How Édouard Manet Became “the Father of Impressionism” with the Scandalous Panting, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863)
Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) caused quite a stir when it made its public debut in 1863. Today, we might assume that the controversy surrounding the painting had to do with its containing a nude woman. But, in fact, it does not contain a nude woman — at least according to the analysis presented by gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above. “The woman in this painting is not nude,” he explains. “She is naked.” Whereas “the nude is posed, perfect, idealized, the naked is just someone with no clothes on,” and, in this particular work, her faintly accusatory expression seems to be asking us, “What are you looking at?”
Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured Manet’s even more scandalous Olympia, which was first exhibited in 1865. In both that painting and Déjeuner, the woman is based on the same real person: Victorine Meurent, whom Manet used more frequently than any other model.
“A respected artist in her own right,” Meurent also “exhibited at the Paris Salon six times, and was inducted into the prestigious Société des Artistes Français in 1903.” That she got on that path after a working-class upbringing “shows a fortitude of mind and a strength of character that Manet needed for Déjeuner.” But whatever personality she exuded, her non-idealized nudity, or rather nakedness, couldn’t have changed art by itself.
Manet gave Meurent’s exposed body an artistic context, and a maximally provocative one at that, by putting it on a large canvas “normally reserved for historical, religious, and mythological subjects” and making choices — the visible brushstrokes, the stage-like background, the obvious classical allusions in a clearly modern setting — that deliberately emphasize “the artificial construction of the painting, and painting in general.” What underscores all this, of course, is that the men sitting with her all have their highly eighteen-sixties-looking clothes on. Manet may have changed the rules, opening the door for Impressionism, but he still reminds us how much of art’s power, whatever the period or movement, comes from sheer contrast.
Related Content:
The Scandalous Painting That Helped Create Modern Art: An Introduction to Édouard Manet’s Olympia
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Puts Online 90,000 Works of Modern Art
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.