Happy Birthday Édouard Manet!

It’s Édouard Manet’s birthday - born on this day - January 23, 1832. To this day, Manet is still considered to be the father of Modernism.

Édouard Manet -the eldest son of an official in the French Ministry of Justice- had early hopes of becoming a naval officer. After twice failing the training school's entrance exam, the teenager instead went to Paris to pursue a career in the arts. There he studied with Thomas Couture and diligently copied works at the Musée du Louvre.

The biennial (and later, annual) Parisian Salons were considered the most expedient way for an artist to make himself known to the public, and Manet submitted paintings to Salon juries throughout his career. In 1861, at the age of twenty-nine, he was awarded the Salon's honorable mention for The Spanish Singer.

His hopes for continued early success were dashed at the subsequent Salon of 1863. That year, more than half of the submissions to the official Salon were rejected, including Manet's own. To staunch public outcry, Napoleon III ordered the formation of a Salon des Refusés. Manet exhibited three paintings, including the scandalous Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

The public professed to be shocked by the subject of a woman blithely enjoying a picnic in the company of two fully clothed men, while a second, scantily clad woman bathes in a stream. While critics recognized that this scene of modern-day debauchery was, to a certain degree, an updated version of Titian's Concert champêtre (a work then thought to be by Giorgione; Musée du Louvre, Paris), they ruthlessly attacked Manet's painting style.

Manet's submissions to the Salon of 1864 were again condemned by critics, who found errors of perspective in his Incident at a Bullfight (fragments of which are now at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Frick Collection, New York) and a lack of decorum in The Dead Christ and the Angels. The latter picture, in particular, was denounced for its realistic touches, such as the cadaverous body of Christ and the seemingly human angels.

It was argued that the painting lacked any sense of spirituality; the figure of the battered Christ was said to more closely resemble the body of a dead coal miner than the son of God.

Despite his efforts, Manet's modern scenes remained a target of criticism throughout the decade. Olympia (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was considered the most shocking work in the 1865 Salon. Its debt to Titian's Venus of Urbino (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence) only accentuated the wide gulf of public opinion vis-à-vis a reclining woman as subject matter: a goddess was perfectly acceptable, but a contemporary prostitute awaiting her client was not.

Dejected by the critical response to his art, Manet traveled to Spain in August 1865. His interest in Spanish culture already had been apparent for years, with paintings such as The Spanish Singer, Mademoiselle V…, and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo. He garbed his studio models in Andalusian costumes and outfitted them with Spanish props, often in fanciful ways. For example, the left-handed model of The Spanish Singer presses on nonexistent chords of a guitar strung for a right-handed player. A stereotypical Spanish still life rests next to his espadrille-clad feet.

Similarly, Victorine Meurent, the female model of Mademoiselle V…, is shown wearing men's clothes, as well as shoes that are impractical for a bullfighting ring. Stylistically, many of these paintings reveal a clear debt to the art of Velázquez and Goya.

After being rejected from the Salon of 1866 and learning that he was to be excluded from the Exposition Universelle of 1867 as well, Manet grew anxious to find an audience for his art.

He used his inheritance to construct a pavilion across the street from one of the entrances to the Exposition Universelle.

Inside were fifty of his pictures, including several large works now in the Metropolitan's collection: A Matador and Young Lady in 1866 (Woman with a Parrot).

Earlier that year, the artist's first champion, Émile Zola, had published a lengthy and glowing article about Manet. "The future is his," Zola proclaimed. He insisted that the much-maligned Déjeuner sur l'herbe (which was included in Manet's 1867 exhibition) would one day hang in the Louvre. Zola proved prophetic; it took almost seventy years, but the painting entered the collection of the Louvre (now Musée d'Orsay) in 1934.

By all accounts, the sociable Manet was on good terms with many of his peers. He had met Edgar Degas in 1859, when they both copied paintings at the Louvre; he befriended Berthe Morisot, who eventually married his younger brother; and he spoke with countless others during the now-famous evening gatherings at the Café Guerbois. His first encounter with Claude Monet was strained due to Manet's belief that Monet was copying his style in "despicable pastiches", then signing them with a signature too close to Manet's own.

After the confusion was cleared, the men became close, as is obvious in a work such as The Monet Family.

Boating, also painted during the summer of 1874, records a moment when Manet, Monet, and Auguste Renoir painted together at Argenteuil, a suburb northwest of Paris.

That spring, Degas, Monet, and Morisot were among the artists who exhibited together as the Société Anonyme des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs (an event more commonly referred to as the first Impressionist exhibition). Manet declined invitations to participate in this or any of the seven subsequent exhibitions organized by the group.

They nonetheless influenced one another and shared an interest in modern subjects, plein-air painting, bright colors (often purchased ready-made, in tube form), and visually arresting cropping (inspired by both photographs and Japanese prints).

