[.ca] Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (ISBN 0300098804)

From Amazon.com:
After an exhausting trip to Madrid to see paintings by Diego Velásquez, Édouard Manet declared in a letter that the seventeenth-century master was "the greatest artist," He was also the greatest influence on Manet, whose bold handling of color and space had revolutionized figure painting. Manet/Velásquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting accompanied an landmark exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002 and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Lavishly illustrated--with nearly 400 color 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-Velásquez 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 nineteenth-century American artists.) Most 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 checkered history, the die was cast. French Romantic artists and poets found a soul mate in Goya, the eighteenth-century artist whose hallucinatory vision and social commentary seemed tailor-made for the 1830s. Three decades later, the shrewd pictorial intelligence of Velásquez was the key that unlocked a new directness in art. —Cathy Curtis

museums rather than art:
as a painter and fan of both manet and velazquez, i found this weighty tome disappointing. the focus is heavily institutional, with separate lengthy chapters on the history of the prado (madrid) and the louvre (paris) and their collections and display policies. the tone is self congratulatory, with no mention, for example, of the prado's misguided 19th century "restoration" (censoring and repainting) of works by goya and velazquez. the emphasis on manet as the source of spanish influence in france inappropriately neglects painters such as corot and downplays the secondary influence of degas. particularly galling is the negligent exploration of technique, style and imagery across the painters. this book provides absolutely no insight into the essence of velazquez's art (everything is reduced to "la cuisine" or brushy technique, which just as well characterizes rubens or hals), nor why it was novel in comparison to italian or northern european traditions (rubens and hals again), nor manet's struggle to accommodate it, nor what this struggle meant to other artists in paris at midcentury. one is left with the impression that spanish postcards somehow became fashionable and artists are rather faddish people. the narrative crawls from one microscopic example of influence or iconography to the next -- this manet painting derives from a specific etching or carte de visite -- and lingers lovingly over inventories of copyist visits and painting sales. j.s sargent *and* carolus-duran merit a skimpy 12 page section of text, while the collector archer m. huntington and the hispanic society of america get a fulsome 20 pages. the upshot is a verbose celebration of collectors and museums, with scanty understanding of artistic influence and its transformative effects on painting practice.