Chapter Two
ÉDOUARD MANET &
Modern Life
CONTENTS
Introduction
2.1
The Challenge of the New: Modernist Attitudes and the Académie
2.2
Enter Édouard: The Paris Salon of 1859
2.3
The Perfect Storm: Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, the Paris Salon and the Salon des Refusés
2.4
2.5
The International Exposition of 1867
2.6
The Political Manet: The Execution of Emperor Maximilian
2.7
Portrait of Émile Zola: Japonisme and the Influence of the Multiple
2.8
2.9
2.10
Impressionism and its Contexts
INTRODUCTION
Édouard Manet forged a path for a revolutionary aesthetic movement in Western art history. During France’s Second Empire a shift in the socio-economic order coincided with the rise of cultural modernity and an embrace of innovatory attitudes and ideology. The emergence of a new leisure class, the effects of a modernized Paris, and the development of visual technologies significantly impacted the cultural landscape, and it would go on to affect the production, dissemination, and acquisition of art.
Cultural modernity was significantly impacted by the reconstruction of Paris as a new metropolis. In the years leading up to l’année terrible of 1870-1871, (the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune) Napoleon III set out to rebuild the sections of the city destroyed by the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. His visionary project was undertaken by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, whose ésprit de géometrie transformed the old medieval city with its narrow streets and slums into a network of large, lighted boulevards flanked by apartment buildings for the newly minted bourgeoisie.
Haussmann created an extensive municipal park system, built schools and hospitals, and installed gas lines and an advanced underground sewer system. These massive changes to the built environment transformed social life, facilitating urban mobility and creating new spaces for social interchange.
The social effects of “Haussamanization,” the peopled open boulevards, avenues, and parks, as well the visual stimuli of shop vitrines, murals, and advertising bill posts, gave rise to a culture of spectatorship amongst a newly affluent demographic of city dwellers.
For Manet, the quintessential flâneur, an inclination towards observing contemporary city life was ignited by the writings of the poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire. In his 1864 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire emphasized that the artist’s duty was to encapsulate the essence of the “fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis.” This philosophy profoundly influenced Manet’s artistic perspective, inspiring him to portray the dynamic and transient aspects of modern urban existence in his works.
Manet’s fascination with modern life as a subject found a precursor in Gustave Courbet’s provocative depictions of rural realism. However, while Courbet portrayed the unvarnished reality of an essentially unaltered peasant world, Manet’s modernism was distinctly urban and forward-looking. He departed from the dista