The first exhibition devoted to Edouard Manet in over 30 years will open in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay this spring. ‘The Man who Invented Modern Art’ will explore the historical situation around the 19th-century painter, including the reaffirmed legacy of Romanticism, the impact of his contemporaries and the changes in the media at the time. The exhibition will also take another look at the many links that the painter resolutely created and rejected within both public and political spheres. For modernity was also a question of integration and of resistance. The exhibition will focus on the teaching of Thomas Couture, Baudelaire’s support and encouragement, the reform of religious art, erotic imagery, the art of the fragment(ed), his relationship with women painters (Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès), the temptations of high society, his decision to remain outside the main Impressionism movement and his complicity with Mallarmé at his darkest.
5 April – 3 July 2011.
Musée National d’Orsay, 1 rue de la Légion d’Honneur, 7th. www.musee-orsay.fr
Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1882
Wish I could be there!