Example research essay topic: Edouard Manet Manet Paintings - 1,940 words

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The paper discusses Edouard Manet's influence on the history of painting. The paper analyses Olympia and other works of Manet to explain how the artists works show the spirit of time and culture in which they were created. The paper discusses whether works of Manet lie at the origin of Impressionism, because his paintings arose out of depths of which Impressionism had no idea yet. Outline Introduction Body Manet's style Manet's paintings in Saloon Olympia Influence of Manet's paintings Impressionism in Manet's works Conclusion Edouard Manet -- The Bridge between Realism and Impressionism Edouard Manet (1832 - 1883) a French impressionist painter was a very significant person and made great contribution into the world art. Manet recreated French art as he was the inspiration to later Impressionists to sweep across Europe. He was of a wealthy background but did not use this wealth to help further his career.

He mingled with much of high society, such as the great poet Charles Baudelaire, and used them in much of his pieces. Manet has a place all his own in the history of art. Not only was he a very great painter, but he cut himself off from the painters who preceded him, opening up the age we live in today, the age we call Modern Times. Completely out of step with his own, he shocked and scandalized his contemporaries, to whom his painting came like a bolt out of the blue. The word revolution might describe this irruption and the completely new outlook behind it, were it not for the misleading political implications almost inseparable from such a word.

The difference between Manet and the other artists of his day can be summed up in two points. First, a Manet canvas, by its very nature, conflicted with everything that a painting was, at the time, commonly expected to be. Durant, a critic of the period, stated the case as follows: At any exhibition, he wrote in 1870, even from many rooms away, there is only one painting that stands out from all the rest: it's a Manet every time. One is apt to laugh, for the effect is queer when a single thing differs from all the others. The second point to be made is no less arresting.

Never prior to Manet had the breach between the taste of the public and changing types of beauty -- which art continually renews-been so conclusively final. With Manet began the days of wrath, of those outbursts of scorn and derision with which, ever since, the public has greeted each successive rejuvenation of beauty. Others before him had roused indignation; the relative unity of classical taste had been all but shattered by Romanticism, while Delacroix, Courbet, and even Ingres, for all his classicism, had set the public laughing. But the laughter that lay in wait for Olympia was something unprecedented; here was the first masterpiece before which the crowd fairly lost all control of itself. (Read) Manet's first works were among the many that were rejected from the salons due to their lack of romanticism, instead a portrayal of immorality and harshness. While following in the footsteps of the Old Masters, he sought to perfect the link between sight and the mind. He managed to do so with his bold brushwork capturing modern life and his appreciation for every delicate stroke of the brush.

Despite his mastery of painting, critics constantly condemn his works. Manet's brilliant technique, founded on the opposition of light and shadow with as little half tone as possible, on painting directly from the model with the intense immediacy, and on a restricted palette in which black was extremely important, helped him to create a new style; yet one founded on Velazquez, Goya, and Hals, all of whom could be studied in Paris. The next painting that was submitted to the Saloon was The Luncheon on the Grass. This was immediately rejected for its portrayal of a naked woman posing with two clothed men, but Manet exhibited it at the salon des refuses.

In 1865 he managed to submit and exhibit Olympia to the salon, although it caused a great scandal. In this painting, Manet depicted a prostitute gazing seductively and proudly at her viewer. This piece sent French society into an outrage, for its nudity of a young woman who enjoys the company of two young and fully clothed males. It was considered to be a deliberate insult to society, and equally a landmark in art history, for its blatant refusal of conventional forms and techniques. It was a mark that the expression of thought and of beauty could merge into one by the stroke of natural colors and realist light. When Edouard Manet's painting Olympia is hung in the Salon of Paris in 1865, it is met with jeers, laughter, criticism, and disdain.

It is attacked by the public, the critics, and the newspapers. Guards have to be stationed next to it to protect it, until it is moved to a spot high above a doorway, out of reach. Although considered his greatest, this piece continued Paris outrage toward Manet and his new movement of art. Olympia was the name for a whore in French literature; the flowers and the veils intensified the sexuality of the portrait, combined with the erotic gaze of the model and watchful eyes of her maid.

This painting a threat to the morals of society and an outrage to the social order attained at that time. Manet, through his work, implanted the thoughts of realistic Impressionism, in the steps of the great Gustave Courbet, into the minds of so many who changed this worldwide appreciation. With Olympia, Manet rebels against the art establishment of the time. Taking Titian's Venus of Urbino as his model, Manet creates a work he thinks will grant him a place in the pantheon of great artists. But instead of following the accepted practice in French art, which dictates that paintings of the figure are to be modeled on historical, mythical, or biblical themes, Manet chooses to paint a woman of his time -- not a feminine ideal, but a real woman, and a courtesan at that. And he paints her in his own manner: in place of the smooth shading of the great masters, his forms are painted quickly, in rough brushstrokes clearly visible on the surface of the canvas.

