Manet/Vel�zquez – Magnificent
Piri Halasz
New York has been
blessed recently with three blockbuster exhibitions, each one in its way richly
rewarding, but appealing to somewhat different audiences. The first was “Leonardo
di Vinci: Master Draftsman.” The second was “Matisse/Picasso,”
and the third :”Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting,”
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through June 28). In my opinion, the Manet/Valazquez
exhibition is not only the best of the three, but the best big museum show since
the Pollock exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1998-99.
It does not claim to tell us anything about politics, but it does so nonetheless.
“Manet/Velázquez”
was conceived by Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan Museum and in conjunction
with Deborah Roldán and Genevieve Lacambre. It may be over the heads of
some museum-goers, since it has virtually no pop sociology, nor are there videos
or other mechanical gimmickry (except for a very small, soundless film clip of
a Spanish dancer, hidden in a side gallery). The people coming appear on average
to be more sophisticated than the crowds at the two other shows I mentioned.
One indication of this may be that, on the two days that I attended, I was not
bothered by the Acoustiguides. Another indication was the knowledgeable remarks
I overheard. One woman who had evidently seen the whole show was saying to anewcomer
whom she knew that although it was a fine show, there wasn’t enough
Velázquez.
An elderly man in a wheelchair was exclaiming with pleasure over the light on
the face of Velázquez’s “Democritus,” and the lady with
him was commenting on the similarity to Franz Hals.
The show divides
into six sections. The first, a large gallery, displays seventeenth-century paintings
that later French artists saw or could have seen in the Prado in Madrid, and
others they might have known about because they had entered French collections
during and after the Napoleon invasion of Spain between 1808 and 1814. Here are
the big four from the period:Velázquez, Ribera, Zurburán, and Murillo
– or anyway, paintings that were believed to be by them in the nineteenth century.
The real Velázquez
paintings are terrific, but their effect is diluted by several lesser paintings
once attributed to him, and now ascribed to “workshop of” or minor
painters. One person I spoke to thought that Murillo was the undiscovered master,
but my thrill of discovery came from the Zurburáns of single figures,
although – or perhaps because – they have an oddly primitive quality, and, technically
speaking, Ribera was the better painter.
A second, much
smaller gallery exhibits French paintings from the Napoleonic era or slightly
later thought to reflect Spanish influence. Third comes a slightly larger gallery
devoted mostly to Goya, together with French work (especially by Delacroix) thought
to reflect Goya’s influence (Goya for me can do no wrong, but the examples
of Delacroix are inconsequential). Fourth, another big gallery is devoted to
Spanish painting that was in the Spanish Gallery of the Louvre from 1838 to 1848,
the four seventeenth-century masters plus Goya and El Greco.
The fifth part
of the show, in several galleries, presents French paintings reflecting the Spanish
influence, and the sixth is a large gallery containing works by Americans similarly
indebted (Eakins, Sargent, Chase and Whistler). Don’t linger too long with
the first four parts of the exhibition. Save yourself for the first big gallery
devoted to French painters, a whopping dose of beauties that includes not only
excellent work by Courbet, Degas, Cassatt, Renoir and Eva Gonzales but also 21
(count ‘em, 21) gorgeous Manets. God, what a superb painter he was, and
this exhibition shows him off to best advantage (seventeenth-century art being
by virtue of its age harder to find and borrow than nineteenth-century art).
“The Third
of May, 1808,” Goya’s masterpiece, is still in the Prado, but it stands
firmly behind Manet’s “The Execution of Emperor Maximilian.” Manet’s
indebtedness was not the only thing that hit me about his painting.q There are
startling similarities between Manet’s “Dead Toreador” and a “Dead
Soldier” once thought to be by Velázquez, between
Ribera’s “The
Beggar (The Clubfoot)” and Manet’s “Boy with a Sword,” and
between all the full-length portraits of figures dressed in black, but with so
many similarities after a while one starts thinking, what the hell, Shakespeare
stole most of his plots, too, and isn’t the subject of a painting pretty
much like the plot of a play? What’s done with the subject is what counts.
Manet appears to
have been most profoundly impressed by Velázquez, and was best at recapturing
the richness of his brush stroke, as well as his brilliant use of black, but
I felt he also owed something to the crispness of outline of Zurburán.
With Manet, this became the “playing card” flatness that so offended
conventional nineteenth-century century critics.
The stylistic contrasts
reflected ways of looking at the world partly conditioned by the political circumstances
in which the works were painted. Manet didn’t quite capture the mellow,
even philosophical combination of gentleness with dignity that Velázquez
alone seemed able to convey, most notably in his painting of the dwarf Don Diego
de Acedo, but the French artist’s paintings are startling in a different
way: his portrait of the actor Faure as Hamlet almost seems to erupt off the
canvas, confronting the viewer with its reality. To me, this is not only the
difference between two temperaments. It is also the difference between a resigned
acceptance of the absolutist, fervently religious empire which Spain had become
in the wake ofthe Counter-Reformation, and the vitality and rebelliousness with
which we still so often have the courage to greet modern life.
