III.

Notoriety

After his father died in 1862, Manet came into a substantial inheritance, which enabled him to pursue his artistic inclinations without needing to sell his work to earn a living. By this time he had experienced some minor professional successes and setbacks, but the following year he was at the center of one of the most dramatic events in 19th-century art. This was the launch in 1863 of the Salon des Refusés, a new exhibition place opened by French emperor Napoleon III following the protests of artists who had been rejected by the official government Salon. Many visitors came to mock the paintings on display, and Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863, Luncheon on the Grass, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) attracted wide attention and was bitterly attacked by the critics. Manet’s canvas portrayed a woodland picnic that included a seated nude woman accompanied by two fully dressed young men. The depiction of nudity in a contemporary setting was considered immoral; at that time nudity in art was acceptable only if it was suitably distanced from real life, by being placed in a mythological context, for example. Despite this setback he exhibited two paintings at the official Salon in 1864.

Greater notoriety came two years later when the official Salon accepted Manet’s Olympia (1863, Musée d'Orsay) for its 1865 exhibition. This painting also showed a naked woman. The pose was based on the well-known Venus of Urbino by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian, a painting that Manet had seen and copied in Florence, Italy. But the woman whom Manet depicted was clearly a modern Parisian, not a Renaissance interpretation of a Greek goddess. Her overt sexuality and her direct and knowing gaze (at the observer of the painting) were out of step with the taste of the time, and many people considered the painting an affront to morality. Manet also was condemned for the unconventional nature of his technique. His use of flat areas of color and bold contrasts of tone rather than painstaking detail struck traditionalists as merely sloppy and lazy. Manet wrote to his friend Baudelaire, “Insults are pouring down on me as thick as hail,” and he went to Spain for a while to escape the abuse. There he drew inspiration from the works of Velázquez and Goya.