Édouard Manet

Édouard Manet: A Mania for Seeing in Blocks

When *Olympia* went up at the Paris Salon in 1865, the administration had to post guards. According to Manet's friend Antonin Proust, only those precautions "prevented the painting being punctured and torn" — visitors were arriving with the intention of attacking a picture. What they were looking at was a naked woman on a bed, staring back. Two years earlier another Manet canvas had been laughed out of the Salon des Refusés, one critic sneering that it looked painted with a floor mop. Within twenty years he would be called the father of modern art, and he would be dead at fifty-one with one foot amputated.

A Judge's Son Who Failed the Navy

He was born in Paris on 23 January 1832 into money and connections. His father, Auguste Manet, was a French judge who expected his son to read law. His mother, Eugénie-Desiree Fournier, was a diplomat's daughter and goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince Charles Bernadotte. Two younger brothers followed, Eugène in 1833 and Gustave in 1835.

Édouard wanted neither law nor the navy, though he tried the latter, failing the entrance examination twice. It was his uncle Edmond Fournier who took him to the Louvre and made an artist of him by attrition. From 1850 to 1856 he trained under Thomas Couture, an academic painter with one unorthodox conviction — that a painter should address contemporary life. Manet would take that conviction much further than his teacher intended, and abandon almost everything else Couture taught him.

The Spanish Detour

Between 1853 and 1856 he travelled to Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and what stuck were the Dutchman Frans Hals and the Spaniards Velázquez and Goya. From them he took a way of putting paint down — direct, loaded, visible, alive on the surface — that had nothing to do with the invisible layered glazing of the French academy. He opened his own studio in 1856 and abandoned Couture's method for *alla prima* painting: opaque colour laid straight onto a light ground in one pass, no underdrawing showing through, no gradual build. Every Impressionist after him would use it.

His 1861 *The Spanish Singer* announced the change and impressed even hostile critics. One contemporary described a "strange new fashion" that "caused many painters' eyes to open and their jaws to drop."

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1863: The Luncheon

*Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe*, two metres by two and a half, was rejected by the Salon jury and shown instead at the Salon des Refusés, the alternative exhibition Napoleon III improvised to defuse public anger at the jury's severity. It became, in the Musée d'Orsay's words, "the principal attraction, generating both laughter and scandal."

The offence was structural. A naked woman sits on the grass with two fully dressed men, and there is no myth, no allegory, no classical alibi to excuse her nakedness — Manet drily called the arrangement *la partie carrée*. Worse, he had lifted his composition from unimpeachable sources: Titian's *Concert champêtre*, then attributed to Giorgione, and Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving after Raphael's *Judgement of Paris*. The old masters had done the same thing; only the costume had changed. The technique compounded the insult. Manet abandoned, as the Orsay puts it, "the usual subtle gradations in favour of brutal contrasts," flattening his figures until critics accused him of a "mania for seeing in blocks," and left the background sketchy, without depth or proper perspective. The museum's verdict is unequivocal: this is "the departure point for Modern Art."

Olympia

*Olympia*, painted the same year and shown in 1865, took the argument further. The reclining nude was a canonical subject; Manet's version was recognisably a prostitute, self-possessed, accessorised, unbothered, meeting the viewer's eye instead of averting it. The audience understood exactly what it was being accused of. Both pictures were modelled by Victorine Meurent, who became his favourite sitter and reappears in *The Railway* in 1873.

Manet's private life ran along equally unofficial lines. After his father's death in 1862 he married Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch piano teacher who had worked in the household; her son Léon Koëlla Leenhoff, whose paternity has never been settled, posed for Manet eighteen times between 1859 and 1872, most memorably in *Boy Carrying a Sword* (1861).

Among the Impressionists, Not of Them

Through Berthe Morisot he came to know Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne and Pissarro. They regarded him as the leader of the new painting. He declined the role. Manet never exhibited in an Impressionist show, insisting instead on the official Salon — the institution that had humiliated him — because official recognition was the only kind he wanted. Shut out of the 1867 International Exhibition, he spent his own money mounting a private one rather than join the independents.

Morisot mattered to him more than any of them. Their friendship began in 1868, she persuaded him to try painting outdoors, and the many portraits he made of her before she married his brother Eugène in 1874 have fuelled a century of speculation about repressed feeling. She pushed his palette lighter. He extended history painting into the present with *The Battle of the Kearsarge and the Alabama* (1864) and several versions of the *Execution of Emperor Maximilian* (1867–69), whose lithographs the French state banned.

The Bar, and the Amputation

*A Bar at the Folies-Bergère* (1882) was his last major painting, and its impossible mirror — a reflection that cannot geometrically be where it is — remains the most argued-over passage in nineteenth-century art. By then he was very ill. Severe leg pain and partial paralysis in his mid-forties he mistook for a circulatory problem, taking hydrotherapy near Meudon in 1879; the real cause was locomotor ataxia, a late complication of syphilis. He shrank his ambitions to what he could still reach: small still lifes of fruit and vegetables, then twenty paintings of flowers in glass vases, the last finished in March 1883. In April, gangrene forced the amputation of his left foot. He died eleven days later, on 30 April 1883, and was buried at Passy. He left 430 oil paintings, 89 pastels and more than 400 works on paper.

Why Édouard Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Manet through a single specific insight, and it is worth stating exactly. Before him, European painting worked to disguise itself: gradations of tone built an illusion of rounded bodies in deep space, and the surface was supposed to disappear. Manet declined to disguise anything. He compressed tonal transitions into abrupt edges, let the flatness of the canvas stay flat, and made the paint visible as paint — which is why a hostile critic reached for "a mania for seeing in blocks," an accurate description mistaken for an insult. Having done that, he pointed the technique at contemporary Paris and its unmentionable social facts. Art historian Beatrice Farwell records that he is "universally regarded as the Father of Modernism," credits him with being "among the first to take serious risks with the public," and notes that he shared with Degas "the establishment of modern urban life as acceptable material for high art." Émile Zola, defending him in 1867, put his finger on the quality: "We are not accustomed to seeing such simple and direct translations of reality."

The counter-case deserves airing. Manet's compositions were frequently borrowed wholesale from Raphael, Titian and Velázquez; his originality lay in the handling, not the invention, and his contemporaries who called *Le Déjeuner* incompetent were not simply philistines — the background genuinely fails as illusionistic space, whether by intention or by limitation, and the sources let us call it either. Nor was he a brave outsider by temperament. He spent his career courting the Salon and refusing solidarity with the painters who admired him most, chasing the establishment's approval to the end. "Father of Modernism" is a title conferred retrospectively by historians who needed a starting line; Manet himself was trying to be a great Salon painter, and became something else by failing at it interestingly.

Legacy

Baudelaire and Mallarmé championed him while the public jeered, which is the usual arrangement. *Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe* and *Olympia* now hang in the Musée d'Orsay as the pictures every subsequent account of modern painting has to begin with, and the guards no longer have anything to do. The two-decade career that produced them ran from 1861 to 1883, which is short. Almost everything painted since has been made in its shadow.