Déjeuner sur l'herbe par Pablo Picasso

Towards the final years of Picasso’s life, he spent a lot of his time re imagining some famous pieces by other artists. In 1958 Picasso was discouraged by the building up around his beloved La Californie home in Cannes and one night after being with some friends he set his sights on a new home and bought it the next day. The Château de Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, would be where he and his second wife Jacqueline would live from 1959-1962. He fell out of love with it as fast as he fell into it and they moved onto a home in Mougins. However, while he was at Vauvenargues he spent the bulk of his time from 1959 to 1961 on 140 drawings and 27 paintings, lino-cuts and cardboard models all on the theme of Manet’s Le  Déjeuner sur l’herbe. 

When Manet painted this monumental piece in 1862, much like his painting Olympia, this one also was met with much controversy. Rejected from the Salon and displayed at the Salon des Refusés with his other Impressionist friends in 1863, the subject of a nude woman sitting between two fully clothed men was a scandal for the time. Although, Émile Zola proclaimed it “the greatest work of Édouard Manet”.

In 1932 Picasso said "When I see Manet's Luncheon on the Grass I tell myself there is pain ahead". On August 1, 1959 he began his dive into Manet’s masterpiece with a small drawing. The subject and structure of the painting was a bit out of the box for Picasso. He normally focused on one subject or model. Manet’s painting with four people was not what he was used to doing. His first drawing was the closest to Manet’s with all four subjects, but he quickly moved away from Manet’s original structure.

Picasso was known to be an extremely fast painter, when he would tackle this theme he would work in torrents of activity for months at a time before putting them down to come back to them later. He would play with the theme and the amount of people in the landscape, sometimes with three women in the back. Picasso would add the woman washing her feet that he would continue into other paintings. Removing the men all together at times, making the trees larger than life, but most of the time staying with the blue and green palette. He had never spent so much time devoted to one theme in his entire life.   

In March 1960, Picasso painted his first larger version of Déjeuner. Mostly green with a bit of blue focusing on the main figure, Victorine. Later versions included the men who Picasso decided needed to be nude as well. In the Musée National Picasso-Paris on the upper floor is a room dedicated to his Déjeuner paintings. They do change them out during the year and is one of my favorite rooms of this well done museum. Every time I walk into this room it brings a huge smile to my face. Hanging on the walls are just a few of his paintings, drawings and even a cardboard model. I usually spend a half an hour in this one small room, listening to the people as they walk in and comment on the paintings. Some even see the resemblance to Manet which pleases me to no end. I love how Picasso dated his paintings and drawings, knowing now when he started this series you can see how the paintings displayed fit into his timeline. 

On this date in 1973, the great Spanish painter would take his last breath in Mougins. He would be laid to rest at the Château de Vauvenargues, high above the hill in Provence. 

Portrait of Émile Zola by Manet

Emile Zola was born on this day, April 2, 1840. The French writer who is known for his famous headline J’ACCUSE in defense of Alfred Dreyfus but did you know he was also a marketing genius. It was Zola who while working for  Librairie Hachette in 1862 where he spent his days packing books, until one day they recognized a hidden talent. He told them they should paint signs to sit outside the doors of shops that people would see as they walked by, and with that the sandwich board was born.  

There are so many tales that can be told of Zola but this one I have been waiting months to share. Inside the Musée d’Orsay off of the main lower gallery in a small room are a few of Manet’s most amazing pieces.  In 1865 when Manet presented his painting Olympia to the jury it did not go over well. They hated it, they hated what she represented and how she was positionioned and rejected it from the Salon. However one day, the young writer Emile Zola heard about the painting and wanted to see it. A friend of Cézanne, he was already a great fan of the arts and the artists. He thought Olympia was a masterpiece by an artist that was a master of the future, deserving to hang in the Louvre. 

Zola did what he did best and took pen to paper. At the time he was enthralled with what was happening in Paris with the artists that were being turned away from the hallowed Salon and being forced to build their own exhibition. He wrote a pamphlet in defense of Manet titled “La Revue du XXe Siecle”. He would write another one the next year when Manet went out on his own to set up his very own exhibit during the Universal Exposition that many other artists mocked him for. 

In a way of thanking his new friend, Manet offered to paint him. He invited him to his studio on Rue Guyot in 1868. Manet set the scene on the desk with elements of Zola's personality and himself. You can see the blue pamphlet that started their friendship on his desk while the quill and inkwell remind us of Zola’s life as a writer. 

Zola is reading “L’Histoire des Peintres” by Charles Blanc, a book both men loved. Although, it is what hangs above the desk that makes me love this painting so much. The print of the Japanese wrestler by Utagawa Kuniaki II suggesting the influence the Japanese woodblock paintings had on the art style at the time. The screen behind Zola is another nod to the influence of the East on the artists. 

To the left of that is an engraving by Velazquez of Bacchus hints at their shared love for Spanish art peaks out from the top of Olympia. 

I have a fascination anytime there is a painting within a painting. So many questions come to mind, why is it there, what does it mean to the artist and what are they trying to tell us. For this one, it is quite simple.  Olympia represents not only the way the two men met and a painting Zola loved, but it was also Manet’s way of righting the wrong of the Salon of 1865. 

Adding Olympia into the painting of the man that in a way legitimized her meant so much to Manet.  He made one small adjustment in this version, he changed the direction of her eyes away from the viewer and onto Zola himself. 

In May of 1868, he entered the painting of Zola into the Salon. This time they welcomed it with open arms. Was it Manet’s work or was it that they were more afraid of what the pen of Zola would say about them? Hanging in room M of the 1868 Salon there was Zola high up on the wall, but even more so, there was Olympia hanging above the same people that rejected her so vehemently just a few years before. 

The painting remained in the personal collection of Emile Zola, hanging in his home until 1925, twenty three years after his death, when his wife Alexandrine left it in her will to the Musée du Louvre. It would hang in the Louvre until 1986 and then move over to the newly opened Musée d’Orsay. 

And in the end Zola was correct, Manet was an artist that would become a master and hang in the Louvre.