"Manet/Velazquez" at the met. (Art).

Was it happenstance, luck, or careful planning that brought two exhibitions linking French and Spanish masters to New York at just about the same time this winter? Whether it was by chance or design that "Matisse Picasso" at MOMA QNS was scheduled to coincide with "Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" at the Metropolitan,(1) we must be grateful. Individually, each exhibition is, of course, completely self-sufficient and spectacular in its own way. But together, they become an intensive seminar in what could be called "the grand unified theory of art history": a thought-provoking progression from the macrocosm of national and period style, at the Met, to the microcosm of the relationship between two remarkable artists, at MOMA, a journey from the broad and verifiable to the sharply focused but ultimately elusive and speculative. (Let's ignore the various notions of parity and dependence encapsulated by the different punctuation of the two titles.) Together the two shows raise countless questions about the history of taste, about how works of art are perceived, about conscious and unconscious choices, about "the anxiety of influence" and more. What is most exciting, both "Matisse Picasso" and "Manet/Velazquez" address these deeply engaging points not by theorizing, but by presenting a simply staggering array of wonderful pictures. In both shows, discreet wall texts and labels supply essential facts and dates about who might have seen what, where, and when; those at the Met are especially helpful in clarifying the arcana of historical background. For even richer detail, both "Matisse Picasso" and "Manet/Velazquez" are accompanied by catalogues full of thought-provoking essays, and a wealth of information on provenances, exhibition histories, and the like, handsomely presented. Readers should be warned, however, that the catalogue of "Manet/Velazquez" is, to say the least, challenging to navigate, relying as it does on a numerical code system to correlate the plates embedded in the essays with the entries, which are in a separate section divided into alphabetical subsets determined by nationality. (The book's combination of related, but essentially independent essays, copious illustrations, and intertwined facts must have posed extraordinary challenges to organization, but until the code reveals itself--which it doesn't until the entries are tackled--finding specific images is a daunting task.)

While the two overlapping exhibitions complement each other nicely, they are nonetheless very different in conception. "Matisse Picasso" is an intimate show, an opportunity to follow closely the visible manifestations of an oblique, rather private dialogue--sometimes more amicable, sometimes less--between two phenomenally gifted individuals who were near-coevals, colleagues, competitors, and ultimately friends. "Manet/Velazquez" despite the mano a mano implications of the rifle, focuses not on a single pair of painters, but rather offers a sweeping panorama that encompasses several generations of artists, spans several centuries, and transcends the limitations of place. The show is a fascinating, wide-ranging examination of a crucial transformation in taste, a study of how Spanish painting, which was mainly ignored by the French until well into the nineteenth century, became an admired model for French painters, an antidote to the Academy-sanctioned worship of Raphael and his legacy of chilly Neo-Classicism. As one of the show's curators, the Metropolitan's Gary Tinterow, describes it, "Manet/Velazquez" probes a dramatic shift in the paradigm of painting "from Idealism to Realism, from Italy to Spain, from Renaissance to Baroque, from carefully finished, porcelain-like surfaces to ... brushy technique." Since the ramifications of that shift can briefly be summarized as the advent of modernism--think about the Impressionists' cultivation of the appearance of spontaneity in their efforts to evoke modern life or, more to the point, think about Manet as the first modernist--it's not an overstatement to say that a visit to "Manet/Velazquez" is essential preparation for seeing the exhibition at MOMA. In a very real sense, neither Matisse nor Picasso might have been the Matisse or Picasso we revere if the subtle revolution in standards traced by "Manet/Velazquez" had not taken place.

