Manet, Édouard (ādwär` mänā`), 1832–83, French painter, b. Paris. The son of a magistate, Manet went to sea rather than study law. On his return to Paris in 1850 he studied art with the French academic painter Thomas Couture Couture, Thomas (tômä` k
..... Click the link for more information. . Manet was influenced by Velázquez Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y (rôthrē`gāth th
..... Click the link for more information. and Goya Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de (fränthēs`kō hōsā` th
..... Click the link for more information. and later by Japanese painters and printmakers and the objectivity of photography.

In 1861 the Salon Salon, annual exhibition of art works chosen by jury and presented by the French Academy since 1737; it was originally held in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre. By the mid-19th cent. the Salon had become an expression of conservative, established tastes in art.
..... Click the link for more information. accepted his Chanteur espagnol. Two years later his Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was shown in the Salon des Refusés and was violently attacked; its depiction of a nude and a partially clad woman picnicking with two fully dressed men is enduringly strange and remarkably forthright, and has not quite lost its power to shock. Manet's masterpiece, Olympia (1863; Musée d'Orsay), a supposedly suggestive painting of a nude courtesan, was shown in 1865. It was met by outrage and abuse from critics and public alike. These paintings incorporated a number of technical innovations, which were themselves attacked by the academicians as heresy. The hostility of the critics attended Manet throughout his life, yet he never ceased to hope for acceptance from the art establishment. Fortunately he had some independent means, a strong following among his fellow painters, and companions in Zola Zola, Émile (āmēl` zôlä`), 1840–1902, French novelist, b. Paris.
..... Click the link for more information. , who lost his position on a newspaper because he defended the painter, and Mallarmé Mallarmé, Stéphane (stāfän` mälärmā`), 1842–98, French poet.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Manet profoundly influenced the impressionist painters (see impressionism impressionism, in painting, late-19th-century French school that was generally characterized by the attempt to depict transitory visual impressions, often painted directly from nature, and by the use of pure, broken color to achieve brilliance and luminosity.
..... Click the link for more information. ). He is sometimes called an impressionist himself, although he declined to exhibit his work with the group, and except for a short time he did not employ impressionism's typical broken color or sketchy brushstrokes. Rather Manet worked in broad, flat areas, using almost no transitional tones, to show what the eye takes in at a glance. By 1900 his techniques and their results were widely understood and appreciated, and his works were hung in the Louvre.

Today examples of Manet's paintings are represented in the most important European and American collections. Among his many celebrated paintings are The Fife Player (1866), a portrait of Zola (1868), and The Balcony (1869), all of which are in the Louvre; part of the Execution of Maximilian (1867; Tate Gall., London); and Les Courses à Longchamps (Art Inst., Chicago). Manet also made many pastels, watercolors, and etchings, including graphic portraits of Baudelaire Baudelaire, Charles (shärl bōdlâr`), 1821–67, French poet and critic.
..... Click the link for more information. and a series of illustrations based on Poe Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–49, American poet, short-story writer, and critic, b. Boston. He is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant and original writers in American literature.
..... Click the link for more information. 's Raven.

Bibliography

See biographies by V. Perutz (1991) and B. A. Brombert (1995); catalog of his retrospective exhibition in Paris and New York (1982); catalogs of his pastels by J. Rewald (1947), graphic works by J. C. Harris (1970), and drawings by A. DeLeiris (1971); studies by G. Batailles (tr. 1955, 1983), P. Courthion (1962), G. H. Hamilton (1954, repr. 1969), J. Dufwa (1981), J. Richardson (1982), and K. Adler (1986).

Manet, Édouard

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, oil on canvas by Édouard …

(credit: Courtauld Institute Galleries, London (Courtauld Collection))

(born Jan. 23, 1832, Paris, France—died April 30, 1883, Paris) French painter and printmaker. His father, a prosperous civil servant, wanted him to pursue a naval career, but he was a poor student interested only in drawing. After having a few paintings accepted by the Salon, in 1863 the jury of the Salon rejected his Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and so Manet instead exhibited it at the Salon des Refusés (established to exhibit the many works rejected by the official Salon). This large canvas aroused loud disapproval from critics, who were offended by the presence of a naked woman in the company of two young men clothed in contemporary dress. At the Salon of 1865, his painting Olympia, created two years earlier, also caused a scandal: the painting's reclining female nude gazes brazenly at the viewer and is depicted in a harsh, brilliant light that obliterates traditional modeling and turns her into an almost two-dimensional figure. In the mid 1870s he became friendly with Claude Monet and the other Impressionists; while Manet would not participate in their independent exhibitions, for a time he experimented with some of their techniques. In 1882 he created the painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), a daring, controversial composition that was radical in its obliteration of the boundary between the viewer and what is viewed. The critical resistance to Manet's work did not abate until near the end of his career; it was not until the 20th century that his reputation was secured by art historians and critics. His daring, unflinching approach to his painting and to the art world assured both him and his work a pivotal place in the history of modern art.