Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [76]
Academic artists who exhibited to great acclaim in the annual Salon often portrayed nudes, but only as Classical deities. Their technique also differed from Manet’s sketchy style. At the time, painters charged by the hour. The more meticulously they worked on a painting, putting in endless detail and a high degree of finish, the higher the sale price. Although Manet worked hard on his paintings, often repainting them many times until satisfied, he was scorned as crudely incompetent for his “shortcuts” in applying paint with broad strokes.
LATE STYLE. In the 1870s, Manet’s brushwork became even freer and looser. As he began to accompany Monet and Renoir on painting trips along the Seine, his work became indistinguishable from Impressionism. Manet’s late masterpiece, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” shows how completely he absorbed Impressionist principles. He expressed, as Matisse observed, “only what immediately touched his senses.” Far more important than the cabaret bar or barmaid, the subject of the painting is the painter’s sensory impressions rendered through color.
Manet excelled at giving vital, visual form to the boulevards and cafés of contemporary Paris. Alone among the Impressionists, he faced the political upheavals of his day. When starving masses rioted, other Impressionists fled to the countryside to paint flowers, but Manet rushed to the scene to record the drama of class struggle. He never blinked at reality or compromised his highly original vision. By liberating his work from artistic convention, he earned Renoir’s accolade: “Manet was a whole new era of painting.”
THE SALON
What was this all-important Salon that dictated style in French painting for 200 years? Established in 1667 by the French Academy, the Salon was an annual art show named for the room, or Salon, in the Louvre where it was originally held. Not just the officially sanctioned art fair, the Salon was the only public art exhibition in Paris. As such, jurors wielded supreme power in standardizing taste. Since they were members of the arch-conservative Academy, jurors spurned works by innovative artists and perpetuated the stranglehold of history painting on French art.
In 1863, jurors rejected 3,000 of 5,000 paintings submitted. Colling the unacceptable work “a serious danger for society,” the Salon was obviously hostile to bold art. The resulting outcry came to the attention of Emperor Napoleon III, who ordered the refused works exhibited in a pavilion dubbed the Salon des Refuses. Huge crowds viewed works by artists like Manet, Cézanne, and Pissarro.
The exhibit was a notorious succès de scandale (due mostly to Manet’s epochal “Déjeuner sur l’herbe”). Art historians date the beginning of modern painting from this point. By the 1880s, the prestige of the Salon declined steadily, as artists like the Impressionists staged their own shows. Art dealers too began to play a more important role in displaying nanmainstream art.
Manet, “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” 1882, Courtould Institute, London. Manet used Impressionist techniques of flickering light and color.
THE ART DEALER
Undoubtedly, some enterprising merchants made a killing exporting galleon-loads of Athenian art to Rome during Nero’s shopping spree. But the first written evidence of the art dealer’s profession comes from Renaissance art historian Vasari. He described how a Madonna painting by Andrea del Sarto “fetched for the merchants four times as much as they had paid for it” when resold to