Edouard Manet

 Édouard Manet (1832-1883)

Edouard Manet , born on January 23 , 1832 in Paris and died on April 30 , 1883 in Paris, is a painter and engraver French major of the late xix th  century. Forerunner of modern painting, which he frees from academicism, Édouard Manet is wrongly considered as one of the fathers of Impressionism : he is distinguished from it by an anxious invoice real that does not use (or little) the new techniques of color and the special treatment of light. However, he approaches it by certain recurring themes such as portraits, seascapes, Parisian life and still lifes, while painting in a personal way, in a first period, scenes of genre: Spanish subjects in particular according to Velasquez and odalisques after Titian.

He refuses to study law and he fails the career of a naval officer. The young between Manet in 1850 in the studio of painter Thomas Couture where he completed his training as a painter, leaving in 1856. In 1860 , he presented his first paintings including the portrait of Mr. and M me Auguste Manet.

His following paintings, Lola de Valence , The Widow Woman , Bull Fight , The Lunch on the Grass or Olympia , are scandalous.

His work includes marines like Clair de Lune on the port of Boulogne (1869) or races: The Races in Longchamp in 1864 which are worth to the painter a beginning of recognition.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 in which he participated, Manet supports the Impressionists among whom he has close friends like Claude Monet , Auguste Renoir or Berthe Morisot who becomes his sister-in-law and whose famous portrait will be noticed. among those he will make of her, Berthe Morisot with the bouquet of violets (1872).

Manet manages to give noble letters to the still lifes, a genre that until then had occupied a decorative, secondary place in painting. Towards the end of his life (1880-1883), he endeavored to represent flowers, fruits and vegetables by applying them dissonant color chords, at the time when the pure color died, which André Malraux is one of the first to emphasize in The Voices of Silence . The most representative of this evolution is Asparagus, which testifies to its ability to go beyond all conventions.

Édouard Manet died of gangrene at age 51 in 1883 and left more than four hundred canvases, pastels, sketches and watercolors. His greatest works are visible in most of the world's museums, especially at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

Edouard Manet, sick, stayed in 1879 with his wife for six weeks in the hydrotherapy facility founded by Dr. Louis Désiré Fleury in Meudon- Bellevue. When he returned for a cure of four months in May 1880, he stayed on the path of the Pierres Blanches where he painted several paintings. He even obtained a prize at the Salon of 1881 and was decorated with the Legion of Honor by his friend Antonin Proust became Minister of Fine Arts: the award is decided despite oppositions late 1881 and the ceremony takes place on1 st January 1882.

Weakened for several years, he painted during the last two years paintings of small format that he performs sitting (many small still lifes of fruits and flowers), but especially portraits of his pastelvisitors , less tiring technique than painting with oil. It eventually turns offApril 30, 1883at 39, rue St. Petersburg at the age of 51, following a locomotor ataxia resulting itself from syphiliscontracted in Rio. The disease, in addition to the many sufferings and partial paralysis of the limbs that it had caused, then degenerated into a gangrene that forced him to amputate the left foot eleven days before his death.

The burial takes place on May 3, 1883in the cemetery of Passy , in the presence of Émile Zola , Alfred Stevens , Claude Monet , Edgar Degas and many others of his former acquaintances. According to Antonin Proust , his comrade always, saw in the funeral procession "crowns, flowers, many women . " Degas, meanwhile, would have said of Manet that "he was bigger than we thought".

His grave is in the 4 th division of the cemetery, an epitaph engraved by Félix Bracquemond in 1890 "  Manet and manebit  " (Latin: "It is and will remain" , pun on the artist's name) can sum up the general feeling of the arts world after his disappearance. He is buried with his wife Suzanne, with his brother Eugene and with his sister-in-law Berthe . His bust adorning his tomb is the work of the Dutch sculptor and painter Ferdinand Leenhoff , brother of the companion of Manet.

Manet decried, insulted, ridiculed became the recognized leader of "avant-garde". If the painter was linked to the actors of the Impressionist movement , he is wrongly considered today as one of his fathers. He is a powerful inspiration as much for his painting as for his favorite themes. His way of painting, concerned with reality, is fundamentally different from that of Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro . Some of his works are close to Impressionism, such as L'Évasion de Rochefort , Portrait of Claude Monet painting on his boat workshop in Argenteuil and A path in the garden of Rueil . If Manet was kept out of impressionism, however, he supported his representatives, especially his sister Berthe Morisot at the first exhibition of the first exhibition of impressionist painters.

The master leaves more than 400 paintings and countless pastels , sketches and watercolors that constitute a major pictorial work with a certain influence on the artists of his time, such as the Batignolles group and beyond: Manet is indeed recognized internationally as one of the most important precursors of modern painting; his major paintings are visible in the largest museums in the world. It was in 1907 , irony of the history of painting, that Olympia "refused" in 1863, between, 44 years after its creation, the Louvre Museum (it is now preserved at the Musée d'Orsay ).

Edouard Manet has an important place in the novel of Olivier Rolin A lion hunter (2008), with the comical and ridiculous adventurer Eugene Pertuiset which he painted in 1881 the portrait "in Tartarin".

In the year 2000 , one of his paintings sold for more than twenty million dollars. In 2014, at Christie'sin New York , the painting Spring , owned by a collector and his family for over a hundred years, was awarded for $ 65 million (€ 52 million).

The June 22, 2010, An Edouard Manet self-portrait was sold to London 22.4 million pounds (€ 27 million), a record for a work by the French painter.

In 2012 , following an auction, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford was able to acquire the Portrait of Mademoiselle Claus painted in 1868 , thanks to a public subscription of £ 7.83 million. The painting was banned from Britain's export by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art .

His only known pupil was Eva Gonzales (1849-1883), presented to him in 1869 by Alfred Stevens . She met in the studio Manet Berthe Morisot , who was jealous of her friendship with the master. He made a painting of her painting a still life in 1870, a canvas now preserved in the collections of the National Gallery Museum in London.