In 1863, when Edouard Manet was 31, he changed the course of art. He did it in the only way possible, by producing a picture that was both revolutionary and great. His reward was laughter.
Like all revolutionaries of real stature, Manet was not a bit afraid of the past. He drew from an extreme variety of sources, thereby established a broad and solid base for his own experiments.* Manet's reworkings of Hals, Goya and Giorgione, among others, led Oswald (The Decline of the West) Spengler to regard his work as the last gasp of...
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