Sea change

'Manet and the Sea' explores the evolving relationship between artists and the oceans they depicted

October 12, 2003|By Alan G. Artner, Tribune art critic.

Edouard Manet's magistrate father wanted him to study law. Manet wanted to become an artist. As a way out of the impasse, he went to sea after failing examinations for the Naval Training School. Only upon his return did his father allow him to study art, and Manet became the last great French painter to receive long academic training, which he supplemented with extensive study at museums.

Nearly 15 years after beginning as an artist, Manet returned to the sea -- in his canvases. And as might have been expected from one so knowledgeable about forebears, Manet's marine paintings entered into a dialogue with works from a long tradition. What that tradition was and how artists participated in it both before and after Manet's influence gives special interest to "Manet and the Sea," the first exhibition to examine more than 30 of his 40 marine paintings in the context of similar efforts by others.

In preparation for the show, which opens Oct. 20 at the Art Institute of Chicago, we reproduce today several works that help indicate some of what Manet would have been familiar with in marine painting plus two of his own first attempts. The exhibition also includes works by younger artists to whom Manet became a leader, but we trust viewers can follow his influence after having seen where he stood in relation to past marine painting and examples from his own period.

In 1932, for the centenary of Manet's birth, Henri Matisse wrote that Manet was "the first painter to have translated his sensations immediately." How that played out in subjects that stressed pictorial values over narrative helps explain why Manet often has been called the father of modern painting.