Word: manet
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...Metropolitan, the urbane, formal mastery of Manet...
When Edouard Manet died of tertiary syphilis in 1883 at the age of 51, Emile Zola and Claude Monet helped carry his coffin to the grave. In life, his milieu had included nearly every French artist of significance, along with writers of the stature of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé; the latter called him "goat-footed, a virile innocence in beige overcoat, beard and thin blond hair graying with wit." Dressed to the nines, Manet was celebrated as a dandy in that city of dandies, Paris. To read his friends and admirers, you would suppose that...
...made no bones about hating the country. His life and work amount to a definition of urbanity. Paris is unthinkable without Manet; Manet unimaginable without Paris. Both were joined again last spring in a centenary exhibition at the Grand Palais. The retrospective was curated by two art historians, Françoise Cachin, of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and Charles Moffett, until recently curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan in New York City. Last week "Manet, 1832-1883" arrived at the Met: 95 paintings, 45 drawings, and prints. It has been shorn...
...artist of Manet's order has many profiles, not all of them visible at the same moment. Fifteen years ago, it was more or less obligatory for American critics to focus on the "radical" formal aspects of Manet's work and, in particular, on his use of flat (or at least shallow) pictorial space. Lone figures like The Fifer and Matador Saluting were posed against a background too flat to be a room, too brown to be outdoors; it was no more than a neutral backdrop, an exaggerated version of the depthless space behind Velásquez...
Japanese Michelangelo or Van Gogh (or perhaps one should say that the Japanese Van Gogh is Van Gogh). The very idea of the avantgarde, that ruling myth in terms of which a century of artists from Manet to Joseph Beuys is conventionally discussed, is purely Western and has never had more than a surface appeal to the Japanese. The idea of cultural norms based on confrontation and "radical" displays of ego strikes them as embarrassing. The scheme whose parody is now being played to exhaustion among the graffitists and plate breakers of Soho-culture as a series of self-conscious...