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Manet
The inventor of modernity Violently criticized during his lifetime for his supposedly provocative paintings, French painter Edouard Manet (1832-1883) is now considered a master of inestimable importance in the history of painting. His 1863 painting "Déjeuner sur l’herbe" depicting two clothed men picnicing with a nude woman—now considered one of the most memorable images of the 19th century—stirred up controversy for what many considered its vulgar audacity. It was famously rejected by the Paris Salon and exhibited in the Salon des Refusés. Manet’s bold style helped pave the way from Realism to Impressionism, and in doing so ushered in the age of modern art. About the
Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series
Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art series
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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About the author
Gilles Néret
127 books49 followersGilles Néret (1933 - August 3, 2005) was a French art critic and historian, journalist and curator. He wrote extensively on the history of erotica.
He organized several art retrospectives in Japan and founded the SEIBU museum and the Wildenstein Gallery in Tokyo. He directed art reviews such as L’Oeil and Connaissance des Arts and received the Elie Faure Prize in 1981 for his publications. Since 1992, Néret was an editor for Taschen, for which he has written catalogues raisonnés of the works of Klimt and others, as well as the author of Erotica Universalis.
He organized several art retrospectives in Japan and founded the SEIBU museum and the Wildenstein Gallery in Tokyo. He directed art reviews such as L’Oeil and Connaissance des Arts and received the Elie Faure Prize in 1981 for his publications. Since 1992, Néret was an editor for Taschen, for which he has written catalogues raisonnés of the works of Klimt and others, as well as the author of Erotica Universalis.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 10, 2025
Como siempre pasa con Taschen, una maquetación muy cuidada y una maravilla de imágenes.
Ahora, en cuanto al texto, ha sido bastante flojo (cosa que no siempre ocurre, por mucho que algunos digan).
Tengo la sensación de haber descubierto poco nuevo y que alguien que no conozca de antemano Manet y su mundo, se encontrará perdido en esta lectura.
Da la sensación de que tan solo profundiza un poco en tres obras, dedicando demasiado tiempo al chisme mal explicado sobre un fucker francés decimonónico.
Ahora, en cuanto al texto, ha sido bastante flojo (cosa que no siempre ocurre, por mucho que algunos digan).
Tengo la sensación de haber descubierto poco nuevo y que alguien que no conozca de antemano Manet y su mundo, se encontrará perdido en esta lectura.
Da la sensación de que tan solo profundiza un poco en tres obras, dedicando demasiado tiempo al chisme mal explicado sobre un fucker francés decimonónico.
September 20, 2025
Taschen’in bu sanat serisinin diğer kitaplarını mutlaka okuyacağım. Yazarın Manet'nin hayatını ve eserlerini anlatışı, tablolarını inceliyişi çok güzeldi. Umarım serinin diğer kitaplarını da bunun kadar severim. Édouard Manet'ye olan ilgim artmış bulunmakta.
August 1, 2019
gotta love manet man
nicely written
awesome paintings
nicely written
awesome paintings
April 6, 2019
3,5/5. Sympathique livre biographique orienté vers l'oeuvre picturale de Manet et un aperçu de son contexte. La qualité de reproduction des d'oeuvres n'est pas incroyable mais un panorama tout de même assez vaste de la production du peintre. Pas mal pour une approche rapide, mais largement insuffisant dans le cadre d'une étude plus poussée.
April 1, 2025
"Is there any difference between this and the campaigns waged today by certain 'right-thinking' minorities in their effort to impose their sexual taboos on an indifferent majority?" Now what in the hell is that supposed to mean, Mr. Néret?
Two great quotes from Manet:
"Art is a circle. It's a matter of chance whether you're born inside or out."
"Drawing is not form, but the way forms are seen."
And a fun fact: Manet had syphilis, which he doubtlessly got from one of the many, many nineteenth century sex workers he frequented. He died hard in 1883 after locomotor ataxia took his left leg.
Two great quotes from Manet:
"Art is a circle. It's a matter of chance whether you're born inside or out."
"Drawing is not form, but the way forms are seen."
And a fun fact: Manet had syphilis, which he doubtlessly got from one of the many, many nineteenth century sex workers he frequented. He died hard in 1883 after locomotor ataxia took his left leg.
September 16, 2021
Das Gemälde "Olympia" ist wirklich gelungen.
