EDOARD MANET
(1832-1883)

BIOGRAPHY

Born into a bourgeoisie household in Paris, France, in 1832, Edouard Manet was fascinated by painting at a young age. His parents disapproved of his interest, but he eventually went to art school and studied the old masters in Europe. Manet's most famous works include "The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia." Manet led the French transition from realism to impressionism. By the time of his death, in 1883, he was a respected revolutionary artist.
Édouard Manet was the most important and influential artist to have heeded poet Charles Baudelaire's call to artists to become painters of modern life. Manet had an upper-class upbringing, but also led a bohemian life, and was driven to scandalize the French Salon public with his disregard for academic conventions and his strikingly modern images of urban life. He has long been associated with the Impressionists; he was certainly an important influence on them and he learned much from them himself. However, in recent years critics have acknowledged that he also learned from the Realism and Naturalism of his French contemporaries, and even from seventeenth century Spanish painting. This twin interest in Old Masters and contemporary Realism gave him the crucial foundation for his revolutionary approach.
Manet's modernity lies above all in his eagerness to update older genres of painting by injecting new content or by altering the conventional elements. He did so with an acute sensitivity to historical tradition and contemporary reality. This was also undoubtedly the root cause of many of the scandals he provoked.
He is credited with popularizing the technique of alla prima painting. Rather than build up colors in layers, Manet would immediately lay down the hue that most closely matched the final effect he sought. The approach came to be used widely by the Impressionists, who found it perfectly suited to the pressures of capturing effects of light and atmosphere whilst painting outdoors.
His loose handling of paint, and his schematic rendering of volumes, led to areas of "flatness" in his pictures. In the artist's day, this flatness may have suggested popular posters or the artifice of painting - as opposed to its realism. Today, critics see this quality as the first example of "flatness" in modern art.

The Impressionism

Impressionism can be considered the first distinctly modern movement in painting. Developing in Paris in the 1860s, its influence spread throughout Europe and eventually the United States. Its originators were artists who rejected the official, government-sanctioned exhibitions, or salons, and were consequently shunned by powerful academic art institutions. In turning away from the fine finish and detail to which most artists of their day aspired, the Impressionists aimed to capture the momentary, sensory effect of a scene - the impression objects made on the eye in a fleeting instant. To achieve this effect, many Impressionist artists moved from the studio to the streets and countryside, painting en plein air.

In 1863, at the official salon, the all-important event of the art world, a large number of artists were not allowed to participate, leading to public outcry. The same year, the Salon des Refusés was formed in response to allow the exhibition of works by artists who had previously been refused entrance to the official salon. Some of the exhibitors were Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, and the early iconoclast Édouard Manet. Although promoted by authorities and sanctioned by Emperor Napoleon III, the 1863 exhibition caused a scandal, due largely to the unconventional themes and styles of works such as Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863), which featured clothed men and nude women enjoying an afternoon picnic.
In 1884, another influencial exhibition started up by the Société des Artistes Indépendants which included many Impressionists. The Société rebelled against the policies of the conservative juries of Paris and would later come to be a focal point for avant-garde activity and a driving force for Modernism in Paris.

Édouard Manet was among the first and most important innovators to emerge in the public exhibition scene in Paris. Although he grew up in admiration of the Old Masters, he began to incorporate an innovative, looser painting style and brighter palette in the early 1860s. He also started to focus on images of everyday life, such as scenes in cafes, boudoirs, and out in the street. His anti-academic style and quintessentially modern subject matter soon attracted the attention of artists on the fringes and influenced a new type of painting that would diverge from the standards of the official salon.
toward overbearing academic standards of fine art, established at the time by the influential Paris salon. The movement gained its name after the hostile French critic Louis Leroy, reviewing the first major Impressionist exhibition, seized on the title of Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise (1873), and accused the group of painting nothing but impressions. The Impressionists embraced the moniker, though they also referred to themselves as the "Independents," referring to the subversive principles of the Société des Artistes Indépendants and the group's efforts to detach itself from academic artistic conventions. Although the styles practiced by the Impressionists varied considerably (and in fact not all of the artists would accept Leroy's title), they were bound together by a common interest in the representation of visual perception, based in fleeting optical impressions, and the focus on ephemeral moments of modern life.