Original subtitles

- Welcome to the Royal Academy of Arts in London,

the opening of a new exhibition Manet Portraying Life,

which explores the art of a man considered by many

to be the father of modern art, Edouard Manet.

With the exhibition about to open in a few hours,

we've been lucky enough to be given exclusive access

to the galleries inside.

And over the course of the next hour and a half are

going to explore much of the work on show as well as

something of the life of Manet himself.

We'll be exploring all aspects of the exhibition.

Combining an analysis and discussion with special

invited guests along with an exclusive behind-the-scene

look at how the exhibition came together.

We'll also be exploring Manet's life and looking at

how he himself viewed his work.

Manet is, in many ways, misunderstood.

Frequently labelled an impressionist,

he never considered himself part of the group.

He was first and foremost a painter of the modern world,

of the rapidly evolving city of 19th century Paris

and the people he knew in it.

His family, his friends, and acquaintances.

What this exhibition celebrates is how Manet managed

to transform the portrait into a means of delving

deeper into the world in which he lived.

With works spanning his entire career,

Manet Portraying Life is the first ever exhibition devoted

to the portraiture of Edouard Manet.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the

Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Toledo Museum

of Arts in Ohio and was five years in the making.

It consists of more than 50 paintings,

arranged over a series of themed rooms.

And sets out to establish the ways in which Manet

combined the portrait with images that depicted the

modern world.

Translating his sitters into actors in scenes from

contemporary life.

- I have no doubt in my mind that Manet is one of the

great artists of the western tradition.

Both as a maker of images and as a practitioner,

the actual making of the art,

and also I think as a radical thinker.

He really goes back and really thinks and questions

what his art can do and what it can contribute.

- He was a genius.

And I don't use that word loosely.

He certainly had the self-confidence and the nerve

to proceed in the face of great criticism.

He didn't have to earn money making painting,

he was from a family that had means,

but he had, as Kavinsky would say,

"the inner compulsion to create."

Edouard Manet is one of the most enigmatic figures

in the history of art.

We may think we know him, a painter of radical images,

of nudes that shocked his world,

as the father of impressionism,

the first emphatically modern artist.

But the reality is far more complicated.

What is not in doubt is that Manet was one of the

greatest artists that ever lived.

Someone who pushed the boundaries of what art could do.

- What he set out to do in terms of a radical re-thinking

about technique, a blurring of the genres,

the pursuit of new, in some ways,

ways of depicting subject matter made him very much

the father of modern art.

- Now I'm joined by head curator of the exhibition,

Maryanne Stephens from the Royal Academy,

standing in front of a late self-portrait

by the man himself.

Maryanne, why is Manet a modern artist?

What makes him the father of modern art, do you think?

- I think when you're looking at, even something like this,

you find yourself thinking,

"He started with no pre-conception."

He himself said that he started every single subject

as if he had never seen that particular subject before.

And he goes absolutely back to square one and builds up

the painting according to the demands of the relationship

between him, the subject, and the way the paint goes

on the surface of the canvas.

Now, from my perspective, that's an incredibly risky

approach to take.

But what's fascinating is that the risk is there,

and you feel with each painting he pushes it to the limit,

but he doesn't quite fall off the precipice.

Something just holds it back.

- Which brings us to the thesis of the show,

portrait Manet and portraiture.

You're saying he treats portraiture in a totally

different way, he blurs distinction between portraiture

and what is broadly called genre painting.

- Yes, and then the real argument of the show is,

first of all, it started with the notion that nobody

had done an exhibition about Manet as a portraitist

and yet he painted portraits from his very early year

right the way through to the point at which he dies

in early 1883.

If he's going to paint the contemporary world,

,

he has to paint people who are real in it,

in his paintings.

He can't just conjure up anyone who might have walked

up the street, he needs to know who they are.

So he uses the people that he'd painted in portraits,

his family, his friends, his models on a regular basis,

and he transposes them and turns them into actors in his

scenes of contemporary life.

