Édouard Manet – Pioneer of Impressionism

Manet or Monet ? That's often the equally perplexing answer to the question of who the most beautiful Impressionist pictures in the world. When it comes to remembering their first names, things get quite difficult; the distinction between the two is clearly not immediately obvious.

While Claude Monet was undoubtedly one of the most famous Impressionists, Édouard Manet was born in 1832 into a completely different tradition.

Nevertheless, both painters, united by four of the five letters of their names, can be mentioned in the same breath with some justification: Both were born in Paris and attended the same academy for a time; the older Manet knew and appreciated the younger Monet.

Édouard Manet cannot be counted among the Impressionists himself; his work, which began somewhat earlier, occupies a special position. However, he can and must certainly be considered of the most important sources of inspiration and pioneers of the Impressionists

A brief biographical profile

Édouard Manet (1832–1883) was a French painter . As one of the first artists of the 19th century to approach themes of modern and postmodern life, he was a key figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism .

His early masterpieces , The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia , sparked great controversy and served as a rallying point for the young painters who Impressionism . Today, they are considered pivotal paintings that mark the origins of modern art.

The Luncheon on the Grass (1863) – Systematic Image Analysis

Childhood, formative years and early years

Initially, the future champion of modern painting grew up in a rather traditional environment, in a thoroughly bourgeois family with republican leanings (although, significantly, his birthplace is located directly opposite the Paris Académie des Beaux-Arts and not far from the Louvre). With a judge as a father and a diplomat's daughter as a mother, the young Manet enjoyed an affluent lifestyle and a corresponding sense of self-confidence, but during his school years he attracted attention for both bad behavior and poor academic performance.

An art-loving uncle not only introduced the young Manet to the Louvre, but also recognized his talent for drawing during his school days and paid for his first drawing lessons.

Nevertheless, after finishing school at the age of 16, Manet initially wanted to become a naval officer, as a small consolation for a legal career that had been closed to him by poor grades. But Manet also failed the entrance exam for the naval academy.

With the aim of retaking his exam the following year, Manet embarked on a school ship bound for Brazil in 1848, but the experiences and beauties of this six-month journey now aroused in him the desire to become a painter and artist.

Artistic training and style development

Due to conflicts with his parents, he did not choose the classical education at the Académie des Beaux-Arts , but went to the studio of a star of the art scene at the time, Thomas Couture .

However, after only a short time, Manet began to criticize his father's teaching methods and unnatural style of representation. Manet then began to work less conventionally, additionally attending the Académie Suisse , copying paintings in the Louvre, undertaking study trips, and traveling abroad financed by his father, during which he became acquainted with a large part of the world's most important art collections.

It wasn't until 1856 that Manet finally broke away from Couture and opened his own studio with the animal painter Albert de Balleroy . Little is known about the work of this studio partnership, which continued until 1859. Many of these early paintings were copies of old masters; they did not yet display a distinct personal style and were sometimes reworked, sometimes even destroyed.

His style during this period was characterized by loose brushstrokes, simplification of details, and suppression of transitional tones. He adopted the contemporary style of realism initiated Gustave Courbet The Absinthe Drinker (1858–59) and other contemporary subjects such as beggars, singers, gypsies, people in cafes, and bullfights.

Music in the Tuileries is an early example of Manet's painterly style. Inspired by Hals and Velázquez, it foreshadows his lifelong interest in the theme of leisure.

The friendship with the poet Charles Baudelaire, , likely also significantly inspired Manet's first independent painting, "The Absinthe Drinker." This work, however, was promptly rejected by the jury of the most important art event of the time, the Salon de Paris "The Guitarist" and "The Spanish Singer," which were in keeping with the fashion of the time, were very well received in the art world.

At the same time, this composition reveals Manet's study of the old Renaissance masters. One work cited Le déjeuner sur l'herbe The Tempest (or Titian's) from 1509.

This success made Manet a kind of leader among contemporary painters, who, together with the fashionable writers, shaped artistic life in Paris. He married and, in the following years, cultivated the lifestyle of the modern Parisian, frequenting restaurants, cafés, and music halls, and he himself appears alongside numerous prominent figures of the time "Music in the Tuileries Garden,"

This painting, however, was also Manet's next self-determined work: he had followed Baudelaire's call and, departing from traditionally appropriate motifs, had addressed modern life. This depiction of "vie moderne" would henceforth characterize Manet's work. The innocuous portrayal of joie de vivre in group portraits was followed by more explicit works that were rejected by the Salon and caused a public scandal.

