Creativity Quote by Edouard Manet

Manet’s line lands like a quiet rebuke to every rulebook that tried to domesticate painting in 19th-century Paris. “Color” isn’t treated as a stable, teachable system here; it’s framed as an encounter between the world and the eye. By calling it “a matter of taste,” Manet drags color out of the academy’s pretensions to objectivity and plants it in the messy terrain of preference, fashion, and personal nerve. Taste can be cultivated, sure, but it’s also socially policed; in Manet’s era, critics used it as a cudgel to mark who belonged. He’s implicitly flipping that cudgel back.

The second half sharpens the point: “and of sensitivity.” Not sentimentality, but acuity. Sensitivity is bodily and immediate: the ability to register small shifts in temperature, shadow, saturation, the electric edge where a black reads as blue. It suggests that color happens in perception, not in theory. That matters for an artist who kept refusing the “proper” finish, flattening forms, and letting bold contrasts sit unblended on the canvas. Manet’s color often looks blunt until you notice how tuned it is to modern light: shop windows, street scenes, indoor glare, the harsh candor of contemporary life.

The subtext is political in an art-world sense: if color is taste and sensitivity, then authority can’t fully legislate it. The critic can sneer, the academy can rank, but the final judge is a responsive viewer - and a painter willing to trust his own eye over inherited doctrine.