The Avant-Garde and Manet

For a work to be considered "avant-garde" or, on the forefront of the fight, it must break the rules.  There are two accepted ways of looking at work in the avant-garde.  Some work is art for the sake of art, like Manet.  Other work is art that relates to morals, but breaks the standards set by the French Academy of Art in order to get that point across.  Much of the accepted work of the day was very like the Classic works.  No brushstrokes were to be seen, the subject matter was expected to be either historical or related to or depicting a moral and/or story. As most people know, artists like Monet worked in impasto, bringing the fact that the images portrayed were in fact made of paint and not the real things to the surface.  Similarly, Manet worked in a "fast and loose" style that suggested he simply slapped the paint on the canvas, with blobs and patches of color filling in the background instead of incredibly detailed landscapes.  He carefully crafted his controversial paintings to look the way they do in order to incite the particular reactions his work received at the time of it's showing.

 When Edouard Manet was shown in the Salon de Refuse, people laughed because they didn't understand his subject matter, the way he made it obvious the work was a work of art and not a window into another world.  Manet's work Le déjeuner sur l'herbe is one of the first pieces to come out of the avant-garde movement.  This painting directly defies all of the Academy's artistic standards; this isn't because he didn't understand them, or why they existed.  Manet was quite the artist.  He defied the Academy because he didn't believe that art needed to adhere to such strict rules and guidelines.  Not only was his artistic style controversial, his subject matter was also challenging to the viewer at the time.  The nude woman looks out at the viewer, acknowledging their presence, but not beckoning to the viewer at all.  She isn't even overtly sexual.  Her clothes are discarded to the side with the picnic; the man on the right wears a smoking cap normally only seen inside.  The men are speaking to each other, but seemingly ignoring the female.  It makes a person wonder whether they are including her in their conversation.  Is she a prostitute?  She certainly wouldn't be one of their wives.