An appreciation for Spanish painting came late to France. Until the nineteenth century, few works by Spanish masters had entered French collections. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in fact, official opinion held that there were no Spanish masters, finding them wanting for many of the same reasons that Caravaggio was criticized by his high-minded contemporaries. Apparently unable to interpret an acute sensitivity to tone, texture, and tactile mass as anything but a quest for verisimilitude, the most elevated taste of the period declared that "merely" imitating nature was an unworthy undertaking; a properly trained artist's task was to invent an improved, geometrically ordered version of the perceivable world based on ideal concepts of form derived from the antique. (It's worth remembering that this was an era when musicians were supposed to compose not by trying things out on an instrument but by applying theoretical principles of harmony.) By the first part of the nineteenth century, however, French enthusiasm for Spanish painting ran so high that during Napoleon's occupation of Spain, Joseph Bonaparte rewarded his generals for their successful campaign with paintings from the royal collections. One of these in particular, the notably astute connoisseur Marshal Soult, took full advantage of the opportunity and shipped home to Paris an astounding number of works by such Spanish masters as Zurbaran, Ribera, Murillo, and Velazquez, along with paintings by Titian and Van Dyke. After Wellington defeated the French and Spanish autonomy was restored, looted Spanish art in French museums was returned, with a good deal of ostentation, to the collections from which it had been taken, but numbers of privately held works, such as the nearly two hundred pictures Soult had carried off, remained in France. This remarkable collection, which was visited by many artists and writers between 1812 and Soult's death in 1851, helped to nourish the growing appetite for the previously underrated Spanish school.

Further sustenance was provided in 1838, when Louis-Philippe inaugurated the Galerie Espagnole at the Louvre. On display was the Hispanophile king's personal collection of four hundred works believed to be by Spanish masters, acquired during the turmoil that followed the death of the post-Napoleonic Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, in 18; in the wake of these political upheavals and the suppression of religious orders, major works from monasteries, convents, and private collections had become available for sale and export, much to the benefit of the constitutional monarch's acquisitive instincts. When the Galerie Espagnole closed at the end of LouisPhilippe's reign in 1848, the absence of Spanish painting at the Louvre was so keenly felt that aggressive efforts were made to acquire the most important works available at the time. A Murillo of the Immaculate Conception was purchased in 1852 from Marshal Soult's estate (at a higher price than the museum had ever before paid for a painting) and throughout the 1860s, the Spanish collection of the French state continued to grow. During these years, too, a visit to the royal museum later known as the Prado became as essential for an aspiring artist as a sojourn in Rome had been for an eighteenth-century practitioner, not only because of the fine Titians that could be seen in Madrid, but also because of the works on view by artists such as Murillo and Velazquez. By the middle of the nineteenth century, admiration for Spanish painting had increased to the point where an ambitious exhibition of Old Master painting, held in Manchester, England-which was visited by many French artists-included nearly a hundred works by the Spanish school, a third of them by Murillo and almost a third by Velazquez.

At the Met, "Manet/Velazquez" brings this complicated history to life with an impressive selection of Spanish pictures that had a particular effect on French artists, including, among an ample group of Murillos, that notoriously expensive Immaculate Concept/on (c. 1678, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), purchased by the Louvre from the Soult collection, and repatriated to Spain in 1940. There's a stunning array of important, frequently iconic works by Zurbaran, Ribera, Goya, and Velazquez, some less familiar ones, and, occasionally, efforts by lesser lights. All of this resonates, in different ways, in an equally impressive selection of works by forward-looking French artists who looked attentively at the work of their Spanish ancestors: Corot, Courbet, Delacroix, and Degas, among others, and especially Manet.

A number of pictures whose attributions have been notably changed by modern scholarship are called upon to provide hints of how mid-nineteenth-century audiences saw the Spanish paintings they so eagerly sought. Among them are a strangely bodiless Magdalen and a grisly close-up of Cato's suicide, both (it seems likely) formerly displayed in the Galerie Espagnole as Riberas. Today, they are assigned to Ribera's student and assistant, the Italian virtuoso Luca Giordano, known in his day because of his painting speed as Luca fa' presto. Since the two artists worked closely together, it's not uncommon for Giordano's work to be mistaken for that of his teacher. What makes the early nineteenth-century attribution of the pictures in question particularly interesting is their having been on view in the Galerie Espagnole. Although Ribera was Spanish-born and known as "Lo Spagnaletto" he spent most of his career in Naples. Because of this, he was traditionally considered in the context of Italian painters and admired as one of the most accomplished of the Caravaggeschi. Clearly, Ribera's "repatriation" in the nineteenth century was triggered by a change in desiderata--further evidence that, by then, Spanish old masters were beginning to command as much, or perhaps even more, attention than some of their Italian counterparts.

