Word: manet
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Throughout his life, but especially toward its end in 1883, that lion of early modernism, Edouard Manet, loved to paint still lifes. Even in his portraits, his arrangements of things--books, bottles, crockery, flowers, food--are given a prominence that nearly puts them on a par with people. His art wasn't dominated by still life, as Cubism would be; but the inanimate has a large and vital presence in his work. That much is evident from the beautiful show at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, curated by George Maunet, "Manet: The Still-Life Paintings." What one might...
...Manet's paintings rarely sold (luckily, he had some money of his own). For most of his short career--he was 51 when he died--he was ferociously assailed by nearly every critic and journalist in Paris. (Some of them actually liked his still lifes and reserved their scorn for his portraits and figures.) His greatest paintings, Olympia and Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, which today are among the unquestioned masterpieces of the 19th century and are seen by many as the twin pillars that mark and hold up the entrance to modernism, were pilloried by every man of taste...
...Valois was a classical ballerina by training, but as a director she often mounted wildly experimental productions, sending dancers to perform barefoot. A writer and an art lover, she sometimes brought drawings to life on her stage: Bar aux Folies-Bergere (1934), for instance, was inspired by a Manet painting of a Parisian lounge...
...Balthus' talents did not run to avant-garde ambitions. He was entirely a figurative painter--there was no abstract phase to his work--and his reverence for past masters, from Piero and Poussin to Courbet and Manet, was so absolute that his work is a virtually seamless homage to them, not so much in subject matter as in studiously quoted poses and meticulously conscious structures. His power of organization was awesome; his spread of quotation, wide. What caused the individual citations to hang together, though, was his eye for nature. Nowhere is this clearer than in his huge composition...
...call him, wandering the Quartier Latin and the narrow, flea-market streets of Montmartre. In the last twenty-five years alone, Paris has seen the sculptures of Rodin, the ballerinas of Degas, the water lilies of Monet, the dreamy Provencal mountains of Cezanne--not to mention to paintings of Manet, Seurat, Bonnard, Renoir and many more. Meanwhile, Toulouse-Lautrec is presiding over the Moulin Rouge nightclub, Paul Gauguin has taken ship for Tahiti and set about painting the native girls--and poor, mad Van Gogh is only ten years in the grave...