Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [75]
CONTRIBUTIONS. After Impressionism, painting would never again be the same. Twentieth-century painters either extended their practice or reacted against it. By defying convention, these rebels established the artist’s right to experiment with personal style. Most of all, they let the light of nature and modern life blaze through the shadowy traditions of centuries.
Manet, “Le Déjeuner sur l‘herbe,” 1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Monet painted flat areas of color — a radical break with traditional chiaroscuro.
MANET: PIONEER OF THE MODERN. Edouard Manet(1832-83) is often called the Father of Modern Art. A reluctant martyr to the avant-garde who wanted nothing more than the official recognition he was denied, Manet is difficult to classify.
Although he painted alongside Renoir and Monet, who hailed him as their leader, he never exhibited with the Impressionists. Classically trained, he saw himself in the tradition of the great masters whose motifs he often borrowed. Yet critics vilified his work, labeling it a “practical joke ... a shameful, open sore.”
What outraged the public and made Manet a hero to young rebels was his translating the Great Tradition into modern terms. Manet stripped away idealizing mythology to portray modern life candidly. He also eliminated the subtle glazing and detailed polish of academic technique. His sketchy brushwork gave his pictures an unfinished look, making his images appear flat and hard.
Art history credits Manet with launching “the revolution of the color patch.” With this new technique, Manet suggested form through broad, flat areas (or patches) of color. Almost as if consciously declining to compete with the camera’s realism, he refused to simulate three-dimensionality through modeling forms with lines or gradations of color. His stencillike images were purposely shallow and simplified. In place of halftones to suggest volume, he used starkly contrasting light tones against dark.
This radical shift in technique forced people to look anew at the picture surface. Ever since the Renaissance, artists regarded the framed painting as a window to look through, in order to see a painted scene “receding” in the distance. With Manet’s minimized modeling and perspective, he insisted his viewers look at the picture surface itself — a flat plane covered with painted shapes.
“Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” or “Luncheon on the Grass,” is the painting that stigmatized Manet as “a danger” to public morality. Shown at the Salon des Refuses in 1863 (an exhibition composed of canvases rejected by the official Salon), “Déjeuner” offended on both moral and aesthetic grounds. Portraying a naked woman and two clothed men picnicking was considered indecent because Manet failed to idealize the nude. Her contemporary look, direct gaze, and the fact that she resembled no pagan deity scandalized viewers, for whom nudity was acceptable only if disguised in Classical trappings.
Actually, Manet firmly grounded the work in the Renaissance tradition, basing the painting on both Giorgione’s “Concert Champêtre” and an engraving after a Raphael design. The painting was also an updating of the traditional “fête galante” painting where decorative aristocrats lolled in misty parks. In addition, Manet used traditional elements like the triangular grouping of figures, the still life arrangement in the left foreground, the goddesslike figure bathing at rear, and receding perspective for the illusion of depth.
He tried to make the public see what Baudelaire called the “epic” side of “actual life,” or “how grand we are in our neckties and varnished boots!” Yet because Manet recast these conventions in realistic modern dress, the work aroused an unprecedented firestorm of hostility.
Two years later, in