Oh, my dear friends. Please, let’s not approach Art or the so-called “Noble Spirit” with such deeply furrowed brows. One mustn’t be so stiff. Why not relax those shoulders, knock back a glass of cheap sake, and let me tell you a story—a story about a most exquisite prank called “Painting.”
The man I simply must speak of today is Édouard Manet. This astonishing “insincere genius” who appeared in nineteenth-century Paris is, in fact, the benefactor who shattered this cramped, suffocating world we live in with a single stroke of his brush.
To begin with, the man was an unbearable “young master.” Born the son of a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Justice, he was always dressed in the height of Parisian fashion, strolling down the boulevards swinging a cane—the very pinnacle of a “dandy.” Ordinarily, such a wealthy, stuck-up dilettante would have been content to paint pretty landscapes, crawl through the gates of the prestigious Salon, receive praise from the authorities, and end his life in quiet respectability. However, within this man’s heart, it seems there lived a “mischievous child” far beyond anyone’s control.
One day, he dropped a literal bombshell onto the streets of Paris. That was the famous Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass). For the people of that time, it wasn’t just shocking; it was enough to send their blood pressure skyrocketing with rage. After all, right next to gentlemen in black frock coats enjoying a picnic, a stark-naked woman sits with the coolest face imaginable.
Furthermore, she isn’t a goddess from mythology or anything of the sort—she’s just a common girl of Paris.
“Indecent!” “Obscene!” “The technique is amateurish!” The public was in an uproar. Yet, Manet didn’t give a fig. It’s not that he wanted to engage in some erotic harassment. He simply wanted to paint the “now” exactly as it was. Until then, there was a tacit understanding that paintings of nudes required a plausible “excuse,” such as history or mythology. Manet mocked that hypocrisy. He was saying, “Hey, everyone. You actually want to look at naked bodies, don’t you? Then just look at them without all the excuses.”
Moreover, his greatest trick lay in the “way” he painted. Until then, a masterpiece was expected to be as smooth as a photograph, showing not a single trace of a brushstroke. Manet’s paintings, however, were somehow flat and pasty, with forceful, jarring shadows. Perspective? Thrown out the window. The “great masters” reviled him as “unskilled,” but this was the very blow that changed history.
Manet had realized something: painting is not about peering into a world beyond a window; it is the act itself of placing pigment upon a flat piece of cloth called a canvas. This “discovery of the flat plane” was the moment he kicked down the door to modern painting—the very door that led to Monet, Renoir, and eventually Picasso. If Manet had read the room and painted like a “good boy,” our world today would surely be a far duller, colorless place.
Here is a lesson for us all. The world is full of invisible cages labeled “This is correct” or “It must be so.” But, like Manet, we should believe in the “now” reflected in our own eyes. With a little courage and a generous helping of humor, we ought to just throw ink at those cages. There is no need to fear criticism. Even Manet’s Olympia was bashed at the time for having “the color of a corpse,” yet today she reigns like a queen in the Musée d’Orsay.
In the end, perhaps true art—and a happy life—begins not by following someone else’s rules, but by loving your own “sense of displacement.” Manet wore the most luxurious clothes while painting what was called the most vulgar art. Isn’t that very contradiction the most endearing thing about being human?
Now then, tonight, let us look at our own lives through eyes that are a bit cynical, yet somehow provocative—just like the barmaid in Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Life, much like a Manet painting, is just a clump of pigment when viewed up close; but if you step back and observe from a distance, it is unexpectedly vivid and beautiful.