Thirty-five contemporary artists create their own version of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) is generally cited as the first modern painting. The entry slide in art history lectures about modernism, the work remains among the “most audacious painting[s] ever seen in France,” as Ross King described it in The Judgement of Paris (2006).

As Manet did with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the most provocative painters today collapse the historical and the contemporary onto one plane. Jeffrey Deitch invited a group of these influential artists to create their own versions, combined here with historical responses to Manet’s painting. The slim volume features these often biting and satirical works alongside essays discussing Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’s enduring influence on contemporary figurative painting.

About the Authors:

Jeffrey Deitch has helped to build the careers of some of many leading contemporary artists as a gallerist and curator. He is the former Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics.

Marina Molarsky-Beck studies twentieth-century art, with a focus on interwar photography and histories of gender and sexuality.

Thomas E. Crow is an American art historian and art critic who is best known for his influential writing on the role of art in modern society and culture.

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Lampooned during his lifetime for his style as much as his subject matter, French painter Édouard Manet (1832–1883) is now considered a crucial figure in the history of art, bridging the transition from Realism to Impressionism.

Manet’s work combined a painterly technique with strikingly modern images of contemporary life, centered on the urban Paris experience. He recorded the city’s parks, bars, and cabarets, often delighting in the frisson of underground or provocative content. The Paris salon rejected his Déjeuner sur l’herbe with its juxtaposition of fully dressed men and a nude woman, while the steady gaze and unabashed pose of the prostitute Olympia, a very modern reworking of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, caused a society scandal.

This richly illustrated book introduces Manet’s work and his uniquely influential combination of Realism, Impressionism, and reworked Old Masters that would become paradigms of a brave new world for generations of modernists to come.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:

- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
- a concise biography
- approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

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 Series:
Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Art Series features:

• a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
• a concise biography
• approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions

The author:
Gilles Néret (1933–2005) was an art historian, journalist, writer and museum correspondent. 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'Œil and Connaissance des Arts and received the Elie Faure Prize in 1981 for his publications. His TASCHEN titles include Salvador Dalí: The Paintings, Matisse, and Erotica Universalis.

Few artists have created as much controversy or survived it with greater fame than Edouard Manet.

In his day, the avant-garde was not only a challenge to the traditions of art, but it was also a gunshot fired at society as a whole.

With his painting Olympia (1869), Manet was to become, to quote Degas, as famous as Garibaldi. Yet how the urbane and diffident son of a bourgeois family became the father of both Realism and Impressionism is a complex and fascinating story that has too often been reduced to textbook clichés.

As Manet has become recognized as a touchstone for historical change but also for interpretations of how that change came about, his individual story has become all the more relevant to the study of art history.

Moreover, far from being an artists to shrink behind his work, one of Manets most characteristic practices was to leave an indelible trace of his own personal identity within his paintings, as illustrated throughout the volume by eminent scholar James H. Rubin.

This lavishly illustrated volume is presented in a handsome box set, and offers a comprehensive and original angle of study on the great master.