Manet: Portraying Life

Interesting exhibition at the Royal Academy looking at Manet’s portraiture and the blurring between formal portraits and genre pictures using known people.

One quote on the commentary on the pictures said it all about Manet “Use of the art of the past to create a new language of art to depict modern life”. Need I say more? Probably not but I will!

I liked the parallels it drew between the artists of the past and Manet particularly those referring to Velazquez including the picture of Austruc who travelled with him to Spain.  Also that the labels said whether the work had been exhibited in his life time as that gave a clue as to whether it was a public or a private work.

I would like to have seen a bit more about the history of the time and how the pictures fit in. There was a  good time line in one room but the works did not always link back to it but then again I had just read Ross King’s “Judgment of Paris”, which I heartily recommend, so I was seeped in Manet and the history of France in this period.

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