Thoroughly modern Manet

There can’t really be many people who look at art with any regularity who continue to confuse Manet with Monet. But there are those who still think that Manet was an Impressionist, because so many of his friends and contemporaries were members of the group. In fact, Manet kept his distance and steadfastly refused to exhibit with them. His was an urban, studio-based art, not given to plein-air effects of atmosphere and local colour. He looked instead to the dazzling bravura of Franz Hals’s portraits, and the sombre and often majestic originality of Velázquez and Goya. Edouard Manet (1832–83) was a painter on the cusp of tradition and Modernism, and although he is today widely credited with the invention of modern art, such simplistic generalisations only serve to disguise this fact. He took as much from the past as he did from the present: the synthesis he created was a unique interpretation of the human predicament in his own lifetime, but it continues to have wide relevance today.