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Indepth Arts News:
"Manet: The Still-Life Paintings"
2001-01-28 until 2001-04-22
Walters Art Gallery
Baltimore, MD,
USA United States of America
Edouard Manet created some of the most revered paintings
of the 19th century, and his unconventional genius had a
profound impact on the art world. Referred to by many as
the Father of Impressionism, Manet was a mentor to a
group of young artists that included Monet, Degas, and
Cézanne. See his extraordinary talent in full bloom as
Manet: The Still-Life Paintings opens at the Walters Art
Museum on January 28, 2001 after its world premiere at the
Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The exhibition will remain on view at
the Walters, its exclusive North American venue, through
April 22, 2001.
Manet: The Still-Life Paintings features 55 works of art,
including a number of rarely seen works by this
19th-century master. Some 37 oils, as well as a selection of
works on paper in a variety of media, are drawn from
museums and private collections around the world,
representing the entire range of Manet's production in the
genre. Portraits and figure paintings into which the artist
incorporated still lifes are also included, notably Portrait of
Théodore Duret (1868) and Woman with a Pitcher
(1858-60). Samples of the artist's private correspondence,
which he decorated with deft, intimate renderings of flowers
and fruit, are also included.
Although Manet is celebrated for the revolutionary character of his figure paintings, such as his
1863 masterwork Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), approximately 80
of Manet's paintings — one-fifth of his output — were dedicated to the still life. A painter can
say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds, the artist once remarked. Manet
devoted himself to the genre he considered the touchstone of the painter with varying degrees
of intensity. Between 1862 and 1869 Manet produced 22 still-life paintings; only 10 are known
from the 1870s; and, finally, he painted 50 still lifes between 1880 and 1883.
Guest curator George Mauner, Distinguished Professor
Emeritus of Art History and Fellow Emeritus and Past
Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies
at Pennsylvania State University, organized the exhibition
chronologically into 11 groupings. In this way, the full range
of Manet's stylistic and technical development is revealed,
from the pre-Impressionist work of the 1860s, including
Oysters (1862), considered Manet's first still-life painting,
to the mature mastery of the paintings produced shortly
before his death in 1883.
The final group, produced during the artist's last months,
when illness confined him largely to his room, consists of
paintings of the bouquets brought to him by his many
friends and admirers. Of these, Mauner says, Every trace of
self-consciousness has been eliminated. Vase of Flowers,
White Lilacs [1882], Manet's admirable fusion of the
ebullience of the subject and the simplicity of its
presentation, provides the perfect conclusion to the
exhibition.
IMAGE:
Edouard Manet
Still-Life with Brioche, 1880,
oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh;
William R. Scott Jr. Fund, 1984
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