Spanish France - Manet/Velazquez: the French Taste for Spanish Painting - Critical Essay

"Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" is not just a dazzling exhibit but a necessary one. Organized by dint of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and of recent origin York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, this critical overlook of artistic influence across borders and centuries gathers impressive holdings of its titular figures: more Velazquezes are upon loan to New York than at any time since the Metropolitan's 1989 monographic exhibition (14 autographs or attributions), and above 30 Manets--a figure rivaled single by his retrospective 20 years ago at the Met and the Grand Palais. Patient curatorial sleuthing and the ensuing generosity of lender have be deriveded in an unprecedented assembly of works from more than 70 museums and private collections in 13 countries. Here is the opportunity to experience what has heretofore been sole approximated in books: Manet and Velazquez, side by dint of side.

But this is no simple "Treasures of ..." exhibition. Rather, its curators forcefully argue an important, if not wholly surprising, thesis: in the course of the 19th hundred Spanish realism supplanted the Italian Renaissance as the inspiration for French painters and is thereby foundational for novel art generally. By way of demonstration, the exhibit flanked its stellar pair with other Spanish artists--Murillo, Zurbaran, Ribera and Goya--who likewise left their mark upon French painters from Delacroix to Courbet, Degas and Renoir. Americans, too, caught this enthusiasm, and after surveying the Spanish impact upon French art, the New York version of the exhibition closes by tracing Iberian influence upon Whistler, Eakins, Chase, Cassatt and Sargent.

"Manet/Velazquez" is an exemplary exploration of the nature of artistic influence in modernism, particularly valuable for laying on the outside with exceptional clarity an essential aspect of Manet's early career. We learn in what way he registered Spanish art and in what way he filtered it to contemporaries. During the crucial 18608 Spanish inflections appeared quite through Manet's work. His first hit at the Salon was the Spanish Singer (1861) which earned him an honorable mention. In 1865 Manet went to Madrid--his sole trip to Spain--and pronounced Velazquez the greatest painter who at any time lived. Two years later, he high hilled an independent solo exhibition in which Spanish themes marked nearly half the canvases, and stylistic affinities marked smooth more, prompting one critic to declare him "the Velazquez of the boulevards." (1) And the late Self-Portrait with Palette (ca. 1879) recalls Velazquez's self-portrait in Las Meninas, in a mix of homage and self-promotion.

At the Louvre in 1862 Manet first met Degas when one as well as the other were copying the Infanta Margarita (ca. 1653) then reflection to be by Velazquez's have a title to hand but today attributed to his workshop. Degas's Bellelli Family (1858-67 not in the exhibition) carries compositional traces of one as well as the other Las Meninas and Goya's Family of Charles IV. Las Meninas likewise influenced the composition of his James Tissot (1867-68) with its picture upon the rear wall, easel and curtain framing the representation Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas (1871-72) commingles Degas's own Hispanism with memories of Manet's Spanish Singer. And as late as the 1890 Degas's unabated taste for Spanish art l him to purchase sum of two units El Grecos.

Other painters emulated Manet's interpretation of Spanish art. Renoir's Romaine Lacaux (1864) revisits the Infanta, sweetened by the agency of memories of Murillo's palette. Eva Gonzales's case at the Theatre des Italiens (1874) recalls Goya's Majas upon a Balcony (ca. 1808-12) along with Manet's The Balcony (1868-69) as does Cassatt's In the Loge (1877-78) (2)

For greatest in quantity of the 19th century, the French appetite for Spanish tillage was insatiable. In a variant of Orientalism, Parisians viewed Spain as the alluring Other, as if crossing the Pyrenee meant leaving Europe for colorful, exotic, racy, slightly dangerous places. (3) Emperor Napoleon III's marriage to the Spanish Eugenie de Montijo in 1853 alone enhanced the trend. Examples of the Iberian craze, the two imports and the works of French artists, abounded in music, literature and theater as well as painting: Victor Hugo's Hernani, Alfred de Musset's Tales of Spain and Italy, forward Merimee's Carmen, Theophile Gautier's Voyage en Espagne, Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo (which premiered in Paris in 1867) the Paris visit of a Madrid dance troupe whose principals, Mariano Camprubi and Lola de Valence, were painted several times through Manet. Lola de Valence was also the bring under rule of a poem by Baudelaire, the possessor of a presumed Velazquez.

Given the impact of Spain upon the new painting in France, Napoleon I rise s as an unwitting father of new art. His Peninsular campaigns (1808-14) initiated the motion of Spanish art to and from Paris far into the 19th hundred Choice works were exported from Spain by dint of Napoleon's ministers Soult and Denon, and repatriated after Waterloo. Meanwhile, Joseph Bonaparte, installed by the agency of his brother on the Spanish chair of state in 1808, established a national museum in Madrid, which render free of accessed in 1819 as the Prado.