reason or instinct, to this picture on the same day as the massacre unnerved me and has since changed my relationship to all the works of this French artist, who, somewhere in Proust’s novels, is described as the painter of countless portraits of vanished models, ‘models who already belonged to oblivion or to history’. Today, whenever I see a Manet, the white, his white, which is unlike any other white, cannot be a cloud, a tablecloth or a woman’s dress but will always remain the white leather belts of the firing squad in The Execution of Maximilian.
