Critical & Contextual Studies, History of Art, A level

1. Édouard Manet French b.1832 – d.1883
circa 1867-1870

3. Before looking at the origins of this painting, try
to unravel its formal qualities.
(Read and understand this part).
The materials, techniques and processes used in a painting help to determine
the work’s appearance and have an effect on the way we understand and
interpret the work.
What materials have been used?
How have the inherent characteristics of the materials been used by the artists
(e.g. watercolour’s transparency, the quick drying property of tempera that does
not allow colour to be blended easily, other than by hatching, oil paint’s
versatility to create translucent layers (glazes) to thick impasto)?
What is the painting’s support (the surface on which the paint is applied)?
Is there evidence of what tools the painter has used?
Have the medium, support and/or tools used helped to determine the paintings
scale?

4. Take the Formal Features of
painting listed here and
consider them to begin a
discussion of Manet’’s
painting, Le Déjeuner sur
l'herbe
Formal
Features
1. Composition
2. Colour
3. Pictorial space
4. Light and tone
5. Form
6. Line
7. Scale
8. Pattern/Ornament/Decoration
Write the list down and
use it as a reference
when discussing formal
qualities of paintings in
the future

5. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass)
1863, Oil on canvas , 208 cm × 264.5 cm. Musee d’Orsay
Here is
the title
and
details of
Le
Déjeuner
sur l'herbe
Refer to
the
Formal
Features
list and
discuss/
annotate
this
painting .
Use the
next slide.

7. The Judgment of Paris, ca. 1510–20. Marcantonio Raimondi (Italian, ca. 1480–before 1534).
Designed by Raphael (1483–1520) Italian. Engraving 29.2 x 43.6 cm

8. The Judgment of Paris, ca. 1510–20. Marcantonio Raimondi (Italian, ca. 1480–before 1534).
Designed by Raphael (1483–1520) Italian. Engraving 29.2 x 43.6 cm
The background of this version of ‘The Judgment of Paris’
A masterpiece of Renaissance printmaking, this work represents a high point in the collaboration
between Raphael and Marcantonio. While Marcantonio sometimes worked from drawings created for
other projects, in this case Raphael created the drawing for the sole purpose of having it engraved by
Marcantonio. Drawings done, as Vasari tells us, "to please himself," gave Raphael a forum in which to
explore the ancient motifs that so fascinated him, while the process of printing ensured that Raphael's
private research would be known to a wide audience. The engraver's controlled, systematic line, curving
around the figures, gives them a great three-dimensional presence.
At the wedding of King Peleus of Thessaly and the sea goddess Thetis, Strife showed up uninvited and
threw into the midst of the guests a golden apple inscribed "to the fairest." To put an end to the
squabbling between Minerva (Athena), Venus (Aphrodite), and his wife Juno (the Greek Hera), Jupiter
decreed that the handsomest man on earth, a Trojan prince raised as a shepherd, would be the judge.
All of the goddesses bribed Paris, but Venus—promising him the most beautiful woman in the world as
his bride—won the contest. Unfortunately, her candidate was already married, and Paris' abduction of
Helen from her Greek husband sparked the Trojan War.
In illustrating this ancient myth, Raphael drew inspiration from the relief sculpture found on two ancient
Roman sarcophagi (stone burial caskets). Marcantonio's controlled and systematic line, curving around
the figures, beautifully conveys the sculptural quality that Raphael sought. The rich areas of gray tone
were created through an unusual procedure: before engraving the lines, Marcantonio roughened the
metal plate with pumice, so that all areas not later burnished smooth hold some of the ink in their
textured surface.

9. Detail of The Judgment of Paris, ca. 1510–20. Marcantonio Raimondi (Italian, ca. 1480–before 1534).
Designed by Raphael (1483–1520) Italian. Engraving 29.2 x 43.6 cm

11. This painting has been cited as an inspiration for Manet's The
Luncheon on the Grass.
By Giorgione
or Titian,
The Pastoral
Concerto,
1510,
Oil on canvas
105 × 137cm
Louvre, Paris

12. Manet allows the pale flesh of the naked woman to glare flatly as if spot-lit,
while the dark coats of the men are flat and black. The paint handled with
abrupt sketchiness. The woman with her wet chemise in the river is, in
conventional term, no more than a rough sketch, and the landscape is
sketched with improvised speed. In short, the painting appears unfinished.
But this is part of it being ‘of the moment’, fresh and direct.

