THE SPANISH LESSON.('Manet/Velazquez: The Spanish Manner in the Nineteenth Century' exhibition at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 18-NOV-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Edouard Manet invented modern--and, while he was at it, postmodern--art. He did it in 1858, when he was twenty-six years old, by modelling his style on seventeenth-century Spanish painting, which was alien to the Italianate tradition in which French artists were then trained. He knew little of Spain--he didn't actually go there until 1865--and his emulation of Velazquez and other Spanish artists was not merely a matter of influence. It was pretty much a straight steal--or, to use a weary buzzword of postmodernism, an appropriation. This precocious act, which set painting on the track of formal innovation that is commonly taken to define modernism, is the centerpiece of a wonderful historical exhibition, "Manet/Velazquez: The Spanish Manner in the Nineteenth Century," at the Musee d'Orsay, in Paris. (The show closes on January 5th, and will arrive at the Metropolitan Museum in March, in a more expansive selection that will include twice as many Spanish paintings and a section devoted to their impact on American artists.)

The exhibition, which is curated by Genevieve Lacambre, of the d'Orsay, and...

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