Painting. World artists. Eduard Manet (1823 -1883)

Edouard Manet came from a well-to-do Parisian family. The young Manet was trained for a naval career, but then permitted to enter the studio of the conservative painter Thomas Couture, where he received thorough training. Trips to Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria in the 1850s brought him into contact with the work of the Old Masters, through careful coping. He was particularly impressed by the optical art and brilliant brushwork of Velazquez, whose work he saw during a brief visit to Spain in 1865. He also admired Goya and Courbet.
In 1863 Manet exhibited at the Salon des Refuses a canvas entitled Luncheon on the Grass which created an uproar. The grouping of a nude female figure and two fully clothed men in a public park shocked the Parisians as flagrant immorality. In actuality Manet had wittily adapted the composition and the poses from a sixteenth century engraving after a design by Raphael. Manet simply modernised the clothing, surroundings and accessories. Courbet found the painting formless and flat. This flatness was just what Manet was striving for. Illumination seems to come from the direction of the observer, and eliminates mass. By this painting Manet pointed out his belief that the important thing about a picture is not what it represents but how it is painted. The erasure of form allows him to concentrate on the luminosity of the green grass and foliage, the sparkling remains of the picnic, and the glowing flesh of the nude. By posing an insoluble enigma of subject, he has transformed a group of figures into a still life.

Manet soon went even further; in 1867 he painted a subject from contemporary history, the Execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, which records an event that had deeply shocked the French public and for which Napoleon III and his government, who had installed Maximilian, were blamed. Manet treated the incident in a totally unexpected way, almost as a reaction against such an elaborately staged protest composition as Goya's "Third of May, 1808". Manet made a close study of newspaper accounts and photographs of the execution, and even of portrait photographs of the slain emperor, but instead of arranging the figures for maximum emotional effect he has taken a snapshot of the scene. It is impossible to make out the expressions of the doomed men. Only the officer preparing his rifle for the coup de grace receives special attention. The onlookers peering over the wall are merely curious. The picture consists of coloured uniforms, a briskly painted background, and puffs of smoke. Another traditional subject, this time a tragic one, has been modernised in terms of immediate vision.

In the early 1870s Manet gave up his flat style and adopted the brilliant palette and the broken brushwork of the Impressionists. Some of his later pictures are indistinguishable from theirs. The most memorable of these, A Bar at the Folie-Bergere, painted in 1881-82, only two years before the artist's premature death, is a brilliant restatement of Manet's earlier interest in the human figure.

The entire foreground is constituted by the marble bar, laden with fruit, flowers and bottles of champagne and liqueurs. The nearer edge of the bar is cut off by the frame and we have the illusion that its surface extends into our space and that we as spectators are ordering a drink from the solid barmaid who leans her hands on the inner edge. This illusion is reinforced by the reflection in the mirror, which fills the entire background of the picture. We can make out clearly a back view of the barmaid, in conversation with a top-hatted gentleman. Manet certainly remembered Velazquez's Las Meninas, in whose background mirror appear the king and the queen. Manet's extension of the mirror beyond the frame at the top and sides substitutes for the expected space within the picture the reflected interior of the cabaret, which is behind the spectator and, therefore, outside the picture. This is the most complex image in the history of art. In his early works Manet had modernised the subject. In this picture Manet eliminated the Renaissance pictorial space (a vertical section through the pyramid of sight). Manet's masterpiece is painted with a brushwork that combines memories of Velazquez's virtuosity with the most briliant achievements of the Impressionists. The imposing dignity of the figure and the straight lines of the bar and the crowded balcony make this work his most monumental accomplishment.
 

Literature: Book "Western European art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva