Édouard Manet

French painter

• Born: January 23, 1832
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: April 30, 1883
• Place of death: Paris, France

In a relatively short career, Manet challenged the conventions of European art by creating a body of paintings, drawings, and etchings manifesting novel approaches both to form and to content. His works and his career were the focal points of the struggle for artistic independence waged by a generation of French artists and writers during the mid-nineteenth century.

Early Life

Édouard Manet (mah-nay) was born in Paris at 5 rue de Grands Augustins, a street bordering the Seine, not far from the Cathedral of Nôtre Dame. His father, Auguste Manet, was a high official in the Ministry of Justice. At the time of Édouard’s birth, his mother, Eugénie-Désirée Manet, was twenty years old, fourteen years her husband’s junior. The family was prosperous from the beginning, and in keeping with its social status Eugénie Manet held twice-weekly receptions for the influential associates of her husband; Auguste, nevertheless, preferred the company of scholars and ecclesiastics to that of his colleagues.

From the ages of six to eight, Manet attended the Institut Poiloup in Vaugirard; in his twelfth year, he began studies at a boarding school, the Collège Rollin, where he befriended Antonin Proust, who later wrote about his childhood friend. During these school years, Manet and Proust frequently visited the Louvre, accompanied by the former’s maternal uncle, Captain Édouard Fournier, who encouraged his nephew’s interest in art by paying for drawing lessons.

Though Édouard excelled at drawing and soon expressed his wish to follow an artistic career, Auguste Manet’s ambition for his eldest son was that he become a lawyer (Édouard’s brothers, Eugène and Gustave, born in 1833 and 1835, were to become civil servants). Because his teachers at the Collège Rollin had found him “distracted” and “slightly frivolous,” in July, 1848, Auguste Manet proposed a compromise in which Édouard would apply to the École Navale, or naval school. Failing the entrance examination, he embarked on a training ship instead, sailing on December 8 for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is reported to have found the cruise boring; after his return to France in June, 1849, having again failed the entrance examination, he was finally allowed to study for an artistic career. By January of 1850, he had registered as an art student to copy paintings in the Louvre, and in September he and Antonin Proust joined the studio of Thomas Couture, a noted painter of innovative, though not revolutionary, sympathies.

Soon after his return from the sea voyage, Édouard and his brother Eugène began to take piano lessons from a young Dutch woman, Suzanne Leenhoff. It seems clear that his association with Suzanne quickly blossomed into love, and when she became pregnant in the spring of 1851, Manet, who was still required to obtain his father’s permission to go out at night, succeeded in keeping his liaison a secret from him. The child born to Suzanne Leenhoff was registered as the son of a probably fictitious Koëlla but was presented socially as Suzanne’s younger brother, Léon. It was not until 1863, more than a year after the death of Auguste Manet, that Suzanne Leenhoff and Manet were married.

Living in his parents’ home, and with their financial support for his study of art, Manet continued working at the studio of Couture during the early 1850’s. His relationship with his teacher was frequently stormy, and Manet acquired a reputation as a rebellious pupil, but Couture was in many ways a good choice of teacher. He represented a middle ground between the academic side of French art, with its often-rigid adherence to tradition, and the experimental, individualistic tendencies of artists such as Honoré Daumier and Gustave Courbet. Manet was, by nature, a somewhat conservative personality—he was always well dressed, even fashionable, and he enjoyed the civil pleasures of bourgeois life—but as an artist he challenged from the outset many of the conventions of painting, even as he learned from the masters of the past.

Life’s Work

After leaving Couture’s studio in 1856, Manet occasionally brought his works to the master for criticism, a circumstance that must have been more than a polite gesture. Manet’s interest in tradition was profound, but his studies of the past were undertaken to achieve a personal understanding of the old masters rather than to emulate their styles. Like many young Parisian artists, Manet often copied paintings in the Louvre and elsewhere. He was particularly attracted to Spanish masters such as Diego Velázquez but also copied works by Peter Paul Rubens and Eugène Delacroix, from whom he personally requested permission to copy The Barque of Dante.

Equally important for Manet’s future as an artist, however, was his devotion to recording the life of the Paris boulevards, where he daily observed the activities of all levels of society. Despite his comfortable family background, Manet had an instinctive appreciation for the urban poor, and in 1859 he submitted his painting The Absinthe Drinker to the Salon, a biennial exhibition of art that was judged by the established painters of the day. The Absinthe Drinker is based in part upon Manet’s observation of a ragpicker named Collardet, part of a legion of characters who were increasingly visible as a result of the redevelopment of Paris begun in 1853 under the direction of Baron Eugène Hausmann. Although such a subject was considered appropriate for the popular press, it was thought too vulgar for the Salon, and Manet’s painting was rejected. In 1861, however, two of his works were accepted into the exhibition; one of them, The Spanish Singer , received an honorable mention.

