Birth Year : 1832
Death Year : 1883
Country : France
Edouard Manet was born in Paris. His father was a government official,
and although Edouard showed early artistic talent, he was destined for
the Navy until he failed the entrance examinations. He then began to study
art with Thomas Couture, whose academic teaching did not satisfy Manet.
He began to study the works of the Venetian Renaissance masters, the Dutch
seventeenth-century artists and of the Spaniard Velázquez. He studied
these first in Fountainbleau, then in the Louvre, and eventually on trips
abroad to Holland, Germany, Italy, and Spain where, in 1865, he discovered
Goya.
His earliest works, by their delight in clear colors, strong lines and
large flat areas, are strikingly similar to Spanish art, particularly in
his silhouetted figures which, if cut out, would leave a background in
monochrome and a clearly defined outline. These striking paintings are
well delineated and so rounded in contour that they seem almost to project
outwards from the immediate foreground. From the very beginning of his
career, Manet startled the public. His "Luncheon on the Grass" (1863),
in which a nude woman sits besides two fully dressed men, based on a classical
work by Giorgione, virtually created
a scandal. This scandal might seem ridiculous by today's standards, but
it marks a turning point in the history of art and in its freedom of expression.
Manet became the elder leader of the group of artists who met at the
Café Guerbois. The experiments of some of the younger members of
the Impressionist School led him to further lighten his palette, although
he never experimented with the effects of light, and he preferred painting
in the studio to working in the open air. Unlike the Impressionists, he
made considerable use of black, a black that became a living color in his
works. Manet died at the age of fifty-one of a progressive forms of paralysis,
after years of suffering and futile treatment. Although his works stem
from the traditional techniques of the past, in their freedom of composition,
use of color, broad planes, and solid construction, they lead toward the
future. He brought fresh inspiration and technique to the observation of
nature and contemporary life and served both as an influence and as the
stimulus for the Impressionists.
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Edouard
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Bar
at the Folies Bergere
Edouard
Manet
Fifer
Edouard
Manet
Bar
at the Folies Bergere
Edouard
Manet
Bar
at the Folies Bergere
Edouard
Manet
Olympia
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