Lecture: «Edouard Manet: an iconoclastic dandy»

Description

Édouard Manet, the iconoclastic dandy
Born in 1832 into a wealthy family, he had a taste for beauty and perfection. Although his father intended him to become a lawyer, he rebelled and asserted his calling as a painter. Trained in classicism and studio work, he soon broke free from these constraints with provocative subjects in which women were naked and proud of it; his first two paintings exhibited at the Salons in Paris, *Le déjeuner sur l’herbe* and *Olympia*, would make him a scandalous and unclassifiable painter, yet a well-known one. .

Thanks to Baudelaire and Zola, he drew closer to the early Impressionists. His colour palette became lighter through his contact with Renoir, Monet and Berthe Morisot, who would become one of his favourite models and for whom he would harbour a secret passion.