Edouard Manet

Edouard Manet was born on January 23, 1832, in the former 10th arrondissement of Paris, into a family of comfortable means and official standing. His father, Auguste Manet, was a senior official at the Ministry of Justice, and his mother, Eugenie Desiree Fournier, was the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince Charles Bernadotte ^[1]. The family expected Edouard, the eldest of three sons, to follow his father into the law.

The boy showed little enthusiasm for that plan. At the College Rollin he was an indifferent student, though an uncle, Edmond Fournier, encouraged his drawing and took him to the Louvre ^[2]. When his father refused to sanction an artistic career, Manet attempted the alternative of a naval life. He failed the entrance examination for the naval college, sailed to Rio de Janeiro in 1848 as an apprentice pilot aboard a training vessel, and failed the examination again on his return ^[1].

Faced with these results, Auguste Manet relented. In 1850 the eighteen year old entered the studio of Thomas Couture, a respected academic painter, where he remained for six years. The relationship was quarrelsome: Manet chafed at studio conventions and preferred copying old masters at the Louvre, and he traveled to Holland, Italy, Germany, and Austria to study Velazquez, Titian, and Frans Hals at first hand ^[2].

Manet opened his own studio in 1856 and set out to win recognition through the official Paris Salon, the annual state exhibition that made and unmade reputations. His early submissions met mixed fortunes. The Absinthe Drinker, a somber picture of a Paris ragpicker, was rejected in 1859, but The Spanish Singer earned an honorable mention at the Salon of 1861 and drew praise from the poet Theophile Gautier ^[1].

The decisive rupture came in 1863. That year the Salon jury turned away an unusually large number of works, and Emperor Napoleon III authorized a separate exhibition of the refused pictures, the Salon des Refuses. There Manet showed Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, a large canvas depicting a nude woman picnicking beside two fully dressed men in contemporary clothes ^[3]. The painting borrowed its composition from Renaissance sources, yet its modern dress, flat lighting, and unidealized nude struck critics as an affront. Crowds came to jeer, and Manet became the most talked about painter in Paris almost overnight.

Two years later the scandal repeated itself on a larger scale. Olympia, painted in 1863 and shown at the Salon of 1865, presented a reclining nude modeled on Titian's Venus of Urbino, but the woman, posed by Victorine Meurent, gazed directly at the viewer with the unmistakable attributes of a Parisian courtesan ^[3]. Reviewers attacked the picture in unusually violent language, and guards were reportedly needed to protect it. The writer Emile Zola came to Manet's defense in print in 1866 and 1867, arguing that the painter's directness and handling would outlast the mockery ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Edouard Manet in the history of art usually receives the same answer: the painter who made modern life a serious subject. His achievements rest less on official honors, which came late and sparingly, than on a body of work that changed what ambitious painting looked like. He abandoned the smooth gradations of academic technique for broad, visible brushwork, strong contrasts of light and dark, and compositions influenced by Spanish painting and Japanese prints ^[2].

Among Edouard Manet achievements the range of subjects is striking. He painted street singers, beggars, bullfights, racecourses, cafe interiors, and portraits of writers and musicians. The Execution of Emperor Maximilian, produced in several versions between 1867 and 1869, addressed a contemporary political catastrophe, the shooting of the French backed emperor of Mexico, and French authorities blocked its public exhibition ^[1]. Music in the Tuileries, The Fifer, and A Bar at the Folies Bergere each rethought a familiar genre in plainly modern terms.

Manet also shaped painting through the artists he drew around him. In the late 1860s he became the central figure of the group that met at the Cafe Guerbois in the Batignolles quarter, a circle including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and the critic Zola ^[5]. The younger painters absorbed his commitment to contemporary subjects and free handling, and in the 1870s, working beside Monet at Argenteuil, Manet in turn lightened his palette and painted outdoors, adopting elements of the Impressionist manner while declining every invitation to exhibit in the group's independent shows ^[3]. He kept his hopes fixed on the Salon, which he called the true field of battle.

In 1863, the same year as his Salon des Refuses scandal, Manet married Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch pianist who had entered the household years earlier as piano teacher to the Manet brothers ^[1]. Suzanne had a son, Leon Koella Leenhoff, born in 1852, whose paternity has never been settled; scholars have proposed both Edouard and his father Auguste as the boy's father. Leon was raised in the household as Suzanne's younger brother and posed for several of Manet's paintings, including Boy Carrying a Sword ^[2].

Manet's circle mixed painters and writers. He was close to the poet Charles Baudelaire, whose call for a painter of modern life matched Manet's ambitions, and later to Stephane Mallarme, whose poetry he illustrated ^[4]. The painter Berthe Morisot met Manet in 1868, modeled for works such as The Balcony, and in 1874 married his younger brother Eugene, binding the two artists' families together ^[5].

During the Franco Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 Manet sent his family out of Paris and served in the National Guard during the Prussian siege of the capital ^[1]. Urbane, sharp tongued, and fond of cafe society, he cut a paradoxical figure: a well dressed bourgeois who craved official approval yet produced the most contested pictures of his generation.

Recognition arrived slowly in Manet's final decade. The Salon of 1873 accepted Le Bon Bock, a genial portrait of an engraver with a beer glass, and the picture proved a popular success ^[1]. In 1881 the Salon awarded him a second class medal, which freed his future submissions from jury review, and in December of that year, through his friend Antonin Proust, then minister of fine arts, he was named a chevalier of the Legion d'honneur ^[3].

By then his health was collapsing. From the late 1870s Manet suffered from locomotor ataxia, a progressive loss of coordination associated with syphilis, which brought severe pain and made standing at the easel difficult ^[2]. He spent long periods resting outside Paris and turned increasingly to small still lifes of flowers and fruit, and to pastel portraits that demanded less physical effort.

He nonetheless completed one final large statement. A Bar at the Folies Bergere, shown at the Salon of 1882, depicts a barmaid facing the viewer before a mirror whose reflection refuses to line up logically, a last meditation on spectacle and modern loneliness ^[6]. In April 1883 gangrene forced the amputation of his left leg. Edouard Manet died in the 8th arrondissement of Paris on April 30, 1883, at the age of fifty one, and was buried at Passy Cemetery ^[1].

Manet's reputation rose steadily after his death. A memorial exhibition at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1884 gathered his work, and in 1890 a public subscription organized by Monet purchased Olympia for the French state; the painting entered the Louvre in 1907 and now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay along with Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe ^[3]. Museums from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Courtauld Gallery, home of A Bar at the Folies Bergere, hold major examples of his roughly 430 oil paintings ^[6].

Historians commonly treat him as the hinge between Realism and Impressionism and, more broadly, as a founder of modern art. His insistence that painting acknowledge its own flatness and facture, his quotation of old masters in contemporary settings, and his refusal to moralize his subjects influenced artists from the Impressionists to Picasso, whose variations on Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe occupied him in the early 1960s ^[2].

The basic Edouard Manet facts, two public scandals, a late medal, and a short life, hardly explain the scale of that influence. What endured was a way of seeing: the conviction that a barmaid, a picnic, or an execution reported in the newspapers deserved the seriousness once reserved for gods and kings. In that sense the argument Zola made in 1866, that Manet's place in the Louvre was assured, proved simply accurate ^[4].