"Manet at the Prado": two views.

WHEN ART HISTORIANS SVETLANA ALPERS AND CAROL ARMSTRONG VISITED "MANET AT THE PRADO," A SURVEY OF THE EARLY MODERNIST'S PAINTINGS AND PRINTS WITH SPANISH INFLUENCES, THEY DECIDED THE EXHIBITION WAS NOT ONLY AMONG THE BEST OF 2004, BUT AMONG THE BEST THEY HAD EVER SEEN. DEMANDING OF ITS AUDIENCES THE SAME PILGRIMAGE TO THE MUSEUM THAT MANET HIMSELF MADE OVER A CENTURY BEFORE, CURATOR MANUELA B. MENA MARQUES'S ENSCONCING OF THE ARTIST AMONG HIS FORBEARS PROVED A POWERFUL COUNTERPOINT TO A CONTEMPORARY ART WORLD DEFINED BY SPEED, AHISTORICISM, AND IMMATERIALITY--AN ART WORLD THAT MAY ASK, "WHY MANET?"

**********

SEEING DOUBLE

SVETLANA ALPERS

The recent surge of interest in Manet and Velazquez bodes well for painting. The international "Manet/Velazquez" exhibition that toured in 2002-2003 had two venues and two incarnations. At the Musee d'Orsay in Paris it was subtitled "La Maniere espagnole au XIXe siecle." In its New York version the subtitle became "The French Taste for Spanish Painting." Whatever else was intended, and there was more, looking at those two artists focused attention on painting as it has been in the past and prompted thoughts about painting now and its possibilities in the future. In Paris, Manet was presented as one of many French artists taking up Spain and things Spanish. In New York, Velazquez was among the many Spanish painters known to French (and, in addition, American) painters. In New York, in particular, explanatory wall labels proliferated to convey historical points about the collecting and migration of pictures. The show was large, the effect cluttered, and though their paintings were present, the Manet/Velazquez of the title was, in the event, a bit of a come-on.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By contrast, "Manet at the Prado," a separate exhibition that opened toward the end of 2003 and closed early in 2004 with Madrid as its only (and indeed, given its nature, its only possible) venue, was designed to give pictorial matters free rein to see what they would yield. It did that, first, by taking advantage of what the Prado had to hand: What would Manet look like set among the Prado paintings, in particular Velazquez's? And second, by giving freedom to Manet himself: What would Manet look like set among himself--his paintings mingled on the walls with the prints and drawings he made that led up to and emerged from them?

The Madrid exhibition was, in part, a homecoming. Manet himself had made a pilgrimage to Madrid to see Velazquez's paintings in late August 1865 as a way of escaping the critical assaults of the Salon reviews of Olympia, 1863, and The Mocking of Christ, 1865. (Manet had indeed been attacked, though both Baudelaire and, on a later occasion, Berthe Morisot, remarked on how thin-skinned their friend was.) It was the first and only time Manet saw Velazquez en face. It confirmed what he had intuited and what in fact was already visible in his paintings before the trip.

In October 2003, it was Manet's works that made the trip. Directly before the viewer in the Prado's grand gallery, long before one reached the exhibition proper, was Manet's The Mocking of Christ (reviled in 1865, now an honored visitor from Chicago). It was the first of several of his paintings situated on the recto and verso of supports erected for the occasion at a certain distance from one another down the middle of the long gallery, which was otherwise hung with Spanish paintings. Manet's paintings travel well, I thought. They are remarkably self-contained. If the lighting on them is good (they do not benefit from the changing light of day, as some paintings do), they hold their own whatever the surroundings.

While looking about and considering how to come to terms with the juxtaposition of Manet and the paintings to either side, I caught sight of a second "mocking of Christ," just visible at a distance through a doorway to the left. A spark of recognition, not quite a sense of identity, passed through my mind about the two--Manet's "double" being a Van Dyck in his early, Rubens manner (Christ Crowned with Thorns, 1620). In both, a group of men circle about a pale figure, brilliantly lit, seated before a dark background. Curatorial tact saw to it that a casual glance, in no way forced, would show that Manet was at home. A latecomer, as Velazquez had been himself in his time (and, like Velazquez, without any direct heirs despite his achievement), he was treated as the last of that distinctive tradition favored by the Hapsburg court-Titian, Rubens, Velazquez, Goya, and now Manet. He would have liked being welcomed into this gallery.

