Manet Day again – the great Edouard's 194th birthday – and I realise that I've never posted on the subject of one of his best-known and most mysterious paintings, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe. There might be a reason for this, as I'm not sure there's much that can usefully be said about it. It's certainly not helpful to apply reductionist Marxist/feminist/sociological critiques to the Déjeuner (as has been often done), but I guess it's worth tracing the painting's affinity with works by Giorgione and Titian (The Pastoral Concert, The Tempest), Raimondi/Raphael (The Judgment of Paris), even Watteau (La Partie Carrée) – as ever, in art and literature alike, the way to the future is by way of the past. However, the Déjeuner remains, and I imagine will for ever remain, a strange and deeply mysterious painting, one in which nothing looks quite 'right'. I lived for some months with a print of it over the fireplace in my university rooms and must have spent many hours staring at it and wondering. It's a painting of strange beauty and tremendous power – hence its long afterlife and 'iconic' status – and I could happily spend more hours staring at it, but I don't think I'd emerge with anything much more to say. Bon anniversaire, Monsieur Manet.
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