Édouard Manet and Georges Seurat
Spectacle and irony of Parisian life
Modernity in painting, when form meets the subject
Courbet and politics
Olympia and A Bar
at the Folies Bergère
Édouard Manet and Georges Seurat are two of the great forerunners of Modern and Abstract art, but this should not obscure the fact that they also invented a new pictorial form that captured the extraordinary acceleration of the second half of the nineteenth century.
3. Argenteuil by Manet
Meaning in formal mismanagment
The formal study of Argenteuil shows that Édouard Manet disregarded conventional perspective, mistreated verisimilitude and neglected the finish, but it is thanks to this abrupt form that he was able to capture the social and sanitary reality of the banks of the Seine.
4. Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon...
Political lecture
The Modernists hailed Georges Seurat as a revolutionary of form: he was the inventor of colour division, the first to base his technique on optical mixing. But this radical innovation can also be seen as a way of translating a social and political discourse onto canvas.
Readings Timothy James Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Princetone University Press, 1985
Iconographic study