At this time in his career, Manet’s art had been noticed appreciatively by a few knowledgeable critics, but his audience was comparatively small. An event in 1863 changed not only Manet’s relationship to the public but also that of a generation of French artists. This was the Salon des Refusés, an exhibition held by order of Emperor Napoleon III , which was to include all of the work rejected by the jury from the regular Salon of 1863. The emperor’s decree invited the public to be the final judge of the quality of the art rejected, and the public responded with tumultuous curiosity and derision.

Manet’s principal submission, Déjeuner sur l’herbe (luncheon on the grass), while appreciated by a discerning few, was taken by many visitors to the exhibition to be the flagship of artistic revolt. The work shows a nude woman with two fashionably dressed men in a modern parklike setting, and although the painting is based upon various historical prototypes, its broad, painterly technique and contemporary setting seem intended to challenge the public’s artistic taste and its moral standards. Déjeuner sur l’herbe marks the beginning of a widespread but often-hostile interest in the dissident claims of modern art; the polarization of the art world into “academics” and the “avant-garde” had begun.

In Manet’s paintings of the early 1860’s, one sees the influence of his friend the poet Charles Baudelaire . In an essay written years earlier, Baudelaire had called for an art based upon “the heroism of modern life” that would show “how great and how poetic we are with our neckties and our varnished boots.” Manet’s emphasis on clothes, costume, fashion, and other aspects of everyday life, rather than giving a trivial view of society, shows urban life as a complex network of signs that require a skilled interpreter. The emergence of the city as the fulcrum of modern culture is one of the implicit themes of Manet’s art, though this is seen more often in his graphic works than in his paintings.

Manet caused another public outcry at the Salon of 1865 with his Olympia , which depicts a nude courtesan, attended by a black servant and a cat, looking impudently toward the viewer. One critic advised that “women on the point of giving birth and proper young girls would be well-advised to flee this spectacle,” and two guards were stationed by the painting, which had already been removed to an obscure and dishonorable location within the immense exhibition. The audacity of Olympia far outdistanced that of Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and in addition to suffering criticism on account of the theme, Manet came under attack for the structure and technique of the painting. Courbet said that it looked flat, like a playing card, and a newspaper critic accused Manet of “an almost childish ignorance of the fundamentals of drawing.”

It is clear that Manet, though not systematically courting the disfavor of the public, was willing to suffer incomprehension both of his treatment of subjects and of his style. He was fully capable of painting appealing subjects in a more traditional manner, but for complex reasons he ruled out forms of compromise that might have gained for him a higher level of public esteem. He subsequently painted popular pictures, such as The Good Glass of Beer (1873), and though he wished for broad acceptance of his art he was never inclined to pursue it.

In many of his works of the 1870’s Manet sought an increasing naturalism by emphasizing lighter colors and more varied surfaces. In paintings made in 1874 at Argenteuil, a few miles northwest of Paris, Manet drew close to the group that became known that year as the Impressionists. He borrowed the light and color of his younger friends Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but his canvases are more deliberately composed and are much less extraverted than theirs of the same period. Some critics who had been sympathetic to Manet’s work, including the novelist Émile Zola, considered Manet’s technical gifts unequal to his ambition of painting in the open air; others recognized that these works were, in part, the result of exacting formal experimentation. In a famous remark made in 1890, the painter Maurice Denis asserted that

a painting—before it is a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

To a significant extent, Manet’s work of the 1870’s is a precocious fulfillment of this concept, particularly in a work such as The Rue Mosnier with Pavers (1878), which brings the spontaneous brushwork, subtle coloration, light, and movement of the Argenteuil paintings back to the streets of Paris. Manet had by this time developed fully a means of drawing with strokes of paint that both represents objects in space and unifies the painting as an assemblage of shapes and colors.

In late 1878, Manet began to have trouble with his leg, and by September of the following year he was seeking treatment for it. The precise nature of his ailment has never been specified, but it seems likely that he was suffering from the advanced stages of a syphilitic infection contracted in his youth. During his last three years, he was in pain, and small drawings and oil paintings began to take the place of larger works, reflecting his diminished mobility.

There are a number of fine portraits and still lifes dating from 1880 through 1882, and there is also one major subject painting, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère . This work, which is about three feet high by four feet wide, is widely considered to be one of Manet’s finest works. It shows a barmaid at the celebrated Paris “café-concert,” standing behind a marble counter on which have been placed bottles of ale and champagne, a compote with mandarin oranges, and a glass holding two pale roses. Behind the melancholy and distracted young woman, a mirror reflects a brightly lit crowd that seems unaware of a trapeze artist whose green-slippered feet are whimsically shown in the upper left-hand corner of the painting. There are many subtle, calculated ambiguities concerning things viewed either directly or in reflection.

Manet seems to have decided, at the end of an artistic career often criticized for a lack of psychological insight, to address the human element in one final, haunting but luminous canvas. In early April, 1883, as Manet’s health precipitously declined, he briefly considered taking lessons in miniature painting from a friend, but by April 20 his condition required that his left leg be amputated, and on April 30 he died.