- So for him, portraiture is only occasionally in and of

itself interesting, in a way it opens the gate to a

different way of looking at seeing it.

It forces him to do things he wouldn't otherwise do,

that's what I mean.

- I think it forces him to do things that he wouldn't

otherwise do and I think it also forces him,

but he accepts it very willingly,

to absolutely re-think what is meant by portraiture.

And that, again, is him pushing the boundaries,

as he does in so much else in his art.

- All of which will reveal itself throughout the exhibition.

Thank you very much for the moment.

We're now going to take a look behind-the-scenes

and find out more about how the actual exhibition itself

came together.

- When curating an exhibition which involves, of course,

the argument of the exhibition being determined,

the section of works to support that argument on the

walls of the exhibition gallery is being determined,

the next stage has to be how is it going to work

within the spaces themselves.

Given that we work here at the Royal Academy with six

galleries, theses were build in mid 19th century,

we really do have to work with the

and against them.

So you think very carefully in terms of chapters.

Each chapter being determined by the spaces,

each gallery space.

And it's at that stage that you enter into a conversation

with the designer.

Basically laying out the argument of the exhibition,

laying out why you selected the works that you had

for each of the spaces, and then beginning the process

of will it fit?

How will they hang on the walls?

What color you will paint the walls,

how you're going to orchestrate the passage of the

visitor from the beginning of the exhibition to the end

of the exhibition.

- On the 23rd of January, 1832 Edouard Manet was born

in the heart of Paris, here in his parents comfortable

second floor apartment.

His family was upper middle class,

wealthy and well connected.

Manet's father was a senior civil servant in the ministry

of justice and rose to become a judge.

Manet's mother was the daughter of a diplomat.

The young Manet struggled at school and was easily

distracted.

An uncle, seeing that Edouard was interested in art,

tried to help matters by paying for drawing lessons

and taking him to the art galleries in Alloue.

By his mid-teens Manet affirmly declared his desire

to become an artists.

His father wanted him to follow in his legal footsteps,

something Edouard stubbornly resisted.

So instead, a third option was proposed,

he could try for a career in the French Navy.

- Manet's going to sea was a kind of compromise on

the part of the family.

It was obvious that he wasn't going to study law

and they hoped that he would go into the Navy,

but he failed the entrance exam.

So there was a kind of way of getting into the Navy

by either going to the merchant navy or, as it turns out,

sailing south of the equator.

So he got a position as a sailor on a boat that was

going to Rio.

And he was very seasick at first and then very, very,

very bored.

So it wasn't a passion, he loved the sea but it was more

about his family forcing a kind of on him

so that he could decide what he was going to do.

Shortly after his return from sea in June, 1849,

when he was still only 17 years old,

Manet met the woman who was to become his wife.

Suzanne Leenhoff was a 19 year old Dutch piano tutor,

employed by the Manet household.

And at some point in the winter of 1849 Edouard and Suzanne

began a relationship.

And back in the first gallery of the exhibition,

in a room exploring portraits of Manet's family is

Suzanne Leenhoff, shown here at the piano in 1868.

Manet and Suzanne's relationship was a complicated one.

Two years after they met, she bore a son that she called

Leon Edoaurd.

And many people subsequently believed that that was

Manet's son.

Manet and Suzanne did eventually marry,

but some 14 years after they first met.

And, significantly, after the death of Manet's father,

who some believed was actually Leon's father.

Now, amidst all this confusion and complexity,

one important thing emerges as far as Manet's art was

concerned.

Namely that Leon was an important early model.

Featuring in 17 paintings by Manet.

And it's an image of Leon that dominates the first major

work that we're going to look at, The Luncheon.

Painted in 1868, The Luncheon is one of Manet's greatest,

yet most enigmatic, works.

It's an image dominated by the figure of Leon.

Though he stands center stage, his position at the edge

of a lunch table suggests his imminent departure,

that his mind is elsewhere.

Reinforced by his distant gaze as he stares blankly out

beyond the viewer.

Around him are a series of contrived still-lifes.

A sword and armor, oysters and a lemon on the table.

