Manet - Symbolic Revolution

Everyone agrees that Manet was the leader of the movement that began in Western art in the mid-19th century against academicism and established tradition. According to Bataille, Manet was not only a very great painter, but he also "broke ties with the painters before him and started the era in which we live today." Linda Nochlin says that the avant-garde began with Manet because Manet was the first painter to concretize the spiritual, social, and ontological alienation on which our understanding of contemporary avant-gardism is based. Bourdieu goes even further and speaks of a "symbolic revolution" implemented by Manet: the outrage he created in the art world of his time stemmed not only from his overturning of aesthetic values but also from his mocking of the moral rules on which these values were based.

Manet participates in the collapse of a world that has been "ordered in God's churches and kings' palaces." In Bataille's words: "We are entering a new world, and the curtain opens with Olympia..."