Édouard Manet - pioneer of Impressionism

Manet or Monet ? This is often the also questioning answer to the question of who had painted the most beautiful impressionist pictures When memory of the first names, it will be very difficult, the classification of the two names is obviously not immediately familiar.

While Claude Monet was undisputedly one of the best -known impressionists, Édouard Manet was born in a different tradition in 1832.

Nevertheless, both of the five letters of their name united painters can not only be mentioned with a certain justification in the one breath: both were born in Paris and at times visited the same academy that older man knew and appreciated the younger Monet.

Édouard Manet cannot be counted among the impressionists, his somewhat earlier work can be used. Certainly, however, it can and must be regarded iner of the most important inspection providers and pioneers of the impressionists

A short biographical profile

Édouard Manet (1832–1883) was a French painter . As one of the first artists of the 19th century, which approached the topics of modernity 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'Arbe) and Olympics triggered great controversy and served as a gathering point for young painters who impressionism . Today they are considered to be the turning point pictures that mark the history of the origin of modern art.

Breakfast in the green (1863) - systematic image analysis

Childhood, embossing and early years

At first, the later strider for modernity in painting grew rather traditionally, in a bourgeois family with a republican attitude (although his birthplace characterically directly opposite the Paris Académie of the Beaux Art and not far from the Louvre). With a judge as a father and a diplomat daughter as a mother, the young Manet enjoyed an upscale lifestyle and a corresponding self -confidence, but was noticeable in school both through poor considerations and through poor performance.

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

Nevertheless, after the end of the school career at the age of 16, Manet should and wanted to become a naval officer as a small replacement for the legal career closed by poor grades. But Manet also failed during the entrance exam for the naval school.

With the aim of a repeat examination in the following year, Manet embarked on a school ship in the direction of Brazil in 1848, but the experiences and beauties of this half -year journey created the desire to become a painter and artist.

Artistic training and finding style

Under conflicts with his parents' house, he did not choose the classic training at the Académie des Beaux-Art , but went to the studio of a star of the art scene at the time, Thomas Couture .

After a short time, however, Manet began to criticize his teaching methods and unnatural representation. Manet now started working less conventionally, also visited the Académie Suisse , copied paintings in the Louvre, undertook study trips and through his father, in the course of which he met a large part of the world's most important art collections.

It was not until 1856 that Manet finally separated from Couture and, together with the animal painter Albert de Balleroy, into his own studio. Little is known about the work of this studio community, which continues until 1859, there were many copies of old masters among these first pictures, they did not show a pronounced style of their own and were partially revised, partly even destroyed.

His style at this time was characterized by loose brush strokes, simplification of details and suppression of transition tones. He took over the current style of realism initiated by Gustave Courbet and painted the absinthe drinker (1858–59) and other contemporary motifs such as beggars, singers, gypsies, people in cafés and bull fights.

The music in the Tuileries is an early example for Manet's picturesque style. Inspired by Hals and Velázquez, it is a harbinger of his lifelong interest in leisure time.

The friendship started at this time with the poet Charles Baudelaire , Manet also significantly inspired his first independent painting, the “absinthe drinker”. promptly rejected by the jury of the most important art event of the time, the Salon de Paris The paintings submitted to the next salon in 1861 were finally accepted. The work “Guitarrero” or “The Spanish singer” were very well received in the art scene.

At the same time, this composition reveals Manet's studies of the old masters of the Renaissance. A work that is led Le Déjeuner Sur L'Arbe the Sturm (or Tizian) from 1509.

Through this success, Manet became a kind of leader of the contemporary painters who, together with the trendy writers, determined the artist's life in Paris. In the next few years he married and maintained the life of the modern Pariser, who visited restaurants, cafes and varieties and was found “Music in the Tuileriengarten”,

This painting was also the next self -determined picture of Manet: he had followed Baudelaires call here and had discussed modern life in departure to traditionally appropriate motifs. From now on, this representation of the “Vie Moderne” should characterize Manet. The harmless implementation of joie de vivre in group pictures followed more revealing works that were rejected in the salon and became a scandal in public.

Features of his characteristic painting techniques

What was the bridge between realism and impressionism ? It was Manet's new approach to painting, its innovations with color and brush guide.

Former artists began to paint their canvases with a layer of darker, usually brown color and then layer layers of color over them. Of course, they had to wait until each layer had dried 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 could not pose all the time, so painters often added layers without the model being present.

As a realist, Manet preferred to paint after life - with his model in front of him. He did this by completing his paintings in a session. How did he achieve this high -speed efficiency ? By not deleting in layers and do not glazing the end product. This meant that he had to select the perfect color immediately because there were no layers that he could fall back on. When he made a mistake, he scraped the color down to the bare canvas and then rejected this area.

The Impressionists took over Manet Alla Prima ("immediately") technology . Without them, they couldn't have painted quickly enough to capture the changing lighting effects.

Manet also painted intermediate values ​​(color shades) in color spots and cuts to create stricter contrasts. So instead of painting a number of increasingly lighter or darker orange tones to show how close an orange dress is on a source of light, it would simply apply a stain in bright orange.

This technique is tachism . (Tache means "stain" or "stain" in French.) The impressionists modified this technique by dissolving manet's color stains in much smaller stains, stains and splashes of color.

With public scandals to a completely new form of painting

As in the luncheon on the grass paraphrased manet also in his painting Olympia (1863) a respected work by a Renaissance artist, a act shown in a pose based on Titian Venus von Urbino (1538) . Manet created Olympics in response to the challenge of giving the salon a nude painting for the exhibition. His later open representation of a confident prostitute was accepted in 1865 by the Paris Salon, where she triggered a scandal.

The painting was controversial because the act has some small items of clothing like an orchid in the hair, a bracelet, a band around the neck and slippers, all of which emphasized their nudity, sexuality and their comfortable Kurtisan Lifestyle. The orchid, the raised hair, the black cat and the bouquet of flowers were recognized at that time recognized symbols of sexuality.

The body of this modern Venus is thin, which contradicts the prevailing standards, and this lack of physical idealism has angered the audience. Both Olympia's body and their gaze are uniformly confrontative.

She looks out defiantly while her servant offers flowers from one of her male admirers. Although her hand rests on her leg and hides her pubic area, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic: female modesty is notorious in this work. As with luncheon on the Grass, the painting accused the problem 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: especially as a challenge for the Renaissance works that copied manet or used as the starting material. His work is considered "early modern", among other things because of the black border of the figures, which directs attention to the surface of the scene and the materiality of the color.

Both “Das Breakfast in the Green” (1863) and “Olympia” (presented in 1865 in the salon) not only outraged with a naked (women) skin, Manet also went the first steps on the way to a completely new form of painting : he was the first painter to dissolve from the illusion caused by careful modeling, released himself in his eyes and simply painted what he saw.

For the first time in the history of painting, shadows were colored, reflexes were used to design the colors. For the first time in the history of painting, a painter wanted to show what his senses perceived , as his senses perceived.

That was exactly the approach with which the impressionists were supposed to change painting, Manet influenced a number of naturalists among his younger colleagues, from whom the powerful movement of impressionism emerged.

Documentation about Édouard Manet

Late work and the end of life

Manet himself was friendly to the young artists of Impressionism, but did not consider himself a belonging. He did not consistently pursue the impressionist approaches, but also created portraits and still lifes in his late work, which were almost traditional, which were nevertheless different enough to be criticized and ridiculed in many ways.

It was only when Manet died of the syphilis in Paris in 1883, did the critics overturn very soon after his death in the praise of the great painter, as Emile Zola noticed in the foreword to the Manet memory exhibition in 1884.

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