Luncheon On The Grass

Title

Luncheon On The Grass

Artist

Edouard Manet

Medium

Digital Art - Digital Reproduction

Description

In 1863 French Impressionist painter Edouard Manet shocked the art world with his painting Luncheon on the Grass.

The outrage at Manet's painting stems from the still-current tradition of hypocrisy. Despite the fact that it was quite obvious that real life nude models were the inspiration for all those mythological creatures and Greek and Roman goddesses cavorting around naked in so many paintings, it was acceptable because they weren't really naked women. Manet's real crime, therefore, wasn't in presenting all the naughty bits that had, after all, been on display in paintings for centuries, but rather that he was contributing to a blurring of the distinction between the real and the artifice. The fantasy nude women in paintings was, with just a few thousand brush strokes by one man, replaced by the ordinary. Oddly, a fully nude Greek goddess complete with exposed breasts and hairless pubes was preferable to the side view of one breast and no genitalia on the woman in Manet's painting.

What was at the center of the scandal, whether the critics wanted to admit it or not, was that Manet's nudity was attacked because it was ugly and degenerate. Strange, that. It was less degenerate to show a fully mature woman with no pubic hair than to cover up the crotch of another woman. The depth of the attack and the revelation that all of this was pure hypocrisy can be illustrated by virtue of the fact that some critics went so far as to disparage the body of the model in Manet's painting. Oddly enough, one described her as not having a good figure. Can't help but wonder what his opinion was of Rubens' ladies of largess might have been.

Today, of course, one would look at the Manet painting and yawn. For its time, however, it was as controversial as anything by Robert Mapplethorpe and it bears repeating as a lesson in the hypocrisy that often surrounds censorship.

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March 29th, 2013

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