Edouard Manet

Works by this Artist

Déjeuner sur l’herbe
Edouard Manet, 1863

Olympia
Edouard Manet, 1863

Music in the Tuileries
Edouard Manet, 1862

Railway
Edouard Manet, 1873

Background

bourgeois

Studies

with Thomas Couture (1850-56)

Career

1859 – Paris Salon committee refuses Absinthe Drinker

1861 – exhibits Spanish Singer (1860, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and M and Mme Manet (1860, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) at Salon; regularly submits paintings to the Salon throughout his career, though they are often rejected

1862 – founder-member of the Société des Aquafortistes (Society of Etchers)

1863 – Salon committee refuses three paintings, including Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe; exhibits instead at Salon des refuses

1865 – exhibits Olympia at the Salon; scandal ensues

1867 –excluded from Exposition universelle (Paris); organizes independent exhibition nearby and issues pamphlet Tableaux de M. Edouard Manet

1875 – illustrates Stéphane Mallarmé’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven

1881 – wins second-class medal at Salon, thereby exempted from jury in future submissions; awarded Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur

1882 – exhibits Bar at the Folies-Bergere at Salon

Travels

Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Italy (1856); Florence (1857); Netherlands (1872); Venice (1875)

Students

Berthe Morisot and Eva Gonzalès

Important Artworks

Absinthe Drinker, 1859 (Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Copenhagen)

The Execution of Emperor Maxmilian, 1867 (final sketch, Ny Carlsburg Glyptothek)

Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882 (Courtauld Institute, London)

Boating, 1874 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Web Resources

Metmuseum: Manet

smarthistory: Manet, Olympia

smarthistory: Manet, The Railway

Readings

Armstrong, Carol. Manet Manette. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002

Bataille, Georges. Manet. Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons, trans. New York: Skira,
1955

Borne, Dominique. Olympia d’Edouard Manet. Paris: A. Colin, 2008 (in French)

Cachin, Françoise. Manet: the Influence of the Modern. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995

Clark, T.J. “Olympia’s Choice,” The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, pp. 79-146

Curtiss, Mina. “Manet Caricatures: Olympia,” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1966): 725-52

Farwell, Beatrice. Manet and the Nude: a Study of Iconography in the Second Empire. New York: Garland, 1981

Foucault, Michael. Manet and the Object of Painting. London: Tate, 2009

Hamilton, George Heard. Manet and His Critics. New York: Norton, 1969

Læssøe, Rolf. ”Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe as a Veiled Allegory of Painting,” Artibus et Historiae, vol. 26, no. 51 (2005): 195-220

Mallarmé, Stéphane. “The Impressionists and Edouard Manet,” Art Monthly Review (1 September 1876): 28-34

Manet, Edouard. Manet: 1832-1883. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983

Nord, Philip. “Manet and Radical Politics," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 19, no. 3 (Winter 1989): 447-80

Reed, Arden. Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003

Reff, Theodore. Manet, Olympia. New York: Viking Press, 1977

Rubin, James Henry. Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994

Tucker, Paul Hayes. Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998

Witkin, Robert W. “Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity: Olympia Revisited,” Sociological Theory, vol. 15, no. 2 (July 1997): 101-25

Images