POLL : MANET OR POLLOCK ?

Let say that you are at an auction sale at Sotheby's. Two pictures are offered : one is the Bunch of Asparagus by Edouard Manet and the other is one of Pollock's compositions 1948. Both are offered at $ 1 million. Which one do you bid for ?

Free Web poll for your Web site - freepolls.com

EDOUARD MANET : UNE BOTTE D'ASPERGES

Edouard Manet (1832-1883), a French painter, one of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.


His mother, Eugénie-Desirée Fournier, was the goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince, Charles Bernadotte, from whom the current Swedish monarchs are descended. His father, Auguste Manet, was a French judge who expected Édouard to pursue a career in law. His uncle, Charles Fournier, encouraged him to pursue painting and often took young Manet to the Louvre. In 1845, following the advice of his uncle, Manet enrolled in a special course of drawing where he met Antonin Proust, future Minister of Fine Arts, and a subsequent life-long friend.

This painting, a Bunch of Asparagus, was painted in 1880, a few years before his death. It is an oil on canvas measuring 45 x 55 cm and is now propriety of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne (Germany). In 1974 German painter Hans Haacke (1936- ) was invited to contribute a work to an exhibition in the museum. He proposed the display on an easel in a room of the gallery of the Bunch of Asparagus and, on the walls, panels summarizing the social and economic position of the people who owned the picture from the time of its purchase in 1880 by a banker from Manet for 1,000 Francs, to the time of its acquisition by the museum in 1968 for 1,36 million Marks ($ 530,000) through The Friends of the Museum association.

The proposal was accepted by the Curator of the museum but turned down by the organizing team of the exhibition in order to retain the support of the chairman of the Friends of the Museum whose positions on 19 boards were to be listed on a panel.

Free Web poll for your Web site - freepolls.com

MANET : LA RUE MOSNIER AUX PAVEURS

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was born into the ranks of the Parisian bourgeoisie on January 29, 1832. His Mother, Eugenie Fournier, was a woman of refinement and god daughter of Charles Bernadotte, the Crown Prince of Sweden. Edouard's father, Auguste Manet, was a magistrate and judge who hoped that Edouard would someday follow in his footsteps. Manet did not.

Instead Manet became a painter and printmaker who in his own work accomplished the transition from the realism of Gustave Courbet to Impressionism. Manet broke new ground in choosing subjects from the events and appearances of his own time and in stressing the definition of painting as the arrangement of paint areas on a canvas over and above its function as representation.

Manet began his career with The Absinthe Drinker (1858), a painting depicting a solitary man amongst the shadows of the back streets of Paris. Exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, his Déjeuner sur l'herbe ("Luncheon on the Grass") aroused the hostility of the critics and the enthusiasm of a group of young painters who later formed the nucleus of the Impressionists, ie Monet, Sisley and Renoir. Throughout his oeuvre Manet painted modern day life, yet many of his paintings are so much more than simple mimetic depictions. He died, in Paris, on April 30, 1883.

This picture La Rue Mosnier aux Paveurs (50cm x 65cm) was sold in 1986 for $ 10.9 million, then the highest auction price for a modern picture. It showed the view from the studio MAnet occupied from 1872 to 1878 and is mentioned by Emile Zola in his novel "Nana". Originally part of the collection of Samuel Courtauld, La rue Mosnier was one of a number inherited by his daughter, Mrs Sydney Butler, wife of "RAB" (Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, 1902-1982, English Conservatice politician). When she died, RAB was left a life interest in the picture which hung in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, or in the Fitzwilliam Museum.