We are accustomed to valuing pictorial difference, to distinguishing between and so confirming the individual identity of the masters. But the wit of the hanging of the Prado's long gallery was that it dared one to assimilate paintings and painters--in particular Manet and Velazquez--to each other. Moving in closer, differences would emerge, but still, seeing double was one of the experiences in play. And, curatorially, one was left to one's thoughts, or rather to the interest of looking.

Hanging to the left along the gallery wall beyond Manet's Christ were Velazquez's Bacchus, 1628-29; The Forge of Vulcan, 1630; The Dwarf Francisco Lezcano 1643-45; and The Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid, 1636-37, known in Manet's day as The Tragic Actor. On the front of the next support, gallery central, in other words, and so juxtaposed at an angle to Pablo de Valladolid, was Manet's The Fifer, 1865-66. If you turned to look back toward the entrance you saw Velazquez's Adoration, 1619--hung back to back with Manet's Christ and facing The Fifer.

A flicker between appearing to be there and being painted as if to appear to be there, and a concentration on human individuals of life- or just under life-size (a perception of scale disrupted by Velazquez's Dwarf, a child-man, and by Manet's Fifer, a man-child)--the two painters share those things. And they also share a taste for colors that surprise, pigments variously worked, and the suggestion of light and air in an uncanny mix that transgresses the conventions of pictorial space.

Wanet famously described that effect when he marveled at Velazquez's Pablo de Valladolid, which he saw in Madrid: "Possibly the most extraordinary morceau of painting that has ever been done ... the background disappears, there is pothing but air surrounding the fellow, who is all in black and appears alive." Responding in paint, he matched the bounce Velazquez gave to the wildly irregular right edge of the actor's black garment with a black stripe of paint approximating the seam of the fifer's red pant leg. Both artists are on record as liking to dress, and they indulged the taste. Manet's extended family served as his models even as the royal court served Velazquez. Both flourished within coteries. And neither came to models with anticipatory or rehearsed knowledge, but instead responded freshly to particular features and to bodies performing before them in the studio. At least that is how the paintings look.

Over time, the original presentness of a painting becomes a thing of the past. But it is in the nature of paintings such as these that the past is undone. We do not suppose that this is how it was at the Spanish court, 1635, or that this was Paris, 1865. The fiction of being present to the viewer overrides that. And in the resemblance Velazquez/Manet, the accustomed art-historical distinctions old/new and historic/modern fold into each other.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Who painted The Forge of Vulcan? I thought. Why not Manet? When he was not painting portraits, his range, like Velazquez's, was unpredictable and the look unexpected. Apollo, with flashy halo, wreath, and sandal of pea green, wrapped round with a cloak of brilliant orange pigment uneasily related to the deeper red of the metal glowing on the forge, stands apart from Vulcan and his assistants. Allusiveness (where did that awkward pose come from?) and elusiveness (what is going on here?) are combined.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The world is willfully painted in the canvases of both Velazquez and Manet. Economy, directness, and a variety of paint handlings within a single image are common to them. Center background of Vulcan, a diminutive male figure, markedly out of scale, jolts our attention. So does a radiant and unlikely white jug set on the mantelpiece and casting a lucid shadow on the wall. Like the still-life details Manet on occasion added to portraits, it finishes the painting off. The forge of Vulcan, so the jug (Manet-like, again) suggests, is a studio where things and people are on display.

Velazquez has been called the greatest of all painters, and Manet the first modernist. But both were enthralled by and worked under the authority of painting past. No oedipal anxieties troubled them. Wit was essential to the stance. Both played with taking paintings past into their own. In addition to flickering between being there and being painted as if appearing to be there, their figures have often had a prior life in art. The women in Velazquez's The Fable of Arachne (The Spinners), 1644-48, come from Titian and Rubens; Victorine Meurent and Manet's brother and brother-in-law have a picnic a la Raphael and Giorgione/Titian in the Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1863. The paintings are not superficially jokey; rather, to exercise artifice is itself playful. They were well suited to this hanging in the Prado, which let us view one artist through the performance of the other--and then challenged us to reverse the terms.

At the end of the grand gallery, by contrast, history and the individual painter were given their due. A huge panoramic photo showed the Prado in the nineteenth century as Manet must have seen it, with pictures two tiers high crowding the walls. Facing this was a daguerreotype image of Manet's face blown up so large as to reveal the tears and flaws of its (and his) history.