Das Buch ist informativ und gut zu lesen, aber das hin und herblättern nervt etwas, wenn der Text sich auf mehrere Werke Bezieht, aber das ist anders auch kaum machbar.
Das Buch ist informativ und gut zu lesen, aber das hin und herblättern nervt etwas, wenn der Text sich auf mehrere Werke Bezieht, aber das ist anders auch kaum machbar.
March 19, 2022
Si más y tal
January 27, 2024
Buena información de Manet aunque faltan muchos de sus cuadros
March 6, 2025
end bit was casually pretty misogynistic lol
August 30, 2020
Beautiful reproductions and informative text, if a little bit stiff.
December 10, 2025
Gilles Néret’s compact monograph—published in Taschen’s widely circulated Basic Art series under the title Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns—functions less as a revisionist manifesto than as a lucid, image-forward argument for a familiar claim: that Manet inaugurates modern painting by refusing the consolations of academic narrative and classical imitation.
The central proposition is straightforward and rhetorically precise: Manet is “first” not by chronological luck but by method. The book traces how Manet’s painterly decisions—flattened pictorial space, abrupt brushwork, and the frank modernity of his subjects—undermined the optical illusions and moralizing narratives prized by the Salon yet opened a new, self-conscious language for representing modern life. Néret marshals the usual exemplars—Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Olympia, the cafés and bar scenes—not as curiosities but as way stations in a career that consistently interrogates the relation between representation and modern experience.
What distinguishes this book for the general reader and the teaching room is its discipline of selection. At roughly a hundred pages, the volume is spare: short, punchy essays accompany a generous array of plates so that the visual argument often speaks louder than the prose. This is precisely the book’s virtue and its limitation. For readers encountering Manet for the first time, the reproductions—carefully chosen and well printed—render the painter’s radical facture tactile: you can see the economy of colour, the deliberate “patches” of light and shadow, the insistently modern gaze of his sitters. For specialists, however, it’s synthetic moves sometimes read as declarative rather than interrogative; there is little archival excavation or engagement with recent historiographical disputes about Manet’s politics, patronage networks, or the shifting reception of his work across Europe.
Some avid readers will notice how the book treats Manet’s images as texts—compressed narratives that resist linear reading. Néret’s prose tends toward appositive, occasionally aphoristic statements: the painter’s “provocations” are named and then set beside formal descriptions. This rhetorical economy helps the volume move briskly but sometimes short-circuits the deeper cultural tensions embedded in works like Olympia—a painting that, as the. author reminds us, unsettled contemporaries because it refused the symbolic alibi of myth and instead staged a modern subject’s transactional visibility. In a brief, supple paragraph he outlines the scandal and its stakes; the reader is left to supply the larger social and economic contexts.
Where the book performs best is in calibration: the balance between close looking and art-historical claim. It resists the twin temptations of hagiography and iconoclasm. Manet emerges in these pages neither simply as a lonely genius nor as an opportunistic provocateur but as a painter who repeatedly tested the limits of painting itself—its ability to flatter, to narrate, to disguise. The book’s layout—image beside concise commentary—models an interpretive practice: see first, then explain; let the picture unsettle the sentence. For classroom use this format is exemplary.
A fair scholarly critique would press Néret further on three fronts. First, on method: the book would profit from a clearer account of its critical inheritances—how much he depends on the older narrative that aligns Manet with Courbet and Impressionism, and where he diverges. Second, on social context: the volume gestures at Parisian modernity but seldom unpacks the press controversies, exhibition politics, or market pressures that shaped Manet’s choices. Third, on nuance: the “first of the moderns” formulation is rhetorically satisfying but flattens a more complicated genealogical picture in which multiple artists and publics participate in the making of modernity. The book is thus best read as an elegantly argued prologue to deeper study rather than as an endpoint.
“Manet…” is a concise, beautiful primer—an image-rich, readable guide that argues persuasively for Manet’s primacy in the modern canon while inviting readers to follow up with more capacious scholarship. For readers who want to feel Manet’s brushwork and grasp the outlines of his contribution in a single sitting, this book is hard to beat. For those seeking archival depth or historiographical revision, Néret’s volume is a brisk, authoritative portal rather than a final word. Recommended for undergraduates, museum-goers, and any reader who prefers looking first and theorizing second.
