Manet, Édouard

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MANET, ÉDOUARD

MANET, ÉDOUARD (1832–1883), French realist painter.

Édouard Manet was born on 23 January 1832, in Paris. His father, Auguste Manet, began his career in the French Ministry of Justice and was, for sixteen years, a civil judge for the Tribunal de la Première Instance, the entry-level court in Paris. Manet's mother, born Eugénie-Désirée Fournier, was the daughter of the vice-consul of France in Sweden, as well as the goddaughter of the king of Sweden, the French-born Jean Baptiste Bernadotte (r. as Charles XIV John, 1818–1844). Both parents were descendents from an aristocratic lineage of so-called gens de robe (nobility acquired through venal offices such as regional treasurer). Auguste's father and grandfather were both mayors of the town of Gennevilliers, a town north of Paris where the Manets owned extensive property, and where Manet spent family vacations. The income from this property guaranteed that Manet and his family remained extremely comfortable.

The young Manet was an indifferent student whose interest in drawing had been aided and encouraged by his maternal uncle Edmond Fournier, who lived with the Manets until Édouard was sixteen. It was determined that a naval career would be appropriate for him, and after Manet failed his entrance exam, he undertook a sea voyage to South America in 1848–1849 as a qualification for naval service. By the time of his return to Paris, however, Manet was determined to study painting, and he enrolled in the studio of Thomas Couture (1815–1879) in Paris, where he remained for six years. Couture was a respected teacher who earned official recognition; he had other illustrious pupils such as Pierre-Cecil Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898). However, it is significant that Manet, whose career would be marked by dramatic breaks with the art establishment of his time, chose not to study at the official art school of the Academy, the École des Beaux-Arts, sited across the Rue des Petits-Augustins in Paris from the house of Manet's birth.

In 1859, Manet submitted his first entry to the Salon exhibition juried by members of the French Academy, and not surprisingly, it was rejected. The Absinthe Drinker (1858–1859) was a sketchy but full-length representation of a homeless drunkard—a type known in popular prints and legends of the chiffonnier

or ragpicker, and found on the outskirts of Paris. The chiffonnier was also notorious, as the character had figured in several poems in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, which was published in 1857 and immediately put on trial for offending public morality. (Baudelaire was found guilty and fined; the court ordered six poems removed from the edition.) Manet and Baudelaire became friends, and Manet's early work frequently featured the kinds of urban characters—gypsies, ragpickers, street entertainers, prostitutes—that populate the poems of Baudelaire.

Although Manet shocked the public with his representations of wayward Baudelairean types, he was equally at home painting his fashionable and well-to-do friends. Until the late 1860s, Manet frequently painted the working poor, or at least models posing as such types, as well as a number of well-known artists, musicians, and writers who are also recognizable figures in his paintings. In a single painting, Music in the Tuileries Gardens of 1862, one can identify the critic Zacharie Astruc (1833–1907), painter Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), poet Théophile Gautier (1811–1872), composer Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), collector Baron Isidore-Justin-Severin Taylor (1789–1879), Baudelaire, and many other personages who form a cadre of the Parisian cultural elite.

In 1863, more than half of the over 5,000 submissions to the Salon were rejected by the Academy, and there was an outcry from the artists that the judging had been harsh. Emperor Napoleon III (r. 1852–1871), in consideration of the excessive complaints, proclaimed that there would be an exhibition of the works rejected by the jury. In this unprecedented Salon des Refusés, Manet exhibited three paintings, including Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863). Entitled Le Bain (Bathing) at the exhibition, the painting was loosely based on a Venetian Renaissance idyll, but featured two men dressed in contemporary attire, one woman bathing in the river, and a nude woman—the model Victorine Meurent—gazing actively out of the painting and at the beholder. The painting bewildered critics and visitors and remains the subject of intense scholarly debate.

