Composition for its Own Sake   Image: Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), Edouard Manet, 1863

Edouard Manet

Gustave Courbet had often tried to paint a group of figures out-of-doors in a landscape, and his conspicuous lack of success inspired two younger painters in the 1860's to offer their solutions to what was at the time a considerable artistic problem. In such a fashion does art progress. The two painters were Edouard Manet and Claude Monet, and the similarity of their names led to frequent confusion, though in their early careers they were developing in very different directions. Edouard Manet was the older of the two by some eight years, and he succeeded Courbet in the 1860's as the leader of the avant-garde painters. This was not altogether to his liking, for he was by temperament no revolutionary. He regarded himself, quite rightly, as a traditionalist. He was not much troubled by a desire to record his visual sensations, nor does he appear to have attached great importance to subject matter, though he knew he preferred to draw for this upon modern life. It was pictorial composition that mattered most to him, or what we might call the science of picture making. As a painter Manet was extremely well educated: he had made a profound study of the painting of the past and did not hesitate to use his knowledge - so much so, that he has at times been unjustly accused of plagiarism. Yet he sought always a specifically modern kind of composition, one that would accord with the new feeling, first apparent in Courbet, for the essential flatness of a picture and for the fact that before all else it is an object complete and self-sufficient. Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) and Olympia, for example, contain echoes of earlier pictures, by Giorgione and Titian and Goya among others, but have an overall flavor that is quite distinct and original. Manet made his figures much flatter than those of any predecessor (Courbet called Olympia a "playing-card queen") by placing the source of light as if it were in front of a picture, never at the sides. He exaggerated the contrast between light and dark, eliminating the in-between gray tones and so further flatting all the forms.

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