Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications) Book

After an exhausting trip to Madrid to see paintings by Diego Velázquez, Edouard Manet declared in a letter that the 17th-century master was "the greatest artist". He was also the greatest influence on Manet, whose bold handling of colour and space had revolutionised figure painting. Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting accompanied a landmark exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002 and travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 colour reproductions and more than 300 in black-and-white, the book is a consolation prize for art lovers who missed the show. Actually, the Manet-Velázquez connection is just one aspect of this wide-ranging survey of French 19th-century culture, bolstered by a detailed chronology. (This inclusive outlook even extends to the influence of Spanish painting on 19th-century American artists.) Most of the essays are packed with scholarly details likely to be of more interest to specialists than to the general reader. Still, the historical outline is intriguing. For generations, the only foreign artists the French thought worthy of interest were the Italians and the Dutch. Napoleon changed all that, inadvertently, when he invaded Spain and brought back artistic plunder for the fledgling Louvre. Although the museum's Spanish art holdings subsequently had a chequered history, the die was cast. French Romantic artists and poets found a soul mate in Goya, the 18th-century artist whose hallucinatory vision and social commentary seemed tailor-made for the 1830s. Three decades later, the shrewd pictorial intelligence of Velázquez was the key that unlocked a new directness in art. --Cathy Curtis, Amazon.comRead More