Although Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe shocked critics and viewers, it was in some ways insulated from the harshest of critical responses by being in the Salon des Refusés; the Academy had, after all, not accepted it for the Salon. But in 1865, it accepted Olympia (1865), a work modeled on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538). In place of the Renaissance Venus, however, Olympia featured a contemporary nude woman in jewelry and satin mules; she gazes directly out at the viewer as a black cat arches its back, and as a female servant of African descent brings in a bouquet of flowers, still in their street wrapper. The picture, with its stark lighting, abbreviated modeling, and references to prostitutes who sometimes rented jewelry and other accessories, or who accepted gifts in lieu of cash, caused an enormous scandal. More than seventy critics showered the picture with hostile commentary: a few associated the painting with Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) and Baudelaire, but most expressed utter shock at both the subject and the manner of painting.

Manet exhibited Olympia again in 1867 in an enormous, self-funded, solo exhibition near the Pont de l'Alma in Paris during the Universal Exposition. In doing so, Manet was following the lead of Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), who had erected a similar pavilion in 1855 during that world's fair, and did so again in 1867. The novelist and journalist É mile Zola (1840–1902) would be one of Olympia's defenders in 1867. In a pamphlet and in his published reviews, he asked viewers to look only at Manet's bold manner of painting rather than at the subject matter.

Manet's work in the 1870s took on a lighter palette, and like the impressionists who were inspired by his example, frequently featured the subject matter of modernity in Paris: cafés, fashionable men and women, the opera ball, conservatories. For instance in The Railroad (1873), Manet's model Victorine Meurent and a young girl pose near the Pont de l'Europe and the Gare St.-Lazare—landmarks of a Parisian neighborhood of rapid growth and prominence in the 1870s. In Argenteuil, Les Canotiers (1874), a man and a woman pose on a river dock in a town that was becoming almost a suburb of Paris in the period. In both paintings, the woman looks away from her companion and gazes out of the painting and at the viewer. The effect is arresting in comparison with the typically tidy narratives of mid-nineteenth-century genre painting: the viewer is put into a position of thinking critically about the subject. Manet's last masterpiece, the Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), makes use of the mirror behind the bar at a glamorous café-concert that was part of the changing urban landscape of Paris in the period: the mirror is used to suggest both the complexity of the subject and the deceptiveness of the viewer's trust in fleeting appearances. Despite his friendship with many of the impressionists, especially with Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), who married Manet's brother Eugène in 1874, he never exhibited at their independent exhibitions; instead, he preferred to risk rejection from the Salon, or he exhibited at private galleries or directly from his studio.

Manet married the Dutch-born Suzanne Leenhoff, a musician and piano teacher, in 1863. The couple had no children of their own, although Suzanne was the mother of Léon Koëlla-Leenhoff, refer red to in polite society as Suzanne' syounger brother. Questions still surround the paternity of Léon. Manet probably suffered from syphilis, and his health worsened considerably by 1880. His left leg was amputated in 1883, and he died shortly after, in Paris.

Édouard Manet has been considered by many critics and historians as the first modernist artist; that is, the first artist to impart a particular consciousness of modernity to subjects drawn from modern life, at a time when most artists still depended on recognized subjects from classical history and mythology. In Manet's work, this awareness of the particularity of the present moment is at times critical, and at times celebratory; indeed, many see it as crucial to modernism that the artist's attitude somehow oscillates between the two or even embraces both stances. As Manet gained notoriety by drawing on modern subjects and by painting them in a more sketchlike and abstract way than his contemporaries, he has been seen as paving the way for the developments in abstractions and modernism that followed, from impressionism to cubism and on into twentieth-century nonrepresentational art. Because of the complex nature of his subjects, the boldness of his style, and his continued

interest in Old Master compositions, art historians and commentators from a wide variety of perspectives, from formalism to Marxism, from feminism to psychoanalysis, continue to debate ways of seeing Manet, but agree on his fundamental importance for the history of modern art.