For a time, Calude Manet sat as the model for the

bearded figure at the table, but in the end,

another artist took up the job,

Auguste Rousselin, the neighbor of the Manet's in Beloin

where they spent the summer and where this painting

is thought to be located.

While the female figure in the background remains

unidentified, the strange disengaged posing of all

three figures make any kind of narrative reading

of the picture very hard to make.

By 1849, Manet's father had finally allowed him

to pursue an artistic career.

Manet then began six years of study in the studio

of the painter, Thomas Couture.

- Manet's period in Couture's studio was very much that

of a student and was no longer the kind of apprenticeship

system that had prevailed in, say, renaissance times.

And it was definitely about learning to draw from the model,

learning to paint, with the supervision of the teacher.

It was much more like an art school today would be.

Though a traditionalist in some respects,

Couture was an interesting mentor.

For he had certain contemporary concerns.

Couture's acknowledged masterpiece was a large scale

history painting called The Romans of the Decadence

in which the debouched Roman represented what

Couture considered to be the moral decline in his own day.

- It's a big history painting,

but it's about the morals of the period.

And Manet wants to be a history painter,

he wants to express the issue of the day,

he wants to turn history painting into modernity.

Couture encouraged his pupils to find their own

artistic language rather than slavishly follow

current conventions.

And he stressed the need for spontaneity and the

rapidly rendered sketch.

But outside Couture's studio, another artist was challenging

the conventions of French painting

to an even greater degree.

In 1850, the realist painter Gustave Courbet,

exhibited this monumental work, A Burial at Ornans,

of the Paris .

The painting was a manifesto for a new kind of art,

realism.

A radical movement that sought to replace romanticized

images from the past with depictions of ordinary people.

Contemporary figures in scenes from every day life.

Accordingly, the salon was scandalized and Courbet's

position as the leading avant garde artist in Paris

was assured.

It was against this backdrop that Manet emerged.

Without doubt, Manet drew on the lessons of realism.

But at the same time, he admired much of the art

of the old masters, including Dutch art of the 17th

century.

But by far his greatest passion was for the art of Spain.

For Manet, certain Spanish painting offered an alternative

to the idealized classically inspired art of Italy.

And the artist he revered above all others

was Diego Velazquez, who he called,

"The greatest artist ever."

There ar a number of examples in the exhibition

which show the influence of Spanish art on Manet.

Works such as the Street Singer,

showing a fashionably attired woman emerging from

a cafe clutching the guitar and eating fruit,

owes something to the art of Spain both in subject

and style.

But it's this work, The Tragic Actor,

that most pointedly references Spanish painting.

Not least, a specific work by Velazquez himself.

Joining me is this Spanish expert and chief curator

of Dulwich Picture Gallery, Dr. Xavier Bray.

This is a theatrical portrait in every sense, isn't it?

It shows the great French tragic actor, Rouviere,

who's playing the role of Hamlet.

He dies, I think, before it's completed and Manet has

to use other friends as models.

One for the legs, one for the main body.

But that's not what really stands out about this picture.

- No, it's a clear homage to Velazquez and nobody who

saw it, even before it was exhibited in 1867

at the , everybody says this owes everything

to Pablo de Valladolid, the great portrait of the

Court Jester by Velazquez.

Which Manet would've seen at the Pravo in 1865,

in some of 1865 he finally makes his journey to Madrid

and of course is completely ,

completely amazed by Velazaquez.

And this is on his return the homage that he paints.

And the way you really pick it up is this neutral

backdrop.

Velazquez was totally unabashed about using neutral

backdrops to bring the figure forward.

And this is the kind of modernity that Manet really

wanted.

He wanted to have that confirmation that Velazquez was

the key to what he was going to be doing back in paris.

Manet was a Parisian through and through.

But during his lifetime Paris underwent a radical

transformation.

Manet embraced change, he lived all his life in and around

the new suburbs in the northwest of the city.

And he was a great enthusiast for the expanding railways,

one of which snaked into the Laser

close to his home.

