only sincerity

In brief, Manet was liberal and a humanitarian. He was a refined and cultivated man of the world, and it would be a mistake to think that his hunger for recognition (which was always bitterly disappointed) was a mere character trait. When presenting his personal exhibition in 1867, he wrote: “It is only sincerity that gives my work a character that could seem to be one of protest. In fact, the artist has tried only to express his impressions. He has no desire to overturn tradition or to create a new kind of painting. He has simply tried to be himself, and not someone else…”
[…]
From beginning to end, Manet’s life was really an impassioned affirmation of a single right—that of expressing a world of feelings that he had really experienced. The refined “dandy” who was full of irony and scepticism, and who loved the superficiality of life on the boulevards, became terribly serious when anyone mentioned his art. Manet’s attitude and the domineering way in which he expressed his ideas about painting needed to be justified by exceptional novelty and clarity of vision, and that he was justified is abundantly shown by the influence that his ideas have had on all art since his time. “Manet was the first,” Matisse wrote, “to work by reflexes and thus simplify the painter’s task…expressing only what affected his senses and feelings immediately.”

—Dario Durbe, Edouard Manet (Premier Book, Oldbourne Book Co. Ltd., 1963)

contemporaneity

George Steiner often insists that the concept of “contemporaneity” should be taken into serious consideration. For instance, it is crucial to know that Édouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire lived at the exact same time in order to understand the deep relevance of one’s work to the other’s. Manet’s fascination with eroticism and modernity coexisted with a more classical touch, which was rooted in a long tradition of painting. In that sense, when his oeuvre was presented in 2011 at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, naming him the “man who invented modernity,” such a claim could only be accurate if related to the perpetuation of certain traditions. Modernity exists alongside tradition. And Baudelaire stands in a similar position. The literary critic Antoine Compagnon famously described his poems as “antimodern,” meaning that they were written as much in contradiction to as in close relation to modernity. Therefore, Baudelaire’s poems and Manet’s paintings, which may seem to be produced in parallel realities, indeed have a lot in common.

—Donatien Grau, The Age of Creation (Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2015)]

galley slave

Degas on Manet:

Manet is in despair because he cannot paint atrocious paintings…and be fêted and decorated; he is an artist not by inclination but by force. He's a galley slave chained to the oar.

Quoted in The Paintings of Manet by Nathanial Harris (Mallard Press 1989)