Features of his characteristic painting techniques

What was the bridge between Realism and Impressionism ? It was Manet's new approach to painting, his innovations with color and brushwork.

Early artists began by painting their canvases with a layer of dark, usually brown, paint, and then layered further layers of color on top. Naturally, they had to wait for each layer to dry before adding the next. Finally, they glazed the painting to give the surface a smooth finish. This process could take weeks or months. Obviously, the models couldn't pose the entire time, so painters often added layers without the model present.

As a realist, Manet preferred to paint from life —that is, with his model in front of him. He did this by completing his paintings in a single sitting. How did he achieve this high-speed efficiency ? By not painting in layers and not glazing the final product. This meant he had to choose the perfect color immediately, as there were no layers to fall back on. If he made a mistake, he scraped the paint off down to the bare canvas and then repainted that area.

The Impressionists adopted Manet's alla prima ("immediately") technique . Without it, they would not have been able to paint quickly enough to capture the changing light effects.

Manet also painted in patches of color, cutting out intermediate values ​​(shades of color) to create sharper contrasts. So instead of painting a series of increasingly lighter or darker shades of orange to indicate how close an orange dress was to a light source, he would simply apply a patch of bright orange.

This technique is Tachisme . (Tache means "spot" or "blot" in French.) The Impressionists modified this technique by breaking down Manet's splashes of color into much smaller spots, blots, and dabs of color.

Public scandals led to a completely new form of painting

As in The Luncheon on the Grass, a respected work by a Renaissance artist in his painting Olympia (1863) Venus of Urbino (1538) . Manet created Olympia in response to the challenge of submitting a nude painting to the Salon for exhibition. His later-explicit depiction of a self-assured prostitute was accepted by the Paris Salon in 1865, where it caused a scandal.

The painting was controversial because the nude wears several small articles of clothing, such as an orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and slippers, all of which emphasized her nudity, sexuality, and comfortable courtesan lifestyle. The orchid, the updo, the black cat, and the bouquet of flowers were recognized symbols of sexuality at the time.

This modern Venus's body is thin, defying prevailing standards, and this lack of physical idealism has angered viewers. Both Olympia's body and her gaze are unabashedly confrontational.

She gazes defiantly out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male admirers. Although her hand rests on her leg, covering her pubic area, the reference to traditional feminine virtue is ironic: feminine modesty is notoriously absent from this work. As with Luncheon on the Grass, the painting raised the issue of prostitution in contemporary France and the role of women in society .

Olympia (1863) – Systematic Image Analysis

The roughly painted style and photographic lighting in these two controversial works were considered modern by contemporaries, particularly as a challenge to the Renaissance works that Manet copied or used as source material. His work is considered "early modern," partly because of the black outlines of the figures, which draw attention to the surface of the picture plane and the materiality of the paint.

Both “The Luncheon on the Grass” (1863) and “Olympia” (presented at the Salon in 1865) not only caused outrage with their depiction of naked (female) skin, but Manet also took the first steps towards a completely new form of painting : He was the first painter to break free from the illusion created by careful modeling, relying entirely on his eyes and simply painting what he saw.

For the first time in the history of painting, shadows were colored, reflections were used to create color. For the first time in the history of painting, a painter wanted to depict what his senses perceived , and in the way his senses perceived it.

This was precisely the approach with which the Impressionists would change painting; Manet influenced a number of naturalists among his younger colleagues, from whom the powerful movement of Impressionism crystallized.

Documentary about Édouard Manet

Late work and end of life

Manet himself was on friendly terms with the young Impressionist artists, but did not consider himself part of the movement. He did not consistently pursue Impressionist approaches, but in his later work also created portraits and still lifes that appeared almost traditional, yet were different enough to be widely criticized and ridiculed.

Only after Manet died of syphilis in Paris in 1883 did the critics, very soon after his death, practically trip over themselves in their praise of the great painter, as Emile Zola remarked with profound sarcasm in the preface to the Manet memorial exhibition in 1884.

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