A pallid and fiercely foreshortened Dead Soldier (National Gallery, London) is included for similar reasons. Plainly the source of Manet's Dead Toreador (1863-1864, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), it was once thought to be a Velazquez, but is now described generically as "seven teenth-century Italian." Manet's belief that the picture was by Velazquez, whom he admired extravagantly, may explain his faithful reiteration of the pose of Dead Soldier, with only minor adjustments; he was, however, willing to take more liberties with other aspects of the picture, displacing and modernizing the seventeenth-century picture's expressive contrast between warm darkness and livid flesh--a contrast that, along with the dramatic pose, carries the narrative--into an even more extreme, but also more abstract, tonal jump between notes of radiant pink--the bullfighter's sash, stockings, jacket facings, and cape--and the minimally inflected, almost undifferentiated black-brown surroundings. When Manet's picture was in its original, uncropped format, which included, as background, the bull ring, this vague, Velazquez-inspired swath of luminous dark seems to have been a more naturalistically lit stretch of sand, but even then, it was never as anecdotal as the sketchily indicated landscape of the Spanish picture.

The Met's problematic but appealing Majas on a Balcony (c. 1812-1835) alSO falls in this category. Long believed to be a Goya, it has also long had its authorship repeatedly questioned on aesthetic grounds, although its documented history can apparently be interpreted either to reinforce or cast doubt on the attribution. Some years ago, the Met exhibited Majas on a Balcony beside an impeccable, universally accepted, vigorously painted Goya of the same subject, from a private Spanish collection. At the time, this confrontation seemed to justify a definitive if reluctant downgrading of the Met's picture, which seemed static and a little flat beside its seldom-seen relative, but in the current show it is identified, cautiously, as "attributed to Goya." For Manet, the picture was unquestionably a Goya; it was reproduced in an important monograph on the artist published in the 1860s and exhibited in the Galerie Espagnole, where he may have seen it as a teenager. Manet's Balcony (1868-1869, Musee d'Orsay, Paris), that miracle of black, brushy white, and unpredictable blue-greens--and an essential lick of mauve-blue hydrangea--is obviously, among other things, an overt homage to a Spanish painter he deeply admired. (As a Goya, Majas on a Balcony also became the source of a vigorous early stain painting by the young Helen Frankenthaler, but that's another matter.) To emphasize Manet's fascination with Goya, the installation at the Met also includes The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1867, Boston Museum of Fine Arts), one of the French painter's repeated attempts to rid himself of his obsession with Goya's pitiless indictment of Napoleonic brutality, The Third of May, with its firing squad and spot-lit, transfixed peasants. A group of Manet's lively, Goya-inspired prints reinforces the point.

The show underlines such connections, with marvelous effect. We all know about Manet's enthusiasm for Spanish painting. He himself was never shy about proclaiming it--he even declared his debt to Velazquez explicitly by including a print of Los Borrachos in the background of his portrait of Zola, along with a Japanese print and an image of his own Olympia--but it is both exhilarating and instructive to have an opportunity for first-hand comparisons. Although such side-by-side pairings are uncommon in the show, we are presented with just such an opportunity at the outset. Velazquez's full length, standing portrait of The Jester Pablo de Valladolid (c. 1632-1635, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), which Manet described in a letter to Fantin-Latour as "possibly the most extraordinary piece of painting that has ever been done" is set beside Manet's portrait of the actor Rouviere as Hamlet. It's an eye-testing confrontation, a kind of warm-up exercise for looking at the rest of the show. The strangely awkward Manet portrait seems to suffer at first, but improves with closer attention. The painter more than redeems himself later on, when, after a spectacular selection of Spanish pictures that, apart from their own considerable merits, also are a textbook demonstration of Tinterow's "new paradigm" we discover a room of Manet's narrow, vertical canvases of standing figures, painted in the mid-1860s. As a group, these broadly painted models dressed as beggars and actors in dark "Elizabethan" costume make plain how enthralled Manet was by the way Velazquez managed to carve out a space for Valladolid, simply through placement, subtle tonal shifts, and a cast shadow. They reveal how fascinated Manet was by the apparent contradiction between the matte, black, flatness of the jester's cloak and the unignorable physicality of the painted figure. And they reveal his eventual successful assimilation and translation of these characteristics into his own pictorial language.

