Word: manet
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...view at the Brooklyn Museum, "The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing, 1830-1900," would not even have been attempted by an American museum 15 years ago; the subject was too grossly out of sync with opinion. It was mandatory, for instance, to see an artist like Manet-with his dandyism and blague, his risky spontaneity and breadth of touch-as a father of later modernist painting. The fact that he also had deep affinities with "retrograde" realists of his own time, and was a 19th century rather than a "proto-20th century" artist, was sometimes played down...
...artists in the show, like Manet himself, or Gustave Courbet or Jean Frangois Millet, have secure reputations as masters. Almost all the rest, whose paintings have been exhumed and whose biographies have been researched with indefatigable diligence by the show's curator, Art Historian Gabriel P. Weisberg of the Cleveland Museum of Art (where the show originated last November), are minor figures. But that is not the show's point. Rather, what Weisberg and his colleagues have tried to do is re-complicate our view of the 19th century and fill in some of the details...
...approaches in the show is somewhat muffled by the lack of key paintings by fundamental masters of realism like Courbet or Honore Daumier. Moreover, there is no way of drawing a hard-and-fast line between the realist enterprise and that of the impressionists. Although artists like Degas and Manet are represented, and although there are some exquisite paintings by figures on the edge of the impressionist group-like Henri Fantin-Latour, whose portrait of his two sisters embroidering and reading is one of the most affecting icons of intimacy in all 19th century art-one wishes the connections between...
...realism of a Flaubert, a Manet, a Degas thought not. This kind of realism was expository, not didactic. It did not aim to show things as they might be-the argument of political art - but as they actually were. Its model, often invoked by Flaubert, was the objective procedure of scientific thought, and its aim was to produce a perfectly limpid art in which the world would be mirrored. There is everything in common between the relentless detail in which the boredom and pointlessness of Emma Bovary's life was built up, and the minutely articulated jumble of reflections...
...poetic consistency of Hopper's vision now seems far more interesting than the unadventurous vanguardism of most "advanced" American painting in the '20s and '30s, that is partly because it was grounded in 19th century France: especially in Manet, whose work Hopper studied and copied. The sober painterliness of Hopper's style, its reliance on the single brush mark to enunciate form, came ultimately from Manet; so did his passion for meticulous truth of tone; and so, especially, did the "emptiness" of his compositions, with their emphatic blocks of shadow, their wide, flat planes of wall...