In the galleries that followed, Manet was on his own. The Spanish flavors of his art--the subjects and his handling of them--were poignant when seen there in the Prado in Madrid. Spanishness as performed by Mlle, V ... in the Costume of an Espada, 1862, and Young Man in the Costume of a Majo, 1863, and, less deliberately, by the haunting Baudelaire's Mistress Reclining, 1862 (sent from Budapest), whose subject is seated in and under a voluminous white, lacy gown, the feigning paint as lightly applied in the making of a faux princess as Velazquez had done in the painting of true ones. A homecoming in a sense, but also not. Seen on his own in these galleries, Manet appeared more as a receptive visitor to Spain.

The trip to Madrid in the summer of 1865 was an exception for Manet. Like lucky Parisians and many painters at the time, Manet spent his summers away, often at this beach or that. "Manet and the Sea," an exhibition mounted at the Philadelphia Museum of Art early this year, showed what he did during some of these summers, mostly after 1865. Other than the singular picture Ship's Deck, 1868, in which a deck and its rigging become a temporary workplace, studio conditions and the Salon ambition of Paris are absent. It appears that an avid market existed at the time for paintings with sea as subject. But painting outside the studio and supplying works for that market, it seems to me, did not encourage Manet to do his best work.

With the exception, perhaps, of the pair of landscape views of the Villa Medici made during one of his Roman sojourns, Velazquez's art offers no equivalent to Manet's summers. In particular, there is no equivalent to the free play found in the drawings and watercolor impressions in Manet's sketchbooks made by the sea. On second thought, something like this is to be found within Velazquez's paintings themselves. The famous rosettes evasively brushed in on Margarita's dress in Las Meninas, 1656-57, might be described as an example of Velazquez at play.

In the reduced and sometimes even defensive state in which painting often finds itself today (pressure from all manner of things photographic is a factor), facture, understood as a tactile, sensual handling of pigments, is sometimes taken as the baseline--the testimony to what painting is. But we should not forget that there have been painters, Piero della Francesca and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, to name two extraordinary ones, who did not display painterly handling in that sense. Nor were they mimicking photography or an antecedent such as the camera obscura.

The affinity Velazquez/Manet is less a specific matter of the handling of pigment--though they were each highly conscious of it in different ways--than a common interest in the pictorial medium. Medium speaks to the range of things that are engaged in the making of a picture: a painter works on a support, uses a combination of his eyes, hand, and mind to create certain forms, at a certain scale, at a certain relationship to each other and to the boundaries or edges of the support, to be seen (perhaps) in a certain light, assuming a certain viewer's position, and even positing a particular kind of response (in E.H. Gombrich's felicitous phrase, a beholder's share).

It is attention to the medium understood in this expansive sense, it seems to me, that constitutes pictorial intelligence. And Velazquez and Manet had that in spades. They shared not only an affinity for each other, but also for painting itself. This is not to deny their differences. But there is also something to be learned from their similarities. Working in a common tradition, neither stood still in it or ignored the world in which he lived. To offer one example: The pictorial tradition in which they worked encouraged the playing of roles. It is assumed in the depiction of the studio where models appear or are imagined as appearing before the artist. Pictorial and human poignancy are discovered in the studio. Where/who is the portrayed person and where/who the audience/beholder? Contrast Pablo de Valladolid and The Fifer. In Velazquez's case the role of Valladolid as buffoon was established at the court, while Manet (here curiously mixing the body of Leon Leenhoff, his wife's illegitimate son, with facial features of Victorine Meurent) had to invent the fifer. This was a problem-in his painting and in his world--that Manet can be said to have addressed. His paintings are an attempt to find a solution.

It is hard to say in any particular instance what in their practices displayed an understanding of the medium and what an understanding of the world. I imagine that for these painters the problem did not present itself in such terms. It is those who come after, in particular writers on painters, who have pressed the distinction.

The residue of "Manet at the Prado" was a renewed passion for painting as an art--to borrow a phrase from Richard Wollheim. Velazquez and Manet, one imagined, had an affinity for each other. Manet said that Velazquez fulfilled his ideals of painting. But it is possible to imagine a reciprocal relationship: that Velazquez returning from the dead would have understood Manet, much as one might imagine that Giotto returning from the dead would have known what Raphael was up to. A difference is that the relationship Velazquez/Manet is not a matter of development or progress (along the lines proposed by Vasari's "three ages of art") so much as it is a matter of persistence, of continuity.

