Art History - Modernism

Taking one painting as a case study, explore the relationship of Manet with Modernism and Modernity.

Edouard Manet (1832 – 1883) is often cited as the father of Modernism – a concept that arose in the late stages of the 19th Century, in response changes in western thinking at the time, notably seen in the rise of the industrial revolution, the middle class and the shift from religion to scientific thought. Through this period of change, Manet’s work evolved, which tends us to believe that his work was influenced heavily by societal change, which can to an extent be deduced from his controversial painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. Modernity itself often lends the definition of a break from the past, and in a context of the arts in the time of Manet, can be interpreted as the “conflict between the Avant Garde (that is the new, experimental and unorthodox) and the reactionaries”, or the French Academy at the time, who more or less regulated what art was seen by the public, and set rigorous standards upon which art was created. It is this “Academic Art” that helps us define the Modernist qualities of Manet and helps us to see why the formal definition of Modernity is not so much of a break with the past, but an evolution of tradition, at least with painting.

Manet himself was an academic painter, having been taught at the French Academy. This characteristic leads to his “lifelong conviction that the Salon was the place to complete” , and this, I believe helps us to understand Greenburg’s explanation of modernism. He states: “The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence”. In the context of Manet’s work, we can draw on the fact that although he moved away from the techniques of the Academy, his long lasting affiliation with the academy represented that he was indeed using what he learnt and was growing on these...