![]() ![]() In their poses and dress, several figures recall those of Velázquez or the peasants painted by French seventeenth-century artist Louis Le Nain, whose works Manet would also have seen during his studies in the Louvre. At the right a man named Guéroult is cast as the "wandering Jew," the prototypical outsider. The man in the top hat is Colardet, a rag-picker and ironmonger. The seated musician is Jean Lagrène, leader of a local gypsy band who earned his living as an organ grinder and artist's model. Here Manet has painted characters from this area he called "a picturesque slum." Most are real individuals. "It was the homeland, at ten pence a night, of all the street organ players, of all the monkey tamers, of all the acrobats and of all the chimney sweeps that swarm the streets of the town." Such was a contemporary description of the neighborhood of Petite Pologne, close to Edouard Manet's studio. Manet's embrace of what Charles Baudelaire termed the "heroism of modern life" and his bold manner with paint inspired the future impressionists, though Manet never exhibited with them. In the evenings at the Café Guerbois, near his studio, he was joined by writers and artists, including Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and others who would go on to organize the first impressionist exhibition. Manet's succès de scandale made him a leader of the avant-garde. Her languid pose copied a painting of Venus by the Italian artist Titian, but Manet did not cloak her with mythology. Even more shocking was the frank honesty of the courtesan: her boldness-not nudity-offended. To many, Manet's "color patches" appeared unfinished. Viewers were not used to flat space and shallow volumes in painting. Critics advised pregnant women to avoid the picture, and it was re-hung to thwart vandals. ![]() Several artists had already begun to challenge the stale conventions of the Academy when Manet's Olympia (today in the collection of the Musée d'Orsay, Paris) was accepted for the Salon in 1865. He drew on the old masters for structure, often incorporating their motifs, but giving them a modern cast. Manet began to develop a freer manner, creating form not through a gradual blending of tones, but with discrete areas of color side by side. He was particularly impressed by the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez, contrasting his vivid brushwork with the "stews and gravies" of academic style. More than in his teacher's studio, Manet learned to paint in the Louvre by studying old masters. Contemporary urban subjects and a bold style, which offered paint on the canvas as something to be admired in itself, gave their art a strong, new sense of the present. Renovations had opened the wide avenues and parks we know today, and painting was transformed when artists abandoned the transparent glazes and blended brushstrokes of the past and turned their attention to new techniques and to life around them. Within twenty-five years, however, both Paris and painting had new looks. Young artists could expect to succeed only through the official Academy exhibitions known as Salons, whose conservative juries favored biblical and mythological themes and a polished technique. When Edouard Manet began to study painting in 1850, Paris' familiar, broad, tree-lined streets did not yet exist, and the life of the city was not a subject artists explored.
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