One day, coming back from Versailles,

I got up on the foot plate of a locomotive.

Along side the engine driver and fireman,

it was a wonderful sight.

His is a dog's life, but it's those men who are the

heroes of today.

Manet's world was essentially of that of the

boulevard, the salon, and the cafe.

But this vision of Paris so familiar to us today,

emerged almost entirely through the 19th century.

From a city that had evolved down the ages,

with a warren of medieval streets at it's heart,

to the city of vast straight spacious boulevard.

These iconic are the product of a remarkable

period of urban planning that took place through

the middle of the 19th century under the direction

of George Eugene Haussmann.

Haussmann had been commanded by the emperor,

Napoleon III to regularize the city at huge expense.

Manet and I stroll together

through the midst of demolitions intercepted by gaping

holes where the ground had already been leveled.

House breakers give out white against it.

A wall left white.

Which was collapsing under their blows,

covering them in a cloud of dust.

For a long time, Manet remained absorbed in admiration

of this scene.

- I think the development of Paris in the second half

of the 19th century under Napoleon III and Haussmann,

was extremely important for Manet.

What he saw was whole districts being whipped on

and new buildings being put up, new boulevards being

created, really the center of modern Paris

as we know it today being created.

And he was fascinated by that.

Manet's enthusiasm was matched by that

of his friend, the poet Charl Baudelaire.

From 1858 the two became close companions,

meeting most days to stroll through the boulevards

and parks of the city.

They held common ideas about art and poetry

and Baudelaire wrote an influential essay entitled,

"The Painter of Modern Life."

In it he described an artist who mixed with the crowd,

but who remained an impartial observer of behavior

and fashion.

A figure he called the flaner, the stroller,

the ambler.

For the flaner, it is an endless source of

pleasure to enroll in the multitude, in the ebb and flow.

And to observe the thousands of floating exitence

which dressed about the underworld of a great city.

Such an observer was Manet.

One of Manet's most strikingly original works,

Music in the Tuileries Gardens is a complex multi-figured

portrait and a direct statement by Manet about

contemporary life.

Within it we see portraits of Manet's family, friends,

and acquaintances.

From his brother Eugene Manet, to the writer,

Zacharie Astruc.

And where some portraits are rendered with a degree

of precision.

Others, including that of Baudelaire,

are given only a cursory treatment.

The painting is also a self-portrait,

as Manet himself is pictured at the far left,

just at the edge of the canvas.

But beyond being a literal likeness of Manet and

his circle this is a kind of cultural self-portrait.

And above all, an affirmation of Baudelaire's ideas

of modernity, of the heroism of the transient beauty

of modern life, and the important role of the flaner

in interpreting and representing that beauty.

Joining me in front of Music in the Tuileries Gardens

is the writer and film maker Iain Sinclair,

who's written extensively about the experience of the

modern city.

Iain when you look at this painting, does it scream

modern Paris to you?

- It shouts about modernity, it shouts about the contact

with Baudelaire who is looking at cities in a new way

and giving the germs of ideas that will play on

the poets for generations.

It's quite difficult to work out what exactly

is happening.

We know there's a concert being given,

but there's no sign of the orchestra or the band

and no real sense of where they are, there's no focal point.

- I think it's enigmatic and almost surreal quality

is a journal of modernity, certainly.

And the action is not in the frame.

The music is elsewhere.

What are these people doing here?

It's like this hugely clotted gathering in a strange space.

They are here because they have moral or social importance.

They are all placed and positioned as if they represented

virtues in some way and as if the music was off screen

and something that was haunting them that which,

we as the reader, would have to bring ourselves

to the action.

- Interesting that this has been described as a kind of

cultural self-portrait by Manet.

And he locates himself in the picture,

but only on the extreme left.

So he's in the picture, but he's detached--

- It's the gaze, the Manet gaze.

He's looking at us more than at the picture.

But what he's seeing is almost a precursor of the

artist of the moment and it's a wonderful example of

self-promotion.

He's got all the possible critics who could write about him

into the picture.

