Tour: Manet and His Influence
Overview

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It is hard to image a time when Paris was without broad, tree-lined streets or when the life of the city did not interest French artists. Yet this was the case in 1850 when Edouard Manet began to study painting. Young artists could expect to succeed only through the official Academy exhibitions known as Salons, whose conservative juries favored biblical and mythological themes and a polished technique. Within twenty-five years, however, both Paris and painting had a new look. Urban renovations had opened the wide avenues and parks we know today, and painting was transformed when artists abandoned the transparent glazes and blended brushtrokes of the past and turned their attention to life around them. Contemporary urban subjects and a bold style, which offered paint on the canvas as something to be admired in itself, gave their art a strong new sense of the present.

More than in his teacher's studio, Manet learned to paint in the Louvre by studying old masters. He was particularly impressed by Velázquez, contrasting his vivid brushwork with the "stews and gravies" of academic style. Manet began to develop a freer manner, creating form not through a gradual blending of tones but with discrete areas of color side by side. He drew on the old masters for structure, often incorporating their motifs but giving them a modern cast.

Several artists had begun to challenge the stale conventions of the Academy when Manet's Olympia (now at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was accepted for the Salon in 1865. Never had a work caused such scandal. Critics advised pregnant women to avoid the picture, and it was rehung to thwart vandals. Viewers were not used to the painting's flat space and shallow volumes. To many, Manet's "color patches" appeared unfinished. Even more shocking was the frank honesty of his courtesan: it was her boldness, not her nudity, that offended. Her languid pose copied a Titian Venus, but Manet did not cloak her with mythology. She is not a remote goddess but emphatically in the present, easily recognized among the demimonde of prostitutes and dancehalls. In Olympia's steady gaze there is no apology for sensuality and, for uncomfortable viewers, no escaping her "reality."

Manet's succès de scandale made him a leader of the avant-garde. In the evenings at the Café Guerbois, near his studio, he was joined by writers and artists, including Monet, Bazille, and others who would go on to organize the first impressionist exhibition. Manet's embrace of what the poet Charles Baudelaire termed the "heroism of modern life" and his bold manner with paint inspired the future impressionists, though Manet never exhibited with them.

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Events in Manet's Time

1848	Louis Phillipe abdicates; Louis-Napoléon elected President
1851	First edition of The New York Times
1852	Louis-Napoléon proclaims himself Emperor Napoléon III (Second Empire)
1853	Baron Haussmann begins renovations of Paris
1855	Courbet presents Pavilon du Réalisme
1856	A. F. Nadar takes the first aerial photographs from a balloon above Paris
1857	Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal
	Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary
1859	Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species
1862	Sarah Bernhardt debuts
1863	Emancipation Proclamation
	death of Delacroix
	Works by Manet and Whistler exhibited at the Salon des Refusés
1864	Louis Pasteur develops the pasteurization process
1866	Jacques Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne
1867	Emperor Maximilian is executed in Mexico
	death of Ingres
	Japanese art gets wide exposure at the Exposition Universelle
1870	French defeated in the Franco-Prussian War after four-month siege of Paris
	death of Bazille
1871	Two-month rule of the Commune ends violently; the Republic restored
	Arthur Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer
1872	Emile Zola's La Curée
1874	First impressionist exhibition

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