Thoroughly modern Manet

There can’t really be many people who look at art with any regularity who continue to confuse Manet with Monet. But there are those who still think that Manet was an Impressionist, because so many of his friends and contemporaries were members of the group. In fact, Manet kept his distance and steadfastly refused to exhibit with them. His was an urban, studio-based art, not given to plein-air effects of atmosphere and local colour. He looked instead to the dazzling bravura of Franz Hals’s portraits, and the sombre and often majestic originality of Velázquez and Goya. Edouard Manet (1832–83) was a painter on the cusp of tradition and Modernism, and although he is today widely credited with the invention of modern art, such simplistic generalisations only serve to disguise this fact. He took as much from the past as he did from the present: the synthesis he created was a unique interpretation of the human predicament in his own lifetime, but it continues to have wide relevance today.

The Royal Academy’s exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life, concentrates on the artist’s portraits, and would thus seem to give less emphasis to him as a painter of modern life — except that his portraits were of course of modern people; and particularly of modern women. Manet was very good at painting women, quite obviously loved and appreciated them (perhaps too well: he was to die aged only 51 from tertiary syphilis), and was one of the first artists to portray them on an equal footing with men. Indeed his most famous paintings, of the courtesan Olympia and the suggestive clothed/unclothed picnic of ‘Déjeuner sur l’Herbe’, give women a more prominent and even confrontational role than had previously been allowed them. But if his subject matter often shocked and horrified the haute bourgeoisie, his style alienated them still further, for Manet was a radical in form as well as content.