He's got all the dignitaries, all the social figures,

all the patrons, he's lined them all out and squeezed

them all into this one picture.

Do you find the idea of the flaner, in this image,

he's detached as well.

He's not just observing us, but he's observing his world

as well as being a parcel to it?

- I definitely think there's an element of the flaner

in Manet.

He's a bourgeoisie figure.

He's elegantly dressed and always seems to be just a small

aspect of distance between him and his subject,

and often the it's really him and the other

painters.

He wants to keep a social status,

he wants to live a good life, but also determined to be

this new thing.

The painter, as poet and his friend of writers and there's

a man in the real dialogue of modernity.

- Within a year of painting Music in the Tuileries Gardens,

Manet's artistic radicalism would provoke an outcry

at the very heart of the French Artistic Establishment,

the Paris salon.

Success for the many painters in France was almost totally

dependent on being accepted by the Paris salon.

The annual artistic showcase that had been established

more than a century earlier at the Louvre Palace.

Majorily recruited from members of Paris' artistic elite,

which select the paintings for exhibition,

which were then hung floor to ceiling.

- It was enormous.

There were thousands of paintings and pieces of sculpture

on view and they were arranged in a way which is almost

unbelievable to us today.

They would put paintings together in whatever configuration

you could fit them.

And also, the rooms were organized alphabetically.

So this wasn't an ideal way of displaying paintings,

but it was the space in which to make your name.

And for Manet it remained the most important place

in which to display his paintings.

This is The Birth of Venus by Alexandra Cabanel.

It was exhibited in 1863 and proves that in that year,

the salon jury were not afraid of nudity.

Indeed, the critics warmly praised the painting

and it's classical style.

This painting, well this was too much.

It was Manet's 1863 submission.

A painting called Luncheon on the Grass,

or Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.

This is an image of a nude female relaxing after lunch

with two men dressed in the clothes of contemporary bandits.

It was easily interpreted as a naked prostitute

sitting in a city park with two young students.

The stark contemporary nature of Manet's scene

offended the salon jury and the painting,

to Manet's intense disappointment was rejected.

In 1863, Manet wasn't alone in being rejected by the

salon jury.

2,200 were accepted but 2,800 were rejected.

This unprecedented number of rejects lead to a public outcry

and called for an alternative exhibition to be setup.

And so, Salon des Refuses was organized.

1,500 of the rejected paintings were put on display.

It was a sensation, with thousands visiting every day.

Among them was a new phenomenon in the art world,

the art critic.

And the painting the new critics tore into above all

was Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe.

Manet will show talent once he learns

drawing and perspective.

And taste once he stops choosing subjects for the sake

of scandal.

I failed to see what could've induced

such a distinguished and intelligent artist to have

built such an absurd composition.

- And here we are in front of the second version

of Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, painted by Manet some time

between 1863 and 1868, probably as a commission.

I'm joined in front of it by the actor, director,

and Manet enthusiast, Fiona Shaw.

Fiona, it's a very difficult painting for some people

to see clearly now because it's so familiar.

How do you find Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe?

- I think as a young person I used to think it was

a sort of fantasy and I'd think,

"God wouldn't it be great if we had such a picnic where

"you just take off all your clothes."

But, of course, there is no picnic and she is naked

as if she's landed from outer space.

She's in a different sort of being to the others.

The men seem to be talking and not talking to her.

She's looking at us going, "Well?"

What are you saying to us?

Are you saying joy this is a picnic or I always

go for picnics naked or?

It's the most mysterious painting.

It was clearly subversive at the time because of

the reaction.

Yes.

Does it still have a subversive power?

- It still packs a punch because he's ambivalent

about it and when he painted this painting he was hoping

that it would be praised and accepted and he was one of

those artists, very like now I think,

who wants to be both the guy on the outside daring to

do something, but also praised for it.

And when he wasn't praised for it, he was smarting.

And I think it's because he's more daring in his

subconscious than he is in his conscious.

I don't think he realized it was going to be so shocking.

