent peonies, also offer a kind of tribute. Manet cultivated peonies and often painted their lush blooms. Bazille's painting style was usually more smoothly blended, but here, even his brushstrokes seem to echo Manet's thick patches of color.

Frédéric Bazille, French, 1841 - 1870, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870. oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1983.1.6

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A densely packed crowd of men and women, all of them with pale skin and most of them wearing black, stand in a theater lobby beneath a mezzanine level that runs close to the top edge of the composition in this horizontal painting. Because the crowd spans the width of the composition, the first impression is of a mass of deep black stretching across the canvas. Slowly, individual faces and poses become evident. Five of the women wear black, oval masks that cover their eyes and noses, and one more mask has fallen onto the rust-red floor below. Two women, wearing bright white and colorful clothing, engage some of the men in conversation. A man cropped by the left edge of the painting wears the green, red, and gold costume and pointed cap of a court jester. Two gold and glass wall sconces hang on the cream-colored wall behind the crowd, one near each top corner. The space within the mezzanine level above is painted loosely so details are difficult to make out, but a pair of legs clad in black britches and white stockings seems to stand with ankles crossed at the top center. A leg wearing a red, high-heeled ankle boot dangles outside of the railing to the right. The brushstrokes are loose throughout. The artist’s signature appears on a piece of discarded paper on the floor near the lower right corner: “Manet.”

Manet came from a well–to–do family, and this painting provides a glimpse of the sophisticated Parisian world he loved. He was uncomfortable in the countryside, preferring instead the finery of the city. These elegant men and coquettish young women are attending a masked ball held each year during Lent. "Imagine," ran a description in the newspaper Figaro, "the opera house packed to the rafters, the boxes furnished out with all the pretty showgirls of Paris. . . . " There is little doubt about the risqué nature of the evening, where masked young women, likely respectable ladies concealing their identities, scantily clad members of the Parisian demimonde, and well–dressed young men all mingle together.

Manet sketched the scene on site, but painted it over a period of months in his studio. He posed several of his friends—noted writers, artists, and musicians—and even included himself in the crowded scene. He is probably the bearded blond man at right who looks out toward the viewer. At his feet, a fallen dance card bears the painter's signature.

At the edges of the horizontal painting—a format Manet used often—figures end abruptly. At top, legs dangle over a railing. In contrast to the self–contained compositions of academic art, we are instantly aware that we see only a part of the scene and that it extends beyond the picture frame.

Edouard Manet, French, 1832 - 1883, Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873, oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Horace Havemeyer in memory of her mother-in-law, Louisine W. Havemeyer, 1982.75.1

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