Luncheons on the Grass

Thirty-five contemporary artists create their own version of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) is generally cited as the first modern painting. The entry slide in art history lectures about modernism, the work remains among the “most audacious painting[s] ever seen in France,” as Ross King described it in The Judgement of Paris (2006).

As Manet did with Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the most provocative painters today collapse the historical and the contemporary onto