This
October sees the opening at the Museo del Prado of the first
exhibition in Spain devoted to the work of Édouard Manet (1832-1883).
The exhibition, entitled Manet at the Prado, has been made possible
through
the sponsorship of the Fundación Winterthur, and will feature 110
of the greatest works by this French painter (58 paintings, 30 prints
and 22 drawings). This is the most significant retrospective to be
devoted to Manet’s work since the one held in Paris and New York in
1983. The exhibition is part of a far-ranging collaboration between the
Museo del Prado, the Musée d’Orsay (Paris) and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art (New York). The latter two institutions recently held the
exhibition “Manet-Velázquez: the French Taste for Spanish
Painting”, but in the present case, the Prado will be focusing
exclusively on the work of Manet with the intention of exploring the
achievements of one of the most innovative and influential of all
19th-century painters. Manet at the Prado is particularly meaningful
given that the artist himself visited the Museum in 1865, inspired by
his interest in Spanish painting and its subject-matter as well as by
his knowledge of the works of the Old Masters such as Titian and Rubens,
whom Manet profoundly admired. The visit to Madrid was decisive for the
development of his painting and the exhibition will reflect the
influence that Spanish painting had on his work. It will specifically
look at his relations with Velázquez, whom he described as “the
painters’ painter”, and Goya, as well as offering a vision of Manet
as a friend of artists, musicians and writers, and Manet as an
independent creative painter and one of the key figues in the
development of modern art.
The exhibition will include examples of
all the different genres in which the artist worked – portrait, still
life painting, history and religious painting – and will offer a broad
survey spanning his entire career, starting with his early years (The
Spanish Singer, 1860, and Mlle. Victorine dressed as a Matador, 1862,
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) when he focused on Spanish themes
in a for a modern mode of representation. It covers his trip to
the Museo del Prado, which was crucially important for his “Spanish
period” (The Balcony, 1868-69, Paris, Musée d’Orsay), culminating
with the works of his maturity. Particularly significant is the
inclusion of one of the impressionist masterpieces of his last years, A
Bar at the Folies-Bergère of 1881-82, which is rarely loaned from the
Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
The exhibition has been made possible
through the support of more than 30 institutions and private collections
who have contributed through generous loans of works. It will therefore
be possible to see many of Manet’s finest painting on show in the
Prado, including the Portrait of Émile Zola (Paris, Musée d’Orsay),
the Petits Cavaliers (Virginia, Chrysler Museum of Art), Guitar and Hat
(Avignon, Musée Calvet), Before the Mirror (New York, The Solomon R.
Guggenhim Museum), the Portrait of Faure in the Role of Hamlet (Hamburg,
Kunsthalle), In the Concervatory (Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,
Gemäldegalerie) and two versions of the Execution of Maximilian
(Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glypototek and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts),
in which Manet treated a subject from contemporary history –the
execution of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867 - on a monumental
scale.
The exhibition will be held in the main
galleries of the Museo del Prado, located on the first floor. As a
prelude to the exhibition, some works by the artist will be hung in the
Central Gallery of the Museum which houses works by artists of the
Spanish school, from Ribera to Velázquez and Murillo to Goya,
emphasising his relationship to the Spanish Golden Age painters and to
Goya, and the key influence that his visit to the Prado in 1865 had on
his work.
The exhibition is supported by the
Regional Office for the Promotion of Tourism in the Region of Madrid (Turmadrid),
the Madrid Institute for Development (IMADE) and the Department of
Economy and Planning of the Region of Madrid.
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From Artdaily.com |