That success is made clear when we see Velazquez's poignant image of The Dwarf Don Diego de Acedo, "El Primo" (c. 1636--1638, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), only a few galleries away from one of Manet's most direct responses to this ravishing picture, his portrait of Emile Zola (1868, Musee d'Orsay). Don Diego, introspective, relaxed, with a resigned, intelligent face and an elegant black-on-black suit, turns the pages of an enormous book, as he sits comfortably against a roughly indicated gray landscape; the picture is dominated by the clash of the insistently white, massively geometric book and the subtly varied blacks and rounded shapes of the dwarf's hat and clothing, distracting us from his disproportionate body and forcing us to concentrate on the sensitively painted head. When, after this encounter, we come across Manet's portrait of his friend, we note in a new way Zola's three-quarter pose, his absorbed expression, and above all, the opposition of his inkyblack jacket and the chalky, spread pages of his open book.

Stimulating as such specific comparisons are, the true strength of Manet/Velazquez lies in the way the show illuminates larger ideas of what French artists learned, more generally, from their Spanish ancestors. Most fundamental was the Spaniards' unflinching realism: their manifest enjoyment of the textures of homespun and brocade, earthenware and armor, as revealed by washes of light, along with their simultaneous celebration of the beautiful, the ordinary, and the grotesque, and a lot in between. Even more important, though, was the Spanish painters' ability--most powerfully demonstrated by Velazquez and Goya--to suggest these particulars without compromising a sense of the materiality of paint. Added to this was the intense fervor of the religious paintings of Zurbaran and Ribera, the fantasy and ferocity of Goya. At the Met, we can trace the varied responses of several generations of French artists to the wealth of fresh possibilities suggested by the Spaniards. Courbet's insistence that his only teacher was nature seems more self-serving than ever, in this context; Constantin Guys's fresh studies of "modern life" suddenly reveal their indebtedness to Goya, and we begin to think about certain pictures by Degas and Renoir in new, unexpected ways. A section devoted to Delacroix's early relationship to Spanish painting is almost a show-within-a-show. It includes an edifying selection ranging from a careful copy of a female saint thought, at the time, to be a Zurbaran, to canvases inspired by Goya and lively studies after Los Caprichos. Delacroix's first-hand acquaintance with Goya's work, it turns out, was both profound and precocious. His godfather was ambassador to Spain, had his portrait painted by Goya, and brought several works by the artist from Spain, quite possibly including a copy of Los Caprichos, when he returned to France in 1800; the young Delacroix, who frequented his godfather's house and was close to his children, had many opportunities to see his collection.

Yet the exhibition makes plain that it was Manet who was not only the most apt French pupil of the Spanish school, but also the one who transformed the implications of their work most completely into a potent new notion of what a picture could be. A glorious selection of his work--glorious even in relation to the Met's own notable holdings--allows us to follow Manet through the 1860s, as he strove to assimilate what he found so powerful and seductive in the Spaniards. It's clear that he responded most strongly to the formal implications of their work, beyond most other considerations. The bullfighter costume pieces, the dead matador, and the still life of the basket of Spanish props that became the emblem of his studio notwithstanding, Manet was less interested in the accoutrements of Spanishness than in more fundamental notions of how to construct a picture. That he quoted poses and compositional ideas from Spanish paintings, throughout the 1860s, is not necessarily significant, since he used Italian sources in similar ways. (That he allowed those quotations to remain evident is probably more noteworthy; it can be interpreted as part of Manet's modernism, not as "appropriation" avant la lettre, but as yet another way of revealing the raw materials of art making.)

Manet seems to have had, from the start, a touch equivalent to the immediacy and transparency of the Spanish painters he admired; other things, as we can see in the portrait of Rouvi&e as Hamlet, he had to work at. But he achieved his goals. We watch him aspire to the economy and clarity of--say--Zurbarfn's rock-hard Saint Francis in Meditation (c.1635-1640, National Gallery, London), formerly hung in the Gal&Galerie Espagnole and easily the painter's most celebrated work in Manet's day, and see how well he succeeded in his ZurbarSnhomage, Monk at Prayer (c. 1864-1865, Boston Museum of Fine Arts). We follow Manet testing the possibilities of drenching light as a means of revealing form and clarifying planes, or probing the limits of tonal contrast as a potent vehicle of expression. We see him struggle to make black as gorgeous, as implacable, and as pictorially essential as Velazquez does. And more. And soon, when we return to the Spanish painters, educated by what Manet emphasizes and suppresses, we begin to have the illusion that we are seeing them freshly, through Manet's eyes.

