The Guitar Player

Edouard Manet never considered himself an Impressionist and refused to show in the seven Impressionist exhibitions held during his lifetime. Nevertheless, he was considered a leading figure in this avant-garde movement. Although he used classical subjects in his early work, he painted them in a new style, seen as irreverent and unacceptable to the art establishment and critics. The Guitar Player exemplifies Manet’s controversial “modern” approach, with its contemporary figure painted on a large canvas; a flat, two-dimensional picture plane; a sharp contrast of dark and light against a neutral background; and no idealized sentiment so prevalent in the accepted hierarchy of historical, religious, and allegorical paintings at that time. In this painting, as in several others, Manet imbued an everyday subject with the dignity and size of an official portrait, a concept that was highly controversial in his day. A year after Manet painted this work, and knowing that he would not be invited to show in the official Exposition Universelle, he mounted his own solo exhibition of 50 works which included this painting along with earlier, often-ridiculed works such as Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (both in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France), and Mademoiselle V in the Costume of an Espada (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA). He used the same model, Victorine Meurent, in all of these controversial compositions, including The Guitar Player.