Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet (1832–1883) was born in Paris to a senior government official and a diplomat's daughter — bourgeois comfort that gave him independence and created painful tension with his rejection by the Salon. After six years in Thomas Couture's studio and extensive travel through Europe studying Velázquez, Hals, and Titian, Manet developed a radical pictorial style that provoked scandal at nearly every exhibition. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) was rejected by the Salon and shown at the Salon des Refusés, where it caused uproar for placing a naked woman casually among clothed men in a modern setting. Olympia (1865), accepted by the Salon, caused even greater scandal — a naked woman staring directly and unapologetically at the viewer, her gaze refusing the passivity expected of nude subjects. Despite these provocations, Manet himself craved official recognition; he sought Salon acceptance his entire career and refused to exhibit in the Impressionist shows, though he was the movement's acknowledged spiritual father. His friendship with Monet in the early 1870s briefly introduced plein-air color into his work, but he always returned to the studio. In his final decade he turned to small intimate interiors, a single model, and still life, producing Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) — an enigmatic masterpiece of modern alienation. Afflicted with locomotor ataxia, he had his left leg amputated in April 1883 and died eleven days later, aged 51, at the height of his powers.

Manet's pictorial language was built on the Old Masters — he consciously quoted and transformed Raphael, Velázquez, Titian, and Goya. His most radical innovation was the elimination of mid-tones: he moved directly from light to shadow without the gradual transitions (sfumato, chiaroscuro) that traditional painting used to create three-dimensional illusion. This gave his figures a flat, poster-like quality that contemporary critics found crude and unfinished. His brushwork is confident and summary, recording form with the minimum number of marks. He was fascinated by black — he used it with an authority that later French painters (especially Matisse) explicitly admired. His light is cool and even, northern in character despite his Mediterranean subjects.

Manet is the pivotal figure in the transition from the Old Masters to modern art. His elimination of tonal gradation and his frank, non-narrative treatment of modern subjects broke the implicit contract between painting and illusion that had held since the Renaissance. Every major development in French painting after 1865 — Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism — registers his influence. Cézanne, who rarely acknowledged debts, called him 'the first in the decadence of our art,' meaning it as the highest praise. He is the painter from whom modernism descends most directly.