Art: Some Lunch

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In 1863, when Edouard Manet was 31, he changed the course of art. He did it in the only way possible, by producing a picture that was both revolutionary and great. His reward was laughter.

Like all revolutionaries of real stature, Manet was not a bit afraid of the past. He drew from an extreme variety of sources, thereby established a broad and solid base for his own experiments.* Manet's reworkings of Hals, Goya and Giorgione, among others, led Oswald (The Decline of the West) Spengler to regard his work as the last gasp of great Western painting, yet his experiments caused Andre (The Voices of Silence) Malraux to call him the first modern artist. Perhaps he was both; certainly his Lunch on the Grass (opposite) stands as a kind of pylon in painting history.

Models & Strictures. Strolling along the Seine one day with a friend, Manet remarked that at the Louvre he had once copied a 16th century masterpiece, Giorgione's Country Feast. He had since come to think Giorgione's picture too dark. It might be interesting, Manet reflected, to paint a similar scene, but in a "transparent atmosphere."

Back in his studio, he had the additional thought of disposing his figures on the grass like those in the lower right-hand corner of Raphael's lost Judgment of Paris, which he knew from Raimondi's engraved copy (above).

The idea grew on Manet. He painted it big (7 ft. by 9 ft.) and proudly submitted it to the official Salon, which refused it. But the Emperor Napoleon III ordered a special exhibition that year of works the Salon had turned down, and Litnch, exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, made Manet notorious—as an eccentric. "A commonplace woman of the demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth," exclaimed one critic. "I search in vain for the meaning of this unbecoming rebus." "Is this drawing? Is this painting?" cried another. "Manet thinks himself resolute and powerful. He is only hard."

The contemporary art world's judgments had a highly moral tone precisely because Manet's picture did not. In France of the Second Empire, bigness was associated with grandeur. A canvas the size of Manet's Lunch, people thought, should have some edifying theme, whether classical, historical or religious. To express mere joie de vivre on such a large scale was just awful.

Bats & Patches. But Manet's manner was even more revolutionary than his matter. He ignored the traditional chiaroscuro, the rich interplay of light and shadow, that was Giorgione's chief strength. Giorgione modeled every form with exquisite subtlety and bathed all together in soft, golden light. Manet's traditional contemporaries tried to do the same, and failed, getting a gloomy, tobacco-juice effect. But people were used to it, and found their way about in the sunless brown caves of contemporary painting as readily as bats. The "transparent atmosphere" that Manet had striven for and achieved was blinding to them. They saw it as an arbitrary patchwork of overbright colors.