In 1804, at the dawn of the French Empire, there were no more than a handful of Spanish paintings in public collections in France. During the course of the 19th century, however, French collectors and museums assembled substantial holdings of works by such Spanish masters as Velazquez, El Greco, Zurbaran, Murillo and Goya. At the same time, French writers and artists - among them Delacroix, Gericault, Courbet, Millet, Bonnat, Degas, and, especially, Manet - came to understand, appreciate and even emulate Spanish painting of the Golden Age. This volume features over 150 works by French and Spanish artists, charting the development of this cultural influence and mapping a fascinating shift in the paradigm of painting: from Idealism to Realism, from Italy to Spain, from Renaissance to Baroque. Above all, it demonstrates how direct contact with Spanish painting fired the imagination of 19th-century French artists and brought about the triumph of Realism in the 1860s, and with it a foundation for modern art. American artists of the second half of the 19th century often turned to Europe for training and inspiration. Whistler, Cassatt, Eakins, Chase and Sargent all travelled to Spain for firsthand exposure to its artistic heritage and experienced the thrill of discovering Spanish painting. Also included in this volume are works by American artists that reflect the pervasive influence of and taste for Spanish painting.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
After an exhausting trip to Madrid to see paintings by Diego Velásquez, Édouard Manet declared in a letter that the seventeenth-century master was "the greatest artist," He was also the greatest influence on Manet, whose bold handling of color and space had revolutionized figure painting. Manet/Velásquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting accompanied an landmark exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002 and traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Lavishly illustrated--with nearly 400 color reproductions and more than 300 in black-and-white--the book is a consolation prize for art lovers who missed the show. Actually, the Manet-Velásquez connection is just one aspect of this wide-ranging survey of French 19th-century culture, bolstered by a detailed chronology. (This inclusive outlook even extends to the influence of Spanish painting on nineteenth-century American artists.) Most essays are packed with scholarly details likely to be of more interest to specialists than to the general reader. Still, the historical outline is intriguing. For generations, the only foreign artists the French thought worthy of interest were the Italians and the Dutch. Napoleon changed all that, inadvertently, when he invaded Spain and brought back artistic plunder for the fledgling Louvre. Although the museum's Spanish art holdings subsequently had a checkered history, the die was cast. French Romantic artists and poets found a soul mate in Goya, the eighteenth-century artist whose hallucinatory vision and social commentary seemed tailor-made for the 1830s. Three decades later, the shrewd pictorial intelligence of Velásquez was the key that unlocked a new directness in art. —Cathy Curtis
From Publishers Weekly
Masterfully untangling one of the strands of modern painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Tinterow and the Mus‚e d'Orsay's Lacambre bring together 729 illustrations (380 in color) from the Louvre and the Prado. Through an assemblage of magnificent works, from Velazquez's Las Meninas and Manet's Boy with a Sword to works by Zurbaran, Goya, Cassatt and Chasseriau, they chart the influence of Spanish on French (and, via Paris, American) artists from the mid-19th century to 1915 and trace the institutional routes Spanish art traveled. Among the 11 essays from various scholars, two appendixes and a chronology of the included work are Tinterow's overview of art during Napoleon's empire, Maria de los Santos Garcia and Javier Portus Perez's essay on the Prado's origins and H. Barbara Weinberg's close views of Whistler, Eakins, Chase, Sargent and Anshutz. Casual readers (and artists) will have enough to take in just having these works systematically presented between the same covers, while the essays connect the dots of influence. The price is steep, but the illustrations are richly printed, and the scholarship is first rate.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
26 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
museums rather than art,
By drollere (Sebastopol, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series) (Hardcover)
as a painter and fan of both manet and velazquez, i found this weighty tome disappointing. the focus is heavily institutional, with separate lengthy chapters on the history of the prado (madrid) and the louvre (paris) and their collections and display policies. the tone is self congratulatory, with no mention, for example, of the prado's misguided 19th century "restoration" (censoring and repainting) of works by goya and velazquez. the emphasis on manet as the source of spanish influence in france inappropriately neglects painters such as corot and downplays the secondary influence of degas. particularly galling is the negligent exploration of technique, style and imagery across the painters. this book provides absolutely no insight into the essence of velazquez's art (everything is reduced to "la cuisine" or brushy technique, which just as well characterizes rubens or hals), nor why it was novel in comparison to italian or northern european traditions (rubens and hals again), nor manet's struggle to accommodate it, nor what this struggle meant to other artists in paris at midcentury. one is left with the impression that spanish postcards somehow became fashionable and artists are rather faddish people. the narrative crawls from one microscopic example of influence or iconography to the next -- this manet painting derives from a specific etching or carte de visite -- and lingers lovingly over inventories of copyist visits and painting sales. j.s sargent *and* carolus-duran merit a skimpy 12 page section of text, while the collector archer m. huntington and the hispanic society of america get a fulsome 20 pages. the upshot is a verbose celebration of collectors and museums, with scanty understanding of artistic influence and its transformative effects on painting practice.
5.0 out of 5 stars
solid accessible art history,
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This review is from: Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting (Metropolitan Museum of Art Series) (Hardcover)
this was an excellent exhibition that includes an excellent catalogue in tow...I am an art historian and I was so pleased to see a text that wasn't simply full of medium-resolution images with superficial history included. I am so glad this was a scholarly project that was well researched and written by some of the best people in the field. it was a refreshing change from most museum catalogues these days that cater only to the general public with nothing substantial for academes. Still the writing is easily digestible for a person of any level of interest in art to learn from.
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