Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting

by Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacambre, Deborah L. Roldan

This illustrated book accompanies a groundbreaking exhibition - the first of such scale and depth to be organized around this subject - that traces the roots of Modernism in mid-nineteenth-century French Realism. In 1804, at the dawn of the French Empire, there were no more than a handful of Spanish paintings in public collections in France. During the course of the nineteenth century, however, French collectors and museums assembled substantial holdings of works by such Spanish masters as El Greco, Zurbaran, Velazquez, Murillo, and Goya, while French writers and artists - among them Hugo and Baudelaire, Gericault, Delacroix, Millet, Courbet, Degas, and especially Manet - came to understand, appreciate, and even emulate Spanish painting of the Golden Age. Here approximately two hundred works by French and Spanish artists chart the development of this cultural influence and map a fascinating shift in the paradigm of painting, from Idealism to Realism, from Italy to Spain, from Renaissance to Baroque. Above all, these images demonstrate how direct contact with Spanish painting fired the imagination of nineteenth-century French artists and brought about the triumph of Realism in the 1860s, and with it a foundation for modern art.

Genres: Art

Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Joseph Sales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rockville, Maryland has one of my favorite booksellers, Second Story Books, with an incredible inventory of books of all kinds, history, first editions, literature, all at a steep discount. I can and often do wander the stacks for hours, always finding something worthwhile. Sunday's trip yielded some treasures. I'm kind of googly eyed about this one, a magnificent catalogue in words and pictures, but very sad that I missed the exhibition.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the top five exhibitions in New York City in the last ten years.

[Individualfrog · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, history is art history, and political and social etc history are really just context for the art. (Of course, for me, religion, philosophy, fashion, etc are all included under art.) Justinian's reign is interesting because it contextualizes the mosaics of Ravenna and the architecture of the Hagia Sofia, etc. This book renders interesting the Napoleonic misadventures in Spain, which set the stage for a new appreciation for 17th Century Spanish painting among the avant-garde painters in 19th Century France, from Delacroix to Courbet to Manet. This relationship is fascinating in the way that artistic influence always is, and given extra complicated poignance when you learn that it was mostly the result of wholesale looting and robbery during a brutal war. It is fascinating the degree to which taking masterpieces was explicitly a goal of the French, almost a religious act, taking a trophy, stealing the enemy's mana; stolen art was a reward for successful generals, like Marshal Soult, whose collection of stolen Murillos and Zurbarans was consulted by Delacroix. The career of the thoroughly unscrupulous art dealer/buyer/fence/'agent' Frederic Quilliet, a strange solitary figure against this epic backdrop, whose relatively large knowledge of Spanish art lead him to finding and "acquiring" a lot of art for France and French collectors, could be the basis for a wild novel, and made me for the first time in my life think that it might be an interesting life to have gotten a graduate degree at the CCS, which I visited often while I was at Bard, and become an unscrupulous art dealer myself, using rich people's money to satisfy my own tastes...

The art is glorious, particularly (I must say) the Spanish masters -- Velazquez, Murillo (much more famous and popular in the early 19th Century), Ribera, Goya, and my favorite Zurburan -- but also of course the Courbets and Manets and Degases and Eakinses and Whistlers and Sargents (the Americans, seeing Baroque Spanish art through Victorian French eyes, very interesting) and the essays very interesting, although several of them seem to cover the same material and feel a little redundant. I'm not used to the format where the large color illustrations are mixed in with the essays, and the catalogue merely includes small black and white illustrations, but I don't mind it. And it's all free as a pdf from the Metropolitan Museum's website, if you ever want it. Not bad!

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful color photographs