Lecture 42: Manet and Monet—The Birth of Impressionism
Although painted in 1863, Olympia was not entered in the Salon until 1865.
Manet was wise enough not to try to show the Luncheon and Olympia at the
same time. In fact, in 1865, Olympia was accepted into the of¿ cial Salon.
Olympia is a prostitute. Her name was a common one for prostitutes of this
period, including a famous ¿ ctional prostitute in The Lady of the Camellias
(18481852) by Alexander Dumas
¿ ls. We can compare Olympia with
Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538),
which Manet copied in Florence in- Venus here is also a prostitute,
a courtesan.
Our next example by Manet is
At the Café (1879). The café
concert was a popular type of
entertainment, combining a café setting and a cabaret. Manet painted several
of these scenes in a cabaret on the Boulevard Rochechouart. The next year,
Manet developed the ¿ rst symptoms of a degenerative disease, locomotor
ataxia, which so weakened him that he stopped making large paintings
in favor of À oral still lifes and pastel portraits. The great exception to this
diminution in his work is his last masterpiece, the Bar at the Folies-Bèrgères
(1881–1882). It is no exaggeration to say that modern art begins with
Manet, a claim that can be made because of his vivid, painterly technique
and his high-toned palette and because of his often enigmatic, personal
subject matter.Claude Monet (1840–1926) was born in Paris but raised in Le Havre, where
his father was in the wholesale grocery business. Monet began drawing
caricatures when he was a teenager. Meeting the landscape painter Eugène
Boudin, Monet was persuaded to accompany the older artist on painting
expeditions in the area and to paint directly from nature in the open air. Open-
air painting had long been practiced by landscape artists but almost always
for sketching, not for completing paintings out-of-doors. Nonetheless, the
practice of open-air painting had been growing in popularity; what was to
make it revolutionary was Monet’s genius, because no one before him had
combined the brilliant light effects observed outdoors with the compositional
imagination and technical skill that he developed. After a year of militaryArt historians often talk about
the “painting of modern life”
in late-19th-century France,
but the politics of modern life
affected everyone.