Luncheon on the Grass

Rejected by the official Paris Salon in 1863, Édouard Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass" ended up in the Salon des Refusés, a show for artworks the jury had turned away. Crowds came to laugh and gasp. Two men in respectable suits lounge on the grass beside a woman wearing nothing at all, and rather than looking bashful, she stares right back at whoever is watching. The mix of ordinary Parisians and casual nudity struck viewers as scandalous, since a naked figure was fine as long as she pretended to be Venus or some other myth. This woman was clearly just a woman, and that made all the difference.

Manet was not simply trying to shock. He built the arrangement of bodies around a print derived from a Raphael design, quietly borrowing from Renaissance masters even as he tossed out their rules. The woman's skin is painted bright and flat, without the gentle shadows that would round her out, so she reads almost like a paper cutout pasted onto the scene. Behind the group, a bather crouches in a stream, though she seems far too big for how distant she should be, and the whole space feels tilted and strange. Critics called these things clumsy errors at the time, but they were choices, and they nudged painting toward the modern age.