Last fall, I found myself so envious of friends lucky enough to have seen the French version of "Manet/Velazquez" at the Musee d'Orsay, the joint organizer of the show, that I made several unsuccessful attempts to add a detour to Paris to other working trips. Now there is no reason to be envious, in spite of the usual number of tantalizing "Paris only" works listed in the catalogue. The New York version of "Manet/Velazquez" includes a brilliant coda, a choice gathering of works by American painters, mostly of a slightly later generation than Manet, that demonstrates their reactions to a double dose of the ideas under review in the main portion of the exhibition. These artists not only responded to Spanish painting with the same enthusiasm and perceptiveness as their French counterparts, but in addition, they looked closely at how their French counterparts had interpreted what they had learned from the Spanish. Mary Cassatt, for example, appears to have been instructed equally by the examples of Goya and her friend, Degas. A sampling of James McNeill Whistler's standing male portraits bears witness to his study of both Velazquez's isolated figures, in their ambiguous paint-space, and Manet's emulations of those prototypes; the palette of Whistler's Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black: Theodore Duret (1883-1884-, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), with its silvery background and pale apricot cloak, suggests the French disciple as much as the Spanish master, although the slash of cadmium orange is entirely Whistler's own. A sober, self-contained Thomas Eakins of his brother-in-law--equally strong as portrait and as painting--takes on new layers of association in this context, as does his uncharacteristically louche portrait of an actress, which acquires an uncanny (and possibly unsuitable) connection with Velazquez's well-known portrait of Pope Innocent X. Like Manet, both of these painters seem to have absorbed the fundamental formal lessons of"Spanishness" in contrast to their compatriot and coeval, William Merritt Chase. Chase, an enormously accomplished, successful, and often impressive painter, obviously admired Velazquez's standing portraits as much as anyone and seems to have learned a good deal from them about how to dispose a vertical figure against a narrow canvas. Yet the pictures at the Met suggest that, in practice, Chase relied more on props and costumes to conjure up associations with Spanish art than on painterly strategies--a sort of nineteenth-century American "Iberianism."

John Singer Sargent, not surprisingly, steals this section of the show. Of course, it's impossible not to be bowled over by him, given a selection that includes Madame X (1883-1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art), with her racy decolletage, Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), in his chic red dressing gown, and--what I am convinced is Sargent's finest work--The Daughters of Edward Darley Bolt (1882, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), in their white pinafores, in a dim interior dominated by an enormous blue and white vase. Just how much Sargent owed to Spanish painting is made perfectly clear by the presence of some of his studies after Velazquez, including a virtuoso little copy of Las Meninas, painted only a year or so before he began the geometrically lucid, tonally rich painting of the Boit children.

My ideal day, over the next few months, would be to spend the morning at the Met with "Manet/Velazquez" and the afternoon at MOMA with "Matisse Picasso" followed by one of the essays in either of the handsome, scrupulously researched catalogues that accompany the shows. On second thought, both shows are so meaty and require such intense looking that I'd better do this on consecutive days. And while I'm at it, I should do some research on the suggestive resemblance between that odd Manet, Woman at Her Window, Also Called Angelina (c. 1860-1864-, Musee d'Orsay, Paris) at the Met, and that equally odd Picasso Blue Period half-length female figure, Celestina (1903, private collection), now at MOMA. It may be pure coincidence, but the Manet was on view in the Luxembourg when Picasso was first in Paris. Another case of cross-fertilization, across generations, between French and Spanish painters, this time in reverse?

(1.) "Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on March 4 and remains on view until June 8, 2003. The exhibition was previously on view at the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, from September 16, 2002 to January 12, 2003. A catalogue of the exhibition, edited by Gary Tinterow, has been published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and is distributed by Yale University Press (600 pages, $75).

Karen Wilkin is the editor of Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey (Harcourt Brace).