Instead of the carefully constructed perspective that leads the eye deep into the space of the painting; Manet offers a picture frame flattened into two planes. The foreground is the glowing white body of Olympia on the bed; the background is darkness. Olympia did not fare better with Theophile Gautier, once, with Victor Hugo, a leader of the romantic poets in their fight against tradition. Gautier had since lost all taste for revolutionary ideas, while still posing as a sympathizer with audacity. With some repugnance I come to the peculiar paintings by Manet, he wrote. It is awkward to discuss them but one cannot pass them by in silence In many persons opinion it would be enough to dismiss them with a laugh; that is a mistake. (Hamilton) Manet is by no means negligible; he has a school, he has admirers and even enthusiasts; his influence extends further than you think.

Manet has the distinction of being a danger. But the danger is now passed. Olympia can be understood from no point of view, even if you take it for what it is, a puny model stretched out on a sheet. The color of the flesh is dirty, the modeling non-existent.

The shadows are indicated by more or less large smears of blacking. Whats to be said for the Negress who brings a bunch of flowers wrapped in a paper, or for the black cat which leaves its dirty footprints on the bed? We would still forgive the ugliness, were it only truthful, carefully studied, heightened by some splendid effect of color. The least beautiful woman has bones, muscles, skin, and some sort of color.

Here is nothing, we are sorry to say, but the desire to attract attention at any price. (Hamilton) The discussions aroused by Manet's impressionist paintings indeed put his name forward to such a degree that Degas could pretend that his friend was now as famous as Garibaldi. It must have seemed to Manet as if whatever he did appear an offense to others. The delicacy of his color accords, the virtuosity with which he created harmonies of blacks, greys, and whites enlivened by some strong or subtle notes, unexpected and delightful, the mastery with which he combined in his technique a clear and almost cold sense of lines and values with an execution full of temperament, all these rare gifts of the true painter seemed nowhere to find the slightest recognition. In painting reality as he sees it, Manet challenges the accepted function of art in France, which is to glorify history and the French state, and creates what some consider the first modern painting. His model, Victoria Meurent, is depicted as a courtesan, a woman whose body is a commodity. While middle-and- upper class gentlemen of the time may frequent courtesans and prostitutes, they do not want to be confronted with one in a painting gallery.

A real woman, flaws and all, with an independent spirit, stares out from the canvas, confronting the viewer, something French society in 1865 is perhaps not ready to face. Similar uproar and the controversy surrounding these two paintings (Luncheon on the grass and Olympia) truly dismayed Manet. It was not at all his intention to create a scandal. He was not a radical artist, such as Courbet; nor was he a bohemian, as the critics had thought.

Another famous Edouard Manet's painting Le Bon Bock (The Good Pint), created for the Salon of 1873, was widely identified as a French Alsatian patriot drinking his regional beer. The picture came to serve as a popular symbol of the recent loss of the Alsace-Lorraine region by France to the Germans and a liberal political symbol of national introspection. It led French intellectuals to question traditional institutions along with notions of patriotism and national identity. His work were frequently rejected by the Salon jury (he played an important part in the 1863 Salon des Refuses) and, if hung, was ill-received by critics, his friend Emile Zola almost alone in defending him. After 1870, due partly to the influence of Birth Morisot, he adopted the Impressionist technique and palette, abandoning the use of black and his genius for analysis and synthesis for a lighter, sweeter, color and freer handling. He also tended more to sentimental subjects.

He always longed for official recognition and refused to take part in the Impressionist exhibitions organized by Degas. Although he was friendly with Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Pissarro he bitterly resented being coupled with them in newspaper criticisms as the leader of Manet's gang. At the end of his life he was given the Legion of Honour and the vilification of his works abated, chiefly because Impressionist handling and color were beginning to affect academic painting. The tragedy of his life was that he was the perfect academic painter, unrecognized and rejected by the body whose dying traditions he alone could have revived. This state of affairs was doubly paradoxical in view of Manet's mild-mannered, self-effacing character. Yet as early as February 1863, only a few weeks after his thirty-first birthday, with the showing of his Concert at the Tuileries at the Galerie Martinet, Manet got his first taste of notoriety; then in May, at the Salon des Refuses, he touched off a scandal that...

Research essay sample on Edouard Manet Manet Paintings