Word: manet
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...Manet's decision to turn upside down the stuffy, artificial traditions then in fashion in the official salons now seems less the act of a revolutionary, more the act of a man in love with reality and with his own time. He had schooled himself arduously by copying the greats...
...Tintoretto, Rubens, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sarto; his problem from the beginning was that he kept leaving off the halos. His taste for reality over illusion distressed his teacher, Academician Thomas Couture, whose 1847 uncostumed orgy, Romans of the Decadence, was the hit of the day. Manet's mother, goddaughter of Jean Baptiste Bernadotte who became King of Sweden, could only explain it thus: "He could paint quite differently, but his friends led him astray...
Threat to Morals. Manet's scruffy friends were none other than the novelist Zola, the poets Baudelaire and Mallarme, the painters Monet, Degas and Renoir. He owed them all a debt, but most of all he trusted his own vision. "One must be of one's time," he said, "do what one sees without worrying about the fashion." Mallarme stated their common goal succinctly: "To paint not the thing, but the effect it produces...
...further inform his own way of seeing, Manet drew from all the enthusiasms and movements of his day, from the realism of Courbet to the clarity of the camera, from the sketches of Renaissance masters to Japanese prints. But though his natural allies were the impressionists, he refused to run with the renegades who were slightly younger, preferred instead to challenge the painting establishment on its own grounds-the official painting salons...
...result, Manet's professional life often reads like an endless scandal. The all-too-earthy goddess Olympia, which he painted in 1863, rocked an art world accustomed to nymphs and satyrs, emperors and gladiators: it was obvious from the bouquet of flowers carried by her Negro maid that a lover had just arrived. And when Manet combined Giorgione's Arcadian pastoral with postures from a corner of Raphael's Judgment of Paris, and then transformed them into all-too-contemporary figures, one of them in the buff, picnicking on the banks of the Seine, Napoleon III considered...