Lunch in the Grass

01/01/2014

Presented at the hall of the rejected in 1863, Lunch on the Grass by Édouard Manet bewildered many judgments of his time. In 2013, Gurcius Gewdner refiled the work. In the image, while the gentlemen are talking to each other and a kind of nymph is bathing behind the group, a naked woman looks at the viewer with a questioning look. A female figure who is neither placid nor modest, nor cornered and sustains a question in her eyes. Through the body, for unexpected carnal reasons and for the Dionysian celebration of a joyful existence, the individual deviates from his condition as a flock. Bewildered sheep that can then find a new north, which is delight and question, surface and mystery, beauty and strangeness.