Velazquez and Manet demonstrate that to take painting on can be to take it on--with "taking on" meaning both to take it up and also to move onward with it. The play on words is a way to suggest that this particular tradition of painting has been inherently an inventive resource. It assumes that there are problems to be addressed, and it encourages change. Is painting that now? Will it continue as such?

Svetlana Alpers is professor ementa of the history of art, University of California, Berkeley. Her Vexations of Art is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

MATERIAL WORLD

CAROL ARMSTRONG

Manet was an artist who cared a great deal about how his art was exhibited; who, indeed, thought of his own studio as an exhibition space, painting and pairing pictures so that they could talk to each other across that space, and to the memories of pictures from the history of art that they invoked in that space. He was just as adamant about where and how he did not show his art, famously refusing to join his friends Monet and Degas and the others in the Impressionist exhibitions. For as much as he may have been considered a modern by those friends, their critics, and their public, he himself wished to be a courtier-artist who kept company with courtier-artists of the past, now relegated to the museum, such as Titian and Velazquez. He wished, moreover, for his pictures to be seen singly, in pairs, or in trios, and in relation to great single pictures by those courtier-artists of the past, rather than in modernist series.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Manet, of course, has been much exhibited since his death as well. Of all of his posthumous exhibitions, he himself would have liked "Manet at the Prado" best, of that I am quite sure. Why? Because there Manet became the courtier-artist he wanted to be. There his art was shown in the context of the Prado's great, out-of-the-way collection of paintings by great painters of the past, particularly those whom Manet himself loved best, most notably Velazquez. There his paintings and prints were shown in the context of a palace collection, to which he himself made his pilgrimage in 1865, part of which for a while had been organized, as it happens, by Velazquez, the premier painter of the Spanish court--as a king's but also a painter's collection. And there four of Manet's great single pictures of the 1860s were lined up, one by one, in an enfilade of single-picture panels down the length of the main gallery of the Prado, where they could dialogue with paintings by Velazquez and others on the walls on either side of them (rehung for the purposes of this exhibition); and then a good portion of the rest of Manet's oeuvre was shown in a series of rooms of their own, ranging from the '60s paintings to the post-Madrid work of the '70s and early '80s, which was less and less obviously Spanish-derived.

Three of the paintings that were mounted in singles down the center of the main gallery were painted after Manet's own trip to the Prado in 1865. The last one, The Balcony, 1868-69, whose composition is an updated, Parisian variation on another painting in the Prado by another Spanish painter, Goya, is, despite that fact, the least Spanish in appearance and subject, the least Prado-looking, the most "modern." It was separated from Goya's Majas on a Balcony, 1810-12, by several rooms, and I for one did not think much about the relationship, which for so long has been so obvious, between the two pictures of balconies. Nor does Manet's Balcony lend itself to anything in the way of direct comparisons with the seventeenth-century paintings on the walls on either side of it, either nearby or at a farther remove: It doesn't offer proof, for instance, of the kind of direct borrowing from a Velazquez source in the Prado (Menippus, 1639-41; The Buffoon Pablo de Valladolid, 1636-37) found in the Philosopher, 1865-67, and The Tragic Actor, 1865-66, which were both in the exhibition. And it doesn't suggest, either, the sort of instructive comparison that the exhibition made possible between rather different paintings by the two artists, such as, say, Velazquez's large, multifigure, mythological subject The Forge of Vulcan, 1630, with its still life of a little white pitcher on the shelf, and Manet's small, single-figure portrait of the modern courtier Theodore Duret (1868), with its still life of a green book on the floor, a burgundy-velvet stool, a lacquer tray, knife and spoon, carafe, glass, and lemon. That was a pairing, across the space of this exhibition, that made differences as well as similarities emerge, depending on which you most wanted to see.

But perhaps, after all, The Balcony does offer something like that, a resemblance within difference. At any rate, I suddenly saw something in the painting that I don't remember ever having seen before, but that I can't keep from seeing anymore: a haunting by Las Meninas, 1656-57, which was hung on a side wall of the main gallery, but at a distance; The Balcony and Las Meninas were never visible together in "Manet at the Prado." But suddenly the latter hung in the background air of the former, like a specter of an invisible presence, like one of the dim paintings by Rubens that hang in the background of Las Meninas, like the mirrored ghosts of the king and queen, like the courtier who comes or goes through the back door of the same painting's recesses, integers all of the court framework within which Velazquez worked. These days we all think Las Meninas is a painting to die for; it has been the object of contemporary admiration, from Michel Foucault's marvelous discussion of the painting at the outset of The Order of Things to the recent video treatment of it by Eve Sussman at the 2004 Whitney Biennial (89 Seconds at Alcazar, 2003). Though he never said anything about it, I imagine Manet being bowled over by Las Meninas, too.

And I wonder if seeing Velazquez's picture didn't actually help to cause the kind of shift in Manet's painting practice that is announced in The Balcony. For me, suddenly, standing before that canvas in the Prado having just seen Las Meninas, it seemed to echo with the realization that, no, Manet couldn't be the court painter he wanted to be, and tried to be in his earlier, directly quotational pictures; that what he had to do, instead, was paint the modernity of the modern Paris that was his home, but paint it in a way that would make it resonate with the past from which it differed. For the social and pictorial conundrums that make Las Meninas the mysterious puzzle-painting that it is are those of a world gone by, a world that could only be dreamed by the modern painter, wished by him, fantasized but not actually inhabited. But powerfully compelling to the artist anyway, artistically, precisely because of that.

But what made me fantasize Las Meninas in front of (or rather in back of) The Balcony? The differences between the two paintings are most immediate: on the one hand, two women in modern dress, one of them Manet's new friend and painting compatriot Berthe Morisot, behind a balcony facing outward onto the implied but unseen street with its unknown passersby (where we must imagine ourselves standing), a modern gentleman between them and a dark interior world behind them contrasting dramatically to their bright, green-shuttered foreground; on the other hand, a more evenly lit interior space facing onto its imaginary extension, all part of the space of the royal palace, peopled with eight elaborately posed and costumed courtiers, including the painter himself, and a ninth in the background, hung with paintings on all sides, and bracketed by the stretchered back of the one the painter is working on on the left, and the lit rim of a window seen from the side on the right. Despite the common humanity of the double encounters with estrangement and sociability that both paintings stage, the differences in the social structures and spaces of their two worlds are marked: the unit of the individual versus the community of the court, the apartment and street versus the palace. The different places of the painters in relation to their worlds is also evident: in the one the painter is outside what he paints (which, barricaded off by its painted balcony railing, was shown in the crowded, alienating market hall of the Salon), in the other he is inside (the studio that he paints, which in turn was inside the palace, and which continues to present itself as a threshold rather than an unpassable barrier). Finally, the dissimilarity in the way the two painters painted is pronounced, for the thick application and opaque, oily density of the colored matter and fact of The Balcony's paintedness pops forward insistently in a way that it never does in Las Meninas, which fades and falls from its vividly brushed color notes back into its rubbed ground, its background wall and canvas support, in a manner that, evoking the dimly luminous tonality of slightly out-of-focus photographs, makes the painting hospitable to current treatment in photographic media.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Yet there it is: The Balcony echoes with Las Meninas. The lapdog in the foreground of the one echoes contrarily with the hound in the other; the close triangulation of heads (Morisot's, Antoine Guillemet's, and Fanny Claus's) resounds vaguely with the different dispersal of Velazquez's, the Infanta Margarita's, and that of her curtseying maid; the grouping of hands (Morisot's light finger-clasp of honor, Guillemet's fist and cheroot-bearing grip, Claus's glove-adjusting movement) reverberates remotely with the painter's brush- and palette-hands and the Infanta's taking of the pitcher from her kneeling maid. The green shutters at either edge of the nineteenth-century painting, even their proportionate widths, ring reminiscently with the canvas-back and window rim of the seventeenth-century one, and then the shadowy interior of The Balcony, with its phantom child, its ghostly objects on an equally spectral shelf, and its whispered hint of a still-life painting on the wall, murmurs with the memory of the pictured, mirrored, and courtiered back wall of Las Meninas. Most noticeably, the outward-facing fascination with female fashion in the one is resonant with the foregrounding of court apparel in the other, and the fascinated equivalence between paint and cloth, however differently articulated, circulates between both paintings, making each vibrate with the other when seen, thought, or remembered in the same museum.

