Manet: Portraying Life and modernity at the Royal Academy of Arts ...

Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872). Oil on canvas? RMN (Musee d'Orsay) / Herve Lewandowski

Female painters in white dresses stare back rather than concentrate on canvasses which, somewhat curiously, have been framed before their completion. Faces which seem finished disintegrate as they head towards collars.

Hands of sitters are rendered posthumously, and suggestions of motion and stillness aren?t always certain. It is in this knot of ambiguities, suggests this display, that ?douard Manet?s power lies.

In The Railway, we cannot deduce whether we are regarding a two or three-dimensional work, nor precisely where the gated puffs of brilliant white smoke may be coming from.

Cradling a puppy, our heroine gazes into a far-off middle distance at odds with the stage-managed stares which formed the portraiture traditions of the times.

Street Singer (circa 1862). Oil on canvas? Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Sarah Choate Sears in memory of her husband, Joshua Montgomery Sears. Photo courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

This elusive mystique ? perhaps characteristically for a man who influenced the impressionists but exhibited alone ? is a touchstone for the viewer?s imaginings.

The self-referencing work is indebted to Goya, and the Hispanic paintings, including a street player with a guitar swept in grey, are derived from the style of Vel?zquez.

Manet?s social scene, from which he attempted to portray the rapidly changing world, is a study of creative catalysts. His subjects in late 19th century Paris encompassed writer Emile Zola at the start of his career and, in Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), a cast of musicians, artists, writers and thinkers.

One of them, the poet Charles Baudelaire, was a key ally of Manet in his search for the nature of modern art and modernity at the start of the 1860s.

The painting, with its bustling string of figures sitting in the famous Parisian gardens enjoying the sun, is given an entire room to istself.?

Some of the faces are the extremely wealthy of the time; others are from the bourgeoisie lining Manet?s cultural clique, the artist himself standing on one side of the group.

A picture of a social culture, it reflects modernity as the height of fashion, with music providing sensation and raising the spirits.

The accompanying band, reputed to have played twice a week within the gardens, are nowhere to be seen. But the inference falls upon what may or may not be within or beyond the frays of each scene.

Aside from the social commentary and who?s who underscoring Manet?s work, eyeing his craft is frequently enrapturing. In a section showing many of his fellow artists ? some of whom were apparently unimpressed at being asked to resit dozens of times before each painting was completed ? Manet worked directly onto the canvas, shaping each composition with an arresting immediacy.

In a show of around 60 paintings, Manet?s perfectly calculated sense of uncertainty permeates every scene, elusive and complex. Full of riddles within riddles, they allow us to rediscover and reinterpret his enormous skill for mysterious vignettes.

• Tickets ?6-?17. Book online. Follow the gallery on Twitter @RoyalAcademy.
• Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy with the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio. Sponored by BNY Mellon, Partner of the Royal Academy of Arts.
  

More pictures:

Boy Blowing Bubbles (1867). Oil on canvas? Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon

Mme Manet in the Conservatory (1879). Oil on canvas? The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo Photo Borre Hostland

Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862). Oil on canvas? The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917

The Railway (1873). Oil on canvas? National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Horace Havemeyer in memory of his mother, Louisine W. Havemeyer, 1956.10.1 Photo courtesyNational Gallery of Art, Washington

Portrait of M. Antonin Proust (1880). Oil on canvas? Lent by the Toledo Museum of Art; Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey Photo Photography Incorporated, Toledo

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting%20&%20drawing/portraits/art417389

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