Significance

Édouard Manet has been celebrated as a rebellious artist who was rejected by his own time; however, such a stereotyping of his career ignores not only the complexities of his personality and artistic production but also the varieties of response that his work elicited from his contemporaries and from the generation that followed. For years, many critics and art historians fostered the notion of a noble, progressive lineage of art that was engaged in perpetual conflict with a defensive, static “establishment” art supported by reactionary social forces; Manet, quite understandably, was installed as the great progenitor of the progressive trend. As the discipline of art history established a broader foundation of fact and methodology during the first half of the twentieth century and the issues of mid- and late-nineteenth century art became both clearer and more intricate, the assessment of Manet’s achievement in particular came to be seen more as a problem in defining the changing relationship of artists and audiences than of arriving at objectively valid, stabilized conclusions about his paintings.

Manet was somewhat conservative by temperament, but he was also creatively independent. Though many of his images involved adaptations of ideas and images borrowed from the past, and thus appealed to aspects of public taste, other elements of his work were vibrantly novel and challenged both the visual imagination and social consciousness of his contemporaries. These contrasting elements in Manet dictated that he could not rely on conventional taste to provide him with a constituency; his success was one that might be earned only by tremendous labor and courage. Finally, it was a largely posthumous success.

In his later career, Manet frequently despaired at the inconsistency with which his work was received, believing, perhaps somewhat naïvely, that it should suffice for an artist to present sincere work. Like many of his contemporaries, he hoped that the public would be able to recognize and value sincerity and commitment and would reward it at least as strongly as virtuosity and predictability. In hoping for this kind of relationship with an ever-expanding mass audience, Manet presents to history a modernity of outlook in keeping with the adventurousness of his finest paintings.

Bibliography

Adler, Kathleen. Manet. Oxford, England: Phaidon Press, 1986. An excellent source of collateral illustrations concerning Manet’s life and times, as well as his art and its sources. The text emphasizes the eclectic nature of the artist’s work and provides an integrated view of modern scholarship concerned with Manet’s place in nineteenth century art.

Bataille, Georges. Manet. New York: Rizzoli, 1983. Françoise Cachin, in her introduction to this reprinting of Bataille’s 1955 essay, shows how the author’s view of Manet was colored by his close association with the artistic trends of his own time. Nevertheless, she concedes, Bataille’s essay has “unusual penetration and appeal.”

Blunden, Maria, and Godrey Blunden. Impressionists and Impressionism. New York: Rizzoli, 1977. Manet is accorded only his share of attention in this survey volume, but contemporary photographs and documents, many of which are seldom reproduced, vividly reveal Manet and his contemporaries. Text and images are presented in a loosely integrated but nevertheless effective manner.

Cachin, Françoise, et al. Manet: 1832-1883. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983. This large, indispensable volume was issued in connection with a major international exhibition organized to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the painter’s death. There are several fine essays, and the book is illustrated with hundreds of exemplary color and black-and-white plates, most of which are discussed in some detail by accompanying text.

Fried, Michael. Manet’s Modernism: Or, The Face of Painting in the 1860’s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Fried seeks to provide a more accurate idea of Manet’s place in art history by describing how Manet’s art was received by his contemporaries.

Mauner, George. Manet, Peintre-Philosophe: A Study of the Painter’s Themes. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975. The author is one of many who have sought to provide a corrective to a once-prevalent view of Manet as a painter obsessed with structural matters and indifferent to meaning; his scholarly arguments are involved but clearly stated. The lack of color plates does not diminish the book’s interest.

Rewald, John. The History of Impressionism. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946. Rev. ed. 1973. This masterly chronological study of the Impressionists does full justice to nine artists in addition to Manet, but Manet’s art is unquestionably the author’s touchstone. There is an excellent annotated calendar covering the years 1855-1886, as well as an extensive bibliography and an index.

Schneider, Pierre. The World of Manet, 1832-1883. New York: Time-Life Books, 1968. The popular format of this book should not be allowed to obscure the fact that it contains a wealth of information. The quality and variety of its reproductions are matched by an intelligent, readable text.

Sloane, Joseph C. “Manet.” In French Painting Between the Past and the Present: Artists, Critics, and Traditions from 1848 to 1870. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973. The author’s emphasis is upon the reaction of critics and the public to Manet’s paintings of the 1860’s, and he shows why the artist’s innovations were met with resistance. The text as well as an excellent bibliography is unrevised from the original 1951 edition.

Tucker, Paul Hayes, ed. Manet’s “Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Essays offering various interpretations of one of Manet’s best-known paintings.

Wadley, Nicholas. Manet. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967. This survey of the artist’s paintings is valuable principally for its good color plates, which are briefly annotated. A modest essay is complemented by a chronology and extensive quotations from Manet and his contemporaries.