I've paired other pictures by Manet with Las Meninas in the art historian's old standby, the double-projection slide lecture: and there, in the same museum with that canvas, was A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, 1881-82 (toward the end of the exhibition), whose brilliantly mirrored world of capitalist spectacle stands up usefully to comparison and contrast with Velazquez's court painting and its background mirror. But the reverberations suddenly felt in The Balcony were something else again. They brought home some things, not only about Manet and Velazquez--this was the show that was really about that pairing, not the one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2003--but also about questions of "influence" and dialogue and the very boundary between the resemblances and differences, the comparisons and contrasts, with which we work, both in the day-to-day practice of art history and in the general rule of thought. That's why "Manet at the Prado" is important to talk about now, at a time when the discipline of art history is in a quandary, when the practice of art is so lacking in discernable rules of the game, and when painting seems to fall in and out of favor in the contemporary art world with almost cyclical regularity. Let alone the question of why Manet, a question I have heard and read more than one artist and critic in the current scene pronounce. A question I have a hard time answering, because the answer seems so self-evident: Not, he was the father of modernism--also something gone by now--but rather, he was a superb and intelligent painter. It's a question that is a symptom, so let's take it on.

Other recent exhibitions, such as "Manet and the Sea" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art earlier this year, show us a different Manet from the artist on view at "Manet at the Prado." There we see an unquestionably modern Manet, a Manet on vacation from the museums and exhibitions of Paris, a Manet at once moving in his elegant simplicity and quick, careless facility (a touch here makes a flower, a stroke there makes a sail) and remarkably malapropos in his larger landscape efforts, with their unmodulated chunks of blue-green sea--a Manet, in short, of Baudelairean speed and bourgeois leisure, of marketable throwaways, impatience with the rules, and disregard for the past. A Manet who was not always at his best, in my opinion, but who could have been exhibited in the Impressionist exhibitions had he chosen to be. A Manet for now--or at least the now that was then. But a Manet who would have seemed out of place in the Prado, next to Velazquez and his court collection.

The two Manets were sometimes all of a piece: Like Velazquez, he often combined two ways of painting in a single canvas. But the Prado Manet, separated out from the beach Manet, is the Manet we can learn most from now, in the now after modernism's demise. We live in an age of traveling exhibitions, of museums whose collections move around inside and outside of the buildings that house them, and of faster and faster circulating, increasingly disembodied reproductions. We live after the shock of modernism, so that it, too, has become part of our past; it is just one of those pasts that circulate in the present. (Which is to say, it is no longer the master narrative of current art and need no longer so rigidly confine and define our reception of a painter like Manet.) And we live at a time when the diffusion of art amid the larger diffusion of visual culture dematerializes the image to such an extent that it is often hard to remember what materials feel like and why they matter. Manet lived at a time when all of this was beginning to happen--after all, he saw as much past art in reproduction as he did at the Louvre, with its accumulated loot from different places and pasts, and he made reproductions himself. (Importantly, however, these reproductions were etchings, not photographs.) But Manet never forgot about materials; he made distinctions between his etchings and paintings, and between his hand and those of the artists he admired, and those distinctions were eminently material. He was a painter who thought in paint--and indeed loved paint--like no other.

And then he made his pilgrimage across the Pyrenees to a place that France was just beginning to put on the European art map, to a collection that was by then and still is largely a stay-at-home collection that requires a special pilgrimage such as the one Svetlana Alpers and I made last December to see it. Just as Manet had to go to the Prado to see Velazquez "in the flesh" and have that flesh make a material difference, so we had to go to Madrid to see "Manet at the Prado." And to have resemblances and differences and echoes across several centuries and one mountain range reverberate in our memories as they must have reverberated in Manet's. To have that interplay between the material presence before you and the haunting of your mind by another, and to realize that that is the way "influence" works: not as a flow or a cause, as a determination and an act of passive reception, but as a dialogue between materials and memories, between the tact of physical fact and the evanescence of the mental image. It works that way--or I guess I think it should--for the art historian as much as for the artist. It is a matter of historical predilection as to whether you focus on continuities and resemblances (as Svetlana does) or discontinuities and differences (as I tend to do), but either way the relay between one and the other, between present and past, matter and mind, should count, for it is what art is made of. My own complaint about art now is that it is more often than not not made of that anymore. That's what the question "Why Manet?" is a symptom of; but that in itself is also the answer to the question "Why Manet?" And that's why "Manet at the Prado" was the best Manet show, and one of the best art exhibitions, I've ever seen. For it was located in a museum--both a physical place and a mental space--where art mattered, and matters still.

Carol Armstrong is professor of art and archacology and Doris Stevens Professor of the Study of Women and Gender at Princeton University.