Conférence "Edouard Manet : un dandy iconoclaste"

Edouard Manet, the Iconoclastic Dandy

Born in 1832 into a wealthy family, he had a taste for beauty and perfection. Although his father intended for him to become a lawyer, he rebelled and asserted his calling as a painter. Trained in classicism and studio work, he quickly broke free from these constraints with provocative subjects in which women were nude and proud of it; his first two paintings exhibited at the Salons in Paris—*Luncheon on the Grass* and *Olympia*—would make him a controversial and unclassifiable painter, yet a well-known one.

Thanks to Baudelaire and Zola, he drew closer to the early Impressionists. His palette lightened under the influence of Renoir, Monet, and Berthe Morisot, who would become one of his favorite models and for whom he would harbor a secret passion.