- I'm now joined by Larry Nicholas the co-curator

of the exhibition who is from the Toledo Museum of Arts

in Toledo, Ohio, and who has a special relationship

with this painting, which is of Manet's great friend,

Antonin Proust, the politician.

He was also trained as an artist, I think.

Larry, what is the significance for you of this work?

- This picture was exhibited in the Salon in 1880.

And some 44 years later on the open market in New York

the founder of the Toledo Museum of Art,

Edward Drummond Libbey, purchases this painting,

leaves it to the museum, it is there from 1925

and it goes on view January 26 and it's been part of our

collection and one of the highlights of our museum's

holdings and is to this moment.

I've been fortunate to work in service curator

at that museum for some two decades now and I said,

"Some day I might want to participate in this painting

"being in an exhibit on his portraiture."

And the way the profession works I heard that London,

my colleague and friend Maryanne Stephens was thinking

about doing something with Manet as well and we got

together, we said, "Let's do Manet,

"let's do Manet's portraiture."

And this was a lynch pin then and the genesis of this

project.

- Many people now, having made part of this journey

with us through this exhibition will look at this and think,

in relative terms, we're on safer ground here.

There's an element to the conventional here.

- Oh, sure.

- But do you think there's a radical underpinning

or this Manet playing a more conventional .

- The composition is, in the terms you've just setup,

the composition is traditional.

I was in the national gallery down the street not many

days ago looking at portraits and you can find

gloves just like that and the stance and the arm

akin bow, this intelligent artist knew his art history.

Composition.

Technique it's radical, and it's modern.

So I'm giving you two answers there.

He is applying paint to canvas in ways that is new

for the time.

The beard, the light on it, the boutineer,

he is applying paint, there were individuals who thought,

critics who thought it was unfinished.

This is as finished as he ever gets.

- One of the great misconceptions about Manet was that

he was an impressionist.

But he never considered himself part of the group.

In fact, despite his friendship with the young artists

who were dubbed impressionists, he was at pains to remain

separate, to stand apart.

By the late 1860s, Manet was well established as the most

celebrated avant garde artist in Paris.

Around him gathered a group of young artists,

including Degas, Monet, and Renoir.

They met in cafes, mostly in those new suburbs to the

northwest of the city.

Ideas about art were argued, exchanged, and advanced.

This was the crucible of the art movement that came

to be called impressionism.

In 1874, these and other artists decided to hold their

own exhibition, here at the studio of the photographer,

.

One painting in the exhibition was this by Claude Monet.

It was called Impression Sunrise.

A critic hated it and mocked this new style of

impressionism.

Manet's name was associated with the movement,

but he never agreed to exhibit with them.

- Manet is not an impressionist for a whole variety

of reasons.

Although people tend to think of him very much as being

an impressionist.

First of all, to be an impressionist, really,

one had to have exhibited with the impressionist group.

They had eight group shows between 1874 and 1886.

And Manet was invited on several occasions to join

with the group, and he refused on every occasion.

But beyond his reluctance to exhibit,

Manet's approach to painting differed fundamentally

from that of the impressionists.

Working outdoors, en plein air, the impressionist set out

to capture the fleeting effects of light on their subjects,

through an innovative approach to brush work and color.

- I think he was very intrigued by looser technique,

a lighter pallet, the possibility of working out of doors.

He didn't enjoy it terribly, but he gave it a try.

But it's very interesting, he never lost two things.

One was the sense of form.

He never breaks up the form in the way the impressionists

do where they allow light to fracture the form

and disperse it.

He holds onto the importance of form,

but at the same time constantly plays with this two

dimensionality, which the impressionists really only

really get to in the 1880s, after Manet's death.

Painted in 1873, The Railway is one of Manet's

great works.

It's an encapsulation of his ability to fuse the

portrait, the genre scene, and a depiction of modern life.

The subject of the painting's title barely appears

in the frame.

And yet the modernity of the railway below,

which had just opened five years before,

and the pond of Europe, just visible in the background,

emphatically declare it as a scene of contemporary life.

