![]() ![]() Similarly, although he was friendly with the Impressionists and exhibited with them - and is now often presented as one of them - his style was in some ways very different to theirs. The great irony of Manet's reputation as a controversialist is that, throughout his life, he both sought and achieved mainstream success, generally having more work displayed at the official Paris Salons than his younger Impressionist peers. In terms of age, he found himself sandwiched between the generation of the great Realists, such as Gustave Courbet, and the Impressionists, most of whom were born in the 1840s. Édouard Manet was born in 1832 into an upper-class family with strong cultural and political ties. By removing the female nude from the legitimizing contexts of mythology and orientalism, and in making his female subject confront the viewer assertively with her gaze, Manet hit a nerve in the bourgeois culture of 1860s Paris, and set the wheels of the avant-garde in motion. The painting depicts two fully clothed men picnicking with a nude woman, while another scantily clad woman bathes in the background. Rejected from the Paris Salon in 1863, it became the most controversial of the works displayed in the so-called "Salon des Refusés" held the same year in order to placate artists rejected from the main exhibition. But it also earned Manet fame and patronage. ![]() It caused outrage with its frank depiction of nudity in a contemporary setting and was scorned by the high-minded salon juries and middle-class audiences of the era. The works that focused on scenes of public leisure - especially scenes of cafés and cabarets - often conveyed the new sense of alienation experienced by the inhabitants of the first modern metropolis.Įdouard Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) was probably the most controversial artwork of the nineteenth century. Impressionism records the effects of the massive mid-19 th-century renovation of Paris, led by civic planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which included the city's newly constructed railway stations wide, tree-lined boulevards that replaced the formerly narrow, crowded streets and large, deluxe apartment buildings.Their art did not necessarily rely on realistic depictions. The Impressionists sought to capture the former - the optical effects of light - to convey the fleeting nature of the present moment, including ambient features such as changes in weather, on their canvases. ![]()
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