The central proposition is straightforward and rhetorically precise: Manet is “first” not by chronological luck but by method. The book traces how Manet’s painterly decisions—flattened pictorial space, abrupt brushwork, and the frank modernity of his subjects—undermined the optical illusions and moralizing narratives prized by the Salon yet opened a new, self-conscious language for representing modern life. Néret marshals the usual exemplars—Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Olympia, the cafés and bar scenes—not as curiosities but as way stations in a career that consistently interrogates the relation between representation and modern experience.
What distinguishes this book for the general reader and the teaching room is its discipline of selection. At roughly a hundred pages, the volume is spare: short, punchy essays accompany a generous array of plates so that the visual argument often speaks louder than the prose. This is precisely the book’s virtue and its limitation. For readers encountering Manet for the first time, the reproductions—carefully chosen and well printed—render the painter’s radical facture tactile: you can see the economy of colour, the deliberate “patches” of light and shadow, the insistently modern gaze of his sitters. For specialists, however, it’s synthetic moves sometimes read as declarative rather than interrogative; there is little archival excavation or engagement with recent historiographical disputes about Manet’s politics, patronage networks, or the shifting reception of his work across Europe.
Some avid readers will notice how the book treats Manet’s images as texts—compressed narratives that resist linear reading. Néret’s prose tends toward appositive, occasionally aphoristic statements: the painter’s “provocations” are named and then set beside formal descriptions. This rhetorical economy helps the volume move briskly but sometimes short-circuits the deeper cultural tensions embedded in works like Olympia—a painting that, as the. author reminds us, unsettled contemporaries because it refused the symbolic alibi of myth and instead staged a modern subject’s transactional visibility. In a brief, supple paragraph he outlines the scandal and its stakes; the reader is left to supply the larger social and economic contexts.
Where the book performs best is in calibration: the balance between close looking and art-historical claim. It resists the twin temptations of hagiography and iconoclasm. Manet emerges in these pages neither simply as a lonely genius nor as an opportunistic provocateur but as a painter who repeatedly tested the limits of painting itself—its ability to flatter, to narrate, to disguise. The book’s layout—image beside concise commentary—models an interpretive practice: see first, then explain; let the picture unsettle the sentence. For classroom use this format is exemplary.
A fair scholarly critique would press Néret further on three fronts. First, on method: the book would profit from a clearer account of its critical inheritances—how much he depends on the older narrative that aligns Manet with Courbet and Impressionism, and where he diverges. Second, on social context: the volume gestures at Parisian modernity but seldom unpacks the press controversies, exhibition politics, or market pressures that shaped Manet’s choices. Third, on nuance: the “first of the moderns” formulation is rhetorically satisfying but flattens a more complicated genealogical picture in which multiple artists and publics participate in the making of modernity. The book is thus best read as an elegantly argued prologue to deeper study rather than as an endpoint.
“Manet…” is a concise, beautiful primer—an image-rich, readable guide that argues persuasively for Manet’s primacy in the modern canon while inviting readers to follow up with more capacious scholarship. For readers who want to feel Manet’s brushwork and grasp the outlines of his contribution in a single sitting, this book is hard to beat. For those seeking archival depth or historiographical revision, Néret’s volume is a brisk, authoritative portal rather than a final word. Recommended for undergraduates, museum-goers, and any reader who prefers looking first and theorizing second.
January 22, 2013
Ok, quick-to-read introduction with excellent selection of well reproduced colour illustrations. Doesn't get under Manet's skin or work however.
Pg 42 quotes the poet Andre Frenaud discussing Manet's Vase of Peonies on a Pedestal - 'it is, he says "a narrative of the death of a flower, or, to use a medical term of greater precision- cruelty, its decay curve. The process is read from right to left, finishing in the centre" and leads from bud through blossom to the fallen petals. This is a legitimate and exact metaphysical interpretation, though it should not occlude the fact thst Manet liked peonies and grew them in his garden.' BINGO!!
Pg 42 quotes the poet Andre Frenaud discussing Manet's Vase of Peonies on a Pedestal - 'it is, he says "a narrative of the death of a flower, or, to use a medical term of greater precision- cruelty, its decay curve. The process is read from right to left, finishing in the centre" and leads from bud through blossom to the fallen petals. This is a legitimate and exact metaphysical interpretation, though it should not occlude the fact thst Manet liked peonies and grew them in his garden.' BINGO!!
June 10, 2010
Not much to say. The photos are the usual fare and the writing stiff and artificial.
October 12, 2016
Wonderfully reproduced images, and a sharply argued essay.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews