The Salon des Refusés: How Napoleon III Accidentally Opened the Door to Modern Art

In 1863, the Paris Salon rejected thousands of paintings, including Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and a nervous Napoleon III made a snap political decision: exhibit the rejects and let the public decide. The Salon des Refusés became the scandal of the season, and the laughingstock exhibition quietly set off a chain of rejections, refusals, and workarounds that led straight to the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 and the birth of modern art. The story of the emperor who accidentally changed art history, the jury that judged eighty paintings an hour, and the painters who finally stopped asking permission.

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Suggested Further Reading

• Ross King, The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (Walker & Company, 2006)
• Albert Boime, "The Salon des Refusés and the Evolution of Modern Art," Art Quarterly 32 (Winter 1969)
• Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (Yale University Press, 1987)
• Beth Archer Brombert, Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
• Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863)