Discover the biography of 19th-century French painter Odouard Manet who inspired many other painters who succeeded him, both for his style and for the way he represented reality.
Manet innovated by challenging traditional rendering techniques and choosing to paint the events and circumstances of his time.
- Your lunch on the Herb painting? The Lunch on the Grass.
- Exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés in Paris.
- Arouses critical hostility.
- But at the same time receives the applause and enthusiasm of a new generation of painters who would later form the core of the Impressionist movement.
The biography of Odouard Manet begins on January 23, 1832, when she was born in Paris, France, the son of Auguste Manet, a senior Justice Department official, whose mother, Eugenie-Desiree Fournier, was the daughter of a diplomat and goddaughter of the Crown Prince of Sweden.
The couple had a lot of wealth and many influential contacts, so they expected their child to choose a respectable career, preferably the right one. However, Manet’s future was to pursue a career in the humanities.
Since 1839, he has been a student at Canon Poiloup School in Vaugirard. From 1844 to 1848 he remained an intern at Rollin College. He was a discreet student, mainly because he was only interested in the special drawing course offered by the school.
Although his father wanted him to enroll in law school, Edward did not choose this fate. When his father refused to allow him to become a painter, he applied for admission to naval school, but did not pass the entrance exam.
At the age of 16 he embarked as an apprentice pilot on a transport ship and, upon his return to France in June 1849, he again attempted to enter military school, but his parents eventually gave in to his son’s tenacious determination to become a painter.
In 1850, Manet entered the workshop of the young classic Thomas Couture, where he developed a good knowledge of the technique of drawing and painting.
In 1856, after six years in Couture, Manet created a studio he shared with Albert de Balleroy, a military-themed painter, where he painted The Cherry Boy (1858), before moving to another studio where he painted The Absinthe Drinker (1859).
The same year, he made quick trips to Holland, Germany and Italy. During this time he copied paintings by Titian and Diego Velázquez at the Louvre.
Despite his realistic success, Manet began to adopt a more relaxed and impressionistic style, characterized by the use of wide brushstrokes and the incorporation of ordinary people engaged in everyday tasks in his paintings.
His paintings were populated by singers, streeters, gypsies and beggars. This unconventional accent, combined with all the knowledge of the ancient masters of painting, surprised each other and impressed each other.
Between 1862 and 1865, Manet participated in the exhibitions organized by galeria Martinet. In 1863, Manet married Suzanne Lennhoff, a Dutchwoman who had been his piano teacher. The couple had been in a relationship for 10 years and had a child before the wedding.
That same year, the judge of the official exhibition exhibiting the works rejected Lunch on the Herb, a work whose technique was completely revolutionary, so Manet exhibited it at the Salon des Refusés, founded to exhibit the numerous works rejected by the Official Hall of Fine Arts.
“A good painting is true to itself. ” -Manet-
Lunch on the Herb is inspired by works by ancient masters such as Giorgione’s pastoral concert, 1510, and Raphael’s Parisian judge, 1517-1520. This screen provoked a great rejection and initiated the “carnival notoriety” that Manet suffered for most of his career.
Her detractors were offended by the presence of one in the company of two young men dressed in contemporary clothes, so instead of looking like a distant allegorical figure, the modernity of the woman made her nudity seem vulgar and even threatening.
Critics were also uncomfortable with the way these characters were portrayed, in harsh and impersonal light, and they did not understand why the characters were in a forest whose perspective was manifestly unreal.
In the hall of 1865, her painting Olympia, created two years later, was the subject of another scandal: the depiction of a bare woman leaning unscathed looks cheekily at the viewer, and the painting has a strong and bright light that blurs the model and almost makes it a two-dimensional figure.
This contemporary odalisca, which French serist Georges Clemenceau nearly exhibited at the Louvre in 1907, has been described as indecent by critics and the public.
Faced with so many difficult situations, Manet went to Spain in August 1865, but his stay in the country is short-lived, since he does not like food and is frustrated by a total lack of knowledge of the language.
In Madrid, however, he met Theodore Duret, who would later become one of the first connoisseurs and defenders of his work. In 1866 he contacted and befriended the novelist Emile Zola, who in 1867 wrote a brilliant article about Manet in the French newspaper Figaro. .
Zola noted how almost all great artists initially offend the public’s sensibility, this review impressed art critic Louis-Edmond Duranty, who also began to support him, and painters such as Cézanne, Gauguin, Degas and Monet became his allies.
In 1874, Manet was invited to exhibit his work in the first exhibition of Impressionist artists and, despite his support for the movement, rejected the invitation and the next ones that would come from the Impressionists.
Manet felt it was necessary to continue to dedicate himself to the Official Hall and conquer his place in the art world. Like many of his paintings, Odouard Manet was a contradiction, bourgeois and common, conventional and radical.
“You have to be contemporary at the time of the performance and paint what you see. “- Manet-
A year after his first Impressionist exhibition, he was offered the opportunity to draw illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Ed Corpe’s French edition. In 1881, the French government awarded it to the Legion of Honour?Legion of Honor.
He died two years later in Paris on 30 April 1883. In addition to 420 paintings, he left a reputation that would forever define him as a daring and influential artist.
Manet’s beginnings as a painter were marked by critical resistance that decayed only until the end of his career.
His reputation did not improve until the end of the 19th century, thanks to the success of his commemorative exhibition and the eventual acceptance of the Impressionists, but it was not until the twentieth century that art historians recognized its merits.
Manet’s contempt for traditional technique and perspective marked the break with academic painting in the 19th century, and his work certainly paved the way for the revolutionary work of impressionists and post-impressionists.
Manet, in turn, influenced the career of much of the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by choosing his themes; his emphasis on urban and modern issues, which he represented directly, almost remotely, further differentiated him from the motif seen in the official Hall of Descriptions. Fine Arts.