When Manet's health began to deteriorate toward the end of the decade, he was advised to take a cure at Bellevue. In the summer of 1880, he rented a villa in that Parisian suburb, and he painted his last portrait of his wife, the Dutch-born pianist Suzanne Leenhoff, in the villa's garden. The following spring, he won a second-class medal at the Salon for his portrait of Henri Rochefort (Kunsthalle, Hamburg), and in the fall he was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He continued to work until his premature death in April 1883.

Within a year, a posthumous exhibition of 179 of his paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints was organized at the École des Beaux-Arts, the officially sanctioned art school. At least one critic commented on the irony of the location for an artist whose works had been ridiculed and refused by so many Salon juries.

It seems unlikely that Manet would have minded. He himself wrote that he had "no intention of overthrowing old methods of painting, or creating new ones". The critic Louis Gonse viewed things slightly differently. "Manet is a point of departure, the symptomatic precursor of a revolution", he wrote.

To this day, Manet is still considered by many art historians to be the father of modernism. | Rebecca Rabinow © Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) nato in una famiglia borghese, dopo gli studi classici si arruolò in Marina.

Respinto agli esami, decise di iniziare la carriera artistica.

Dal 1850-1856 studiò presso il pittore accademico Couture, pur non condividendone gli insegnamenti.

Viaggiò molto in Italia, Olanda, Germania, Austria, studiando soprattutto i pittori che avevano scelto il linguaggio tonale quali Giorgione, Tiziano, gli olandesi del Seicento, Goya e Velazquez.

Notevole influenza ebbe sulla definizione del suo stile anche la conoscenza delle stampe giapponesi. Nell’arte giapponese, infatti, il problema della simulazione tridimensionale viene quasi sempre ignorato, risolvendo la figurazione solo con la linea di contorno sul piano bidimensionale.

Manet è stato un pittore poco incline alle posizioni avanguardistiche.

Egli voleva giungere al rinnovamento della pittura operando all’interno delle istituzioni accademiche.

E, per questo motivo, egli, pur essendo il primo dei pittori moderni, non espose mai con gli altri pittori impressionisti. Rimase sempre su posizione individuale e solitaria anche quando i suoi quadri non furono più accettati dalla giuria del Salon.

Le sue prime opere non ebbero problemi ad essere accettate. La rottura con la critica avvenne solo dopo il 1863, quando Manet propose il quadro «La colazione sull’erba». In questa tela sono già evidenti i germi dell’impressionismo.

Manet aveva abbandonato del tutto gli strumenti classici del chiaroscuro e della prospettiva per proporre un quadro realizzato con macchie di colori puri e stesi uniformemente. In esso, tuttavia, l’occhio riesce a cogliere una simulazione spaziale precisa se osservato ad una distanza non ravvicinata.

Nello stesso anno realizzò l’«Olympia». Come «La colazione sull’erba», anche questo deriva da un soggetto tratto da Tiziano.

Da questo momento, infatti, molte delle opere più famose di Manet derivano da soggetti di pittori del passato, quasi a rendere omaggio a quei pittori tonali a cui lui aveva sempre guardato.

Ne «Il balcone» riprende un analogo soggetto dipinto da Goya.

E sempre da Goya «La fucilazione dell’8 maggio 1808» deriva il suo «Esecuzione dell’imperatore Massimiliano».

Da Velazquez «Las meninas» riprende le visioni riflesse che si ritrovano nel suo celeberrimo «Bar aux Folies Bergère».

Tutti questi quadri sono la dimostrazione inequivocabile di come la pittura di Manet sia decisamente moderna, sul piano della visione, rispetto a quella del passato.

Tuttavia, questo progresso non fu compreso proprio dal mondo accademico del tempo, al quale in realtà Manet si rivolgeva.

Fu invece compreso da quei giovani pittori, gli impressionisti, anche loro denigrati e rifiutati dal mondo ufficiale dell’arte.

Nei confronti degli impressionisti Manet ebbe sempre un atteggiamento distaccato.

Partecipava alle loro discussioni, che si svolgevano soprattutto al Cafè Guerbois, ed, in seguito, al Cafè della Nouvelle Athènes, ma non espose mai ad una mostra di pittura impressionista.

Egli, tuttavia, non rimase impermeabile allo stile che egli stesso aveva contribuito a far nascere.

Dal 1873 in poi, sono evidenti nei suoi quadri le influenze della pittura impressionista.

Il tocco diviene più simile a quello di Monet, così come la scelta di soggetti urbani «Bar aux Folies Bergère» rientra appieno nella poetica dell’impressionismo.

Egli, tuttavia, conserva sempre una maggior attenzione alla figura e continuerà sempre ad utilizzare il nero come colore, cosa che gli impressionisti non fecero mai.

Tra tutti i pittori dell’Ottocento francese, Manet è quello che più ha creato una cesura con l’arte precedente. Dopo di lui la pittura non è stata più la stessa.

E la sua importanza va ben al di là del suo contributo alla nascita dell’impressionismo.