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)

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 Gary Tinterow, of the Met, furnishes a rich setting for Manet's breakthrough. The masters of Spain's "golden century"--Velazquez, Zurbaran, Murillo, and Ribera, each represented by great paintings--remained obscure in France until the early eighteen-hundreds, when their influence began to be felt in scattered works by Delacroix, Prud'hon, Millet, and other artists. The title of Tinterow's catalogue essay, "Raphael Replaced," summarizes a shift in taste away from the High Renaissance and toward various strains of the Spanish Baroque. One subplot of the show illuminates the gritty realism that Courbet and others derived from Spanish artists, notably Ribera. Another touches on Goya's savage political vision, which informs Manet's harrowing "The Execution of Emperor Maximilian" (1867). On display at the d'Orsay is the large version from Boston, in which hazy figures standing amid gun smoke evoke generic news reports of distant disasters.

For nineteenth-century French eyes, of which Manet's were among the keenest, the chief appeal of the Spanish masters was their immediacy. The maniere espagnole was stark and sudden, even in the rosy mode of a Murillo. Radically painterly, the Spanish style was as remote as possible from the linear bias of so much French painting after Poussin; it spoke through color and through forms that were softly fleshy rather than coldly sculptural. "The eye can't follow any line in his pictures, any more than it can in nature," a French visitor to Madrid in 1831 wrote of Murillo. The remark is apt even for Zurbaran's sharply contoured images of praying monks, because the contour in such works isn't an outline. It is a frontier in which figure and ground abut and trade intensities, forming a taut membrane across the canvas. This approach became the signature of nearly all significant modern painters, from the Impressionists to Gerhard Richter. What Manet took from the Spanish masters established the model. But what he didn't take may be just as decisive for modern sensibilities.

Manet paid no attention to what the Spanish masters conveyed--socially, politically, or psychologically--with their brilliant pictorial rhetoric. He plucked them clean of their ideologies: royalist, in the case of Velazquez, and Counter-Reformational Catholic in the rest. (Only Velazquez, among the leading painters in seventeenth-century Spain, was exempt from the obligation to satisfy Church patrons. His job, as commissioned by Philip IV, was to produce ornament and propaganda for the ruling dynasty. All those portraits of adorable royal children, dispatched to foreign courts, were ...