13. The Luncheon on the Grass, 1862 by Edouard Manet Luncheon on the Grass
Luncheon on the Grass ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," 1863) was one of a number of impressionist works that broke
away from the classical view that art should obey established conventions and seek to achieve timelessness.
The painting was rejected by the salon that displayed painting approved by the official French academy. The
rejection was occasioned not so much by the female nudes in Manet's painting, a classical subject, as by their
presence in a modern setting, accompanied by clothed, bourgeois men. The incongruity suggested that the
women were not goddesses but models, or possibly prostitutes.
Yet in Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, Manet was paying tribute to Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject
from The Pastoral Concert - a painting by Titian attributed at the time to Giorgione (Louvre) - and taking his
inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael's
Judgement of Paris.But the classical references were counterbalanced by Manet's boldness. The presence of a
nude woman among clothed men is justified neither by mythological nor allegorical precedents. This, and the
contemporary dress, rendered the strange and almost unreal scene obscene in the eyes of the public of the
day. Manet himself jokingly nicknamed his painting "la partie carree".
Manet displayed the painting instead at the Salon des Refuses, an alternative salon established by those who
had been refused entry to the official one. Like his friend Courbet, Manet influenced modern painting not only
by his use of realistic subject matter but also by his challenge to the three-dimensional perspectivalism
established in Renaissance painting. Manet painted figures with a flatness derived partly from Japanese art and
resembling (as Gustave Courbet commented) the flatness of the king or queen on a playing card.
Luncheon on the Grass - testimony to Manet's refusal to conform to convention and his initiation of a new
freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation - can perhaps be considered as the departure
point for Modern Art. The modernist reinvention of pictorial space had begun.

15. Edouard Manet, Olympia. 1863 Oil on canvas. 130.5 × 190 cm. Musée d'Orsay.
Olympia_Khan Academy

16. Venus on seashell, from the Casa di Venus, Pompeii, Before 79 AD.
Aphrodite of
Melos
(Venus de
Milo)
marble 2.04
m. Louvre
Paris, France
Sandro Botticelli
The Birth of Venus
1482 and 1485
Oil on canvas
Uffizi, Florence

17. Titian ,Venus of Urbino 1583 Oil on canvas. Uffizi ,Florence

18. 1 2
Giorgione
(Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco)
Sleeping Venus.
C. 1510
Oil on canvas
Titian, Venus of Urbino 1583
Edouard Manet,
Olympia. 1863

19. Francisco de Goya
La Maja Desnuda
(The Naked Maja),
Before 1800
Oil on canvas
98 x 191 cm.
Museo Nacional
Del Prado
Francisco de Goya
La Maja Vestida
(The Clothed Maja),
Between 1798–1805
oil on canvas
97 cm x 1.9 m.
Museo Nacional
Del Prado

20. Goya’s La Maja Vestida and La Maja Desnuda, installed at the Prado

21. Edouard Manet, Olympia. 1863 Oil on canvas. 130.5 × 190 cm. Musée d'Orsay.
Olympia_Khan Academy

22. Manet’s Olympia caused a scandel when it was exhibited at the 1865 Salon in Paris. Visitors to
Salon were used to nudity in painting – but they were used to seeing it in a Classical context.
A nude was Venus, or a nymph, and usually alluded to a well-known myth or a passage of
Classical history. In Olympia they saw a ‘real’ nude presented without reference to the
Classical world, a prostitute who evoked the Parisian street rather than the Classical past.
With Olympia, Manet reworked the traditional theme of the female nude, using a strong,
uncompromising technique. Both the subject matter and its depiction explain the scandal
caused by this painting at the 1865 Salon. Even though Manet quoted numerous formal and
iconographic references, such as Titian's Venus of Urbino, Goya's Maja desnuda, and the
theme of the odalisque with her black slave, already handled by Ingres among others, the
picture portrays the cold and prosaic reality of a truly contemporary subject. Venus has
become a prostitute, challenging the viewer with her calculating look. This profanation of
the idealized nude, the very foundation of academic tradition, provoked a violent reaction.
Critics attacked the "yellow-bellied odalisque" whose modernity was nevertheless defended
by a small group of Manet's contemporaries with Zola at their head.

23. Edouard Manet's Olympia 1865 PBS Culture Shock
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, 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.
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 modelled 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.
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, Victorine 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.
After Manet's death, the painter Claude Monet organizes a fund to purchase Olympia
and offers it to the French state. It now hangs in the Musée D'Orsay in Paris, where it is
considered a priceless masterpiece of 19th French painting.

25. Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
1882, oil on canvas, 96 cm × 130 cm. Courtauld Gallery, London
This
painting
Was
Manet’s
last
major
work.

26. In the
Making
Far from being quickly and spontaneously painted, the composition was the result of
careful preparatory studies. However, that is not to say that Manet did not make
changes as he painted. In an x-ray of the final canvas, we can see that Manet initially
painted the barmaid with her arms crossed across her waist, her right hand clasping
her left arm above the wrist. This gesture emphasised her glovelessness, but is also
one of protection. The woman in the background looking through opera glasses was a
late addition.