Summary

Manet's two paintings Le Bain and Olympe opened up a new phase of modern art. Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon closed that phase while opening yet another onto the twentieth century. Having dealt at length with Picasso's seminal picture in his book, Picasso's brothel, in this book Andersen takes up Manet's two most original paintings: one depicting a picnic, the other a prostitute, finding links between them beyond the fact that a single model, Victorine Meurent, posed for both pictures.

Author Bio

Wayne Andersen is professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the 1950s while attending the University of California at Berkeley, he was an abstract expressionist painter and architectural designer in the San Francisco Bay area. He moved to New York in 1959 to undertake graduate studies in art history and archeology at Columbia. After completing his doctorate and spending a year as senior curator of the Walker Art Center, he spent two years in Paris before joining the Department of Architecture at MIT in 1965. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the firm he founded, Vesti Design International, carried out major architectural projects in Saudi Arabia. He is the author of nine books and many essays. He currently resides in Boston with his wife, the landscape historian Phyllis Andersen.