Exhibition review: Manet: Portraying Life, Royal Academy of Arts, London, January 26 – April 14 2013

Female painters in white dresses stare back rather than concentrate on canvasses which, somewhat curiously, have been framed before their completion. Faces which at first seem finished seem to disintegrate and the hands of sitters aren’t always certain. It is in this knot of ambiguities that Édouard Manet’s power lies.

In The Railway we cannot deduce whether we are regarding a two or three-dimensional work, nor precisely where the puffs of brilliant white smoke may be coming from.

This elusive mystique – perhaps characteristically for a man who influenced the impressionists but exhibited alone – is a touchstone for the viewer’s imaginings.

The work is indebted to Goya, and the Hispanic paintings including a street player with a guitar swept in grey, are derived from the style of Velázquez.

But Manet’s social scene, from which he attempted to portray the rapidly changing world, is a study of creative catalysts.

His subjects in late 19th century Paris encompassed writer Emile Zola at the start of his career and, as in Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862), an impressive cast of musicians, artists, writers and thinkers. One of them, the poet Charles Baudelaire, was a key ally of Manet in his search for the nature of modern art and modernity at the start of the 1860s.

The painting, with its bustling string of figures sitting in the famous Parisian gardens, is given an entire room to istself. 

Some of the faces are of the extremely wealthy; others are from the bourgeoisie lining Manet’s cultural clique, the artist himself standing on one side of the group.

It reflects modernity as the height of fashion, with music providing sensation and raising the spirits. The accompanying band, reputed to have played twice a week within the gardens, is nowhere to be seen, but like many of Manet's paintings the intrigue sometimes lies in what may be beyond the fray of each scene.

In a section showing many of his fellow artists – some of whom were apparently unimpressed at being asked to resit dozens of times before each painting was completed – Manet worked directly onto the canvas, shaping each composition with an arresting immediacy.

But in a show of around 60 paintings, Manet’s perfectly calculated sense of uncertainty permeates every scene.

• Tickets £6-£17. Book online. Follow the gallery on Twitter @RoyalAcademy.
  
  
• Exhibition organised by the Royal Academy with the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio. Sponored by BNY Mellon, Partner of the Royal Academy of Arts.
  

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