Slow is better when writing about art. I am not talking about the speed of putting thoughts into words but of making them public..What's the hurry unless you write listings of "what's on in town today". An exhibition is not a political election, a hurricane or kidnapping. However...rush acts are part of my working life--one reason I don't blog as often as I'd like. By nature I am a ruminant--a snail who moos. So here are some thoughts about "Portraying Manet" at the Royal Academy that took too long to settle in my mind. By the time they did the deadline was behind me.
There are a lot of terrific pictures and the show is going to make a lot of money for the RA. Advance sales were higher than for any show except Hockney and that includes Van Gogh. It is well worth seeing because there are wonderful paintings. The three portraits of friend, artist and sister-in-law Berthe Morisot are worth the price of admission alone--one of them is below. The one above is among many portraits of Berthe not included. What an exhibition it would have been--it would be-- to bring together all of them together and nothing else.
The show is also a terrible muddle. It could have been so much better--and fairer to Edouard Manet. There are too many unfinished paintings "improved" after his death. And the display should have been chronological. This is not a quibble. Those pastels are not just pretty pictures--they were all he could manage at the end of his life..
A person came to sat and Manet worked at his easel. On their next visit he scraped off what he did before and started again. Not surprisingly when this happened a dozen times, some sitters quit. All those hours they'd sat there and to show for it. Manet didn't paint portraits from memory so the unfinished ones piled up. Too many of them made it to the RA. Before seeing the show I thought it was terrible when I heard that an artist had burned works that didn't make the grade.. Not any more.
Manet died from syphilis when he was 51 after ten years of a painful decline. I guess it wouldn't do to end a "blockbuster" on a downer with a group of pastels he made because he was too frail to hold a paint brush. Instead the show ends with crowd pleasing--and terrific-- portraits of Victorine a favorite model, among them that magnificent shocker, Olympia. But is this Portraying Manet or Betraying Manet? Mooo.
