Luncheon on the Grass ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," 1863) was
one of a number of impressionist works that broke away from the
classical view that art should obey established conventions and
seek to achieve timelessness. The painting was rejected by the
salon that displayed painting approved by the official French
academy. The rejection was occasioned not so much by the female
nudes in Manet's painting, a classical subject, as by their
presence in a modern setting, accompanied by clothed, bourgeois
men. The incongruity suggested that the women were not goddesses
but models, or possibly prostitutes.
Yet in Le dejeuner sur l'herbe, Manet was paying tribute
to Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from The
Pastoral Concert - a painting by Titian
attributed at the time to Giorgione (Louvre) - and taking his
inspiration for the composition of the central group from the
Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael's Judgement of
Paris.But the classical references were counterbalanced by Manet's
boldness. The presence of a nude woman among clothed men is
justified neither by mythological nor allegorical precedents.
This, and the contemporary dress, rendered the strange and almost
unreal scene obscene in the eyes of the public of the day. Manet
himself jokingly nicknamed his painting "la partie carree".
Manet displayed the painting instead at the Salon des
Refuses, an alternative salon established by those who had been
refused entry to the official one. Like his friend Courbet, Manet
influenced modern painting not only by his use of realistic
subject matter but also by his challenge to the three-dimensional
perspectivalism established in Renaissance painting. Manet painted
figures with a flatness derived partly from Japanese art and
resembling (as Gustave
Courbet commented) the flatness of the king or queen on a playing
card.
Luncheon on the Grass - testimony to Manet's
refusal to conform to convention and his initiation of a new
freedom from traditional subjects and modes of representation -
can perhaps be considered as the departure point for Modern Art.
The modernist reinvention of pictorial space had begun.
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