And then staring out almost confronting the viewer

is a young women, the model Victorine Meurent,

dressed in the latest autumn fashions.

She's accompanied by an anonymous little girl,

who's focus is on the noise and steam of the locomotives

below.

The two occupy a compressed space.

Between the picture pane and the giant bars of the railings

that beat a rhythm across the composition.

The painting was accepted at the salon,

like so many of Manet's previous works,

The Railway frustrated critics.

One of whom complained, "Is this a double portrait,

"or a subject picture?"

But in many ways, that was the point for Manet.

It was both and neither.

Now I'm joined in front of The Railway by Fiona Shaw again.

Fiona, this again I suppose superficially is a very

straightforward picture.

But it is enigmatic too.

Do you make sense of it easily?

- Well look at it now.

It does have hint of sort of what became

sentimental painting.

You think of navy and channels, which at first look

what strikes you about the painting is it's set

in an urban context and he was definitely trying

to get away from the countryside.

So this is very daring to put a rather nice innocent

lady and this little girl,

but against this new Paris that's building up behind.

I think that's probably what the point of it is.

- Take a moment to enjoy this.

'Cause you're right it's a girl in a fashionable pretty

frock with a woman very fashionably attired with a dog

on her lap reading.

But in the flesh isn't there something quite

confrontational about her face?

Do you feel like you've invaded a space that you might

not have done, or that you shouldn't have done?

- You know it's curious you say that because I think

this, in general, he uses this gaze of a female

looking straight at the camera, as it were.

Is he trying to say it's him looking through these

women's eyes.

It's a very strange way of painting something.

It's not a painting of the woman and the child, is it?

It's somehow a painting in which the woman and the child,

or the woman is in dialogue with us.

So it's not of something, it's about something.

And I suppose, in this case, it's about maybe her

bewilderment at being in a new country that's becoming new.

That France is changing under her feet.

She seems such a bourgeoisie lady.

She's so, she so isn't.

Actually as I look at it now she's almost questioning.

- Something about the alienating nature of modern life,

or the city.

Some of Manet's visions have this kind of, you know,

people in the Toileres Gardens together.

But a lot of the time people are together,

but isolated, and this is very loudly that I think.

- It is and she's very, it's very vintage Manet

in that you know it's Manet.

It's something to do with the black choker,

he does define the character as though it's in the world

whether it's going to last long in the world or whether

the world is a nice world to be in.

But he's very definite about her.

She's definitely there.

For all the book and the lap dog and everything and there's

something very lonely about it.

- By the end of the 1870s there was the sense that Manet's

work had been a clips to certain extent by the

radical steps taken by the impressionists to make

a new form of painting.

But in the very last years of his life,

and already suffering the affects of the syphilis

that would kill him, Manet created one final great work.

theater, it is the only place in Paris that wreaks

so exquisitely of paid love, and we're it's corruptions.

In Manet's last great work, The bar at the Folies Bergere,

we're confronted by a direct gaze like few others in the

history of art.

There's a sense that perhaps he knew it would stand

as a final statement, an encapsulation of all that he

tried to do.

- The Bar at the Folies Bergere is a true masterpiece

and it was meant to be when he was ill

he knew that, his doctor,

didn't have the means to cure him.

And also an account of farewell to the Paris world

that he loved to enjoy before.

So he tried to sum up everything in one painting.

The bar maid stands in place,

a bar offering bottles of champagne, flowers,

and fruit.

But with the lights and ambiance of the nightclub visible

in the mirror behind her.

The face betrays a weary resignation,

totally at odds with her surroundings.

And then in an extraordinary twist, off to the right,

a mirror image.

We see the face of her customer, the viewer,

in effect, us.

Manet died aged 51 on the 30th of April, 1883

suffering from advanced syphilis and having failed

to recover from the amputation of his left leg

earlier in the month due to gangrene.

Among the paul bearers at his funeral were his great

friends, Antonin Proust, , and Claude Manet.

Edgar Degas was reported to have said after his death,

"He was more important than we realized."