MANET
PORTRAYING LIFE
curated by MaryAnne Stevens and Larry Nichols
Rayal Academy of Arts
Burlington House, Piccadilly - London
26/1/2013 - 5/4/2013
The Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition in the UK to showcase Édouard Manet's portraiture. The exhibition will examine the relationship between Manet's portrait painting and his scenes of modern life. By translating portrait sitters into actors in his genre scenes, Manet guarantees the authenticity of the figures that populate his genre paintings and asserts a new, more potent relationship between Realism and Modernity.
Manet: Portraying Life will include over 50 paintings spanning the career of this archetypal modern artist together with a selection of pastels and contemporary photographs. It will bring together works from both public and private collections across Europe, Asia and the USA.
This singularly important exhibition is the first ever retrospective devoted to the portraiture of Edouard Manet. Spanning the entire career of this enigmatic and at times controversial artist, 'Manet: Portraying Life' brings together works from across Europe, Asia and the USA.
Manet’s engagement with portraiture has never been explored in exhibition form before, despite it constituting around half of his artistic output. Manet painted his family, friends and the literary, political and artistic figures of his day, giving life not only to his subjects but also to Parisian society of the time.
The exhibition consists of more than 50 works, among them are portraits of Manet’s most frequent sitter, his wife Suzanne Leenhoff, luminaries of the period Antonin Proust, Émile Zola and Stéphane Mallarmé, and scenes from everyday life revealing Manet’s forward-thinking, modern approach to portraiture.
