Word: manet
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...when Edouard Manet was 31, he changed the course of art. He did it in the only way possible, by producing a picture that was both revolutionary and great. His reward was laughter...
Like all revolutionaries of real stature, Manet was not a bit afraid of the past. He drew from an extreme variety of sources, thereby established a broad and solid base for his own experiments.* Manet's reworkings of Hals, Goya and Giorgione, among others, led Oswald (The Decline of the West) Spengler to regard his work as the last gasp of great Western painting, yet his experiments caused Andre (The Voices of Silence) Malraux to call him the first modern artist. Perhaps he was both; certainly his Lunch on the Grass (opposite) stands as a kind of pylon...
Models & Strictures. Strolling along the Seine one day with a friend, Manet remarked that at the Louvre he had once copied a 16th century masterpiece, Giorgione's Country Feast. He had since come to think Giorgione's picture too dark. It might be interesting, Manet reflected, to paint a similar scene, but in a "transparent atmosphere...
...idea grew on Manet. He painted it big (7 ft. by 9 ft.) and proudly submitted it to the official Salon, which refused it. But the Emperor Napoleon III ordered a special exhibition that year of works the Salon had turned down, and Litnch, exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, made Manet notorious-as an eccentric. "A commonplace woman of the demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth," exclaimed one critic. "I search in vain for the meaning of this unbecoming rebus." "Is this drawing? Is this painting?" cried another...
...Japan sketching. He turned his sketches into a flood of prints showing the nation's famed views, stopping places, bridges, rivers and fairs in all kinds of weather. Bales of Hiroshige's prints found their way to Europe, did as much as anything to spark modern painting. Manet, Degas, Lautrec and Van Gogh all learned from Ukiyo-e art. But after Hiroshige's death in 1858, the art itself descended permanently to a postcard level...