MANET Edouard
Édouard MANET (born 23 January 1832 in Paris) is a French painter and engraver from the late 19th century. Precursor of modern painting that he frees himself from academicism, Édouard Manet is mistakenly regarded as one of the fathers of Impressionism: he distinguishes himself from it by an invoice concerned with the real that does not use (or little) new techniques of color and the special treatment of light. However, he drew closer to it by certain recurring themes, such as portraits, marine landscapes, Parisian life and still life, while painting in a personal way, in a first period, scenes of genre: Spanish subjects especially according to Velasquez and odalisques according to Le Titien.
He refused to study law and failed the career of a merchant naval officer. The young Manet entered the studio of painter Thomas Couture in 1850, where he began his training as a painter, leaving in 1856. As early as 1860, he presented his first paintings, including the Portrait of M. and Mme Auguste Manet.
Her next paintings, Lola de Valence, The Widow, Bull Fight, Lunch on the Grass or Olympia, are scandalous. Manet is rejected from official exhibitions, and plays a leading role in the "elegant bohemian". He frequents artists who admire him like Henri Fantin-Latour or Edgar Degas and men of letters such as the poet Charles Baudelaire or the novelist Émile Zola whose portrait he paints: Portrait of Émile Zola. Zola actively defended the painter at a time when the press and critics were working on Olympia. At that time, he painted Le Joueur de fifre (1866), the historical subject of L'Execution de Maximilien (1867), inspired by the engraving of Francisco de Goya.
His work also included marines such as Clair de lune on the port of Boulogne (1869) or races: Les Races à Longchamp in 1864, which earned the painter an early recognition.
After the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 in which he participated, Manet supported the Impressionists among whom he had close friends such as Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir or Berthe Morisot, who became his sister-in-law and whose famous portrait would be noticed, among those he would make of her, Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets (1872). At their contact, he abandoned the workshop painting for outdoor painting in Argenteuil and Gennevilliers, where he owned a house. His palette became clearer as evidenced by Argenteuil of 1874. However, he retained his personal approach made of neat composition and concerned with reality, and continued to paint many subjects, in particular places of leisure such as Au Café (1878), La Serveuse de Bocks (1879) and his last large canvas Un bar aux Folies Bergère (1881-1882), but also the world of humble Paveurs de la Rue Mosnier or self-portraits (Autoportrait à la palette, 1879).
Manet manages to give letters of nobility to still life, a genre that previously occupied a decorative and secondary place in painting. Towards the end of his life (1880-1883) he worked to represent flowers, fruits and vegetables by applying dissonant color chords, at the time when pure color died, which André Malraux was one of the first to highlight in Les Voix du silence. The most representative of this evolution is The Asparagus, which emologates from its ability to exceed all conventions. Manet also multiplies portraits of women (Nana, 1877, Blond woman with bare breasts, Berthe Morisot or men who are part of her entourage: Stéphane Mallarmé, Théodore Duret, Georges Clemenceau, Marcellin Desboutin, Émile Zola Henri Rochefort. From the 1880s onwards, he was increasingly recognized. He received the Legion of Honour on 1 January 1882. However, as a victim of syphilis and rheumatism, he had suffered, since 1876, from his left leg which had to be amputated.
Édouard Manet died of gangrene at the age of 51 in 1883 and left more than four hundred paintings, pastels, sketches and watercolours. His greatest works are now visible in all museums around the world, particularly at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.