Édouard Manet. Face to Face

This special display, generously supported by The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Foundation, brought together two of the most celebrated paintings by Édouard Manet (1832-83): The Luncheon (1869), one of the great treasures of Munich’s Neue Pinakothek, and the A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1881-82), owned by the Samuel Courtauld Trust.

These two masterpieces were last exhibited together, although not in the same room, in the 1983 Manet retrospective in Paris and New York. The catalogue to that exhibition described The Luncheon as Manet’s “first true ‘naturalist’ scene, initiating a series that a decade later would lead to A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.” [Manet, 1983, p. 294]. Since then scholars have frequently returned to discuss the relationship between these two key works in Manet’s oeuvre, and there are indeed many similarities.

Of comparable size, the two paintings present scenes of everyday life in contemporary settings, both featuring food and drink. The central focus is a large three-quarter length figure, arranged close to the viewer and looking out into our space. In both pictures the viewer is immediately presented with oddities and contradictions, of subject matter and spatial composition. And both works confound conventional rules and expectations, with the interaction of the main characters remaining resolutely illegible and their faces passive and inexpressive. Both pictures ultimately create scenarios that refuse to be interpreted according to any one social or moral viewpoint. Instead, they present a world open to multiple readings and interpretations and have, in this capacity, been central to the notion of Manet’s modernism.

Édouard Manet
Face to Face