Manet: Portraying Life

摘要

The Manet exhibition at the Royal Academy in London was touted as one of the big hits on this year's art calendar - it claimed to be the first major Manet retrospective in the UK, as well as the first ever devoted to his portraiture. Among the 54 collected works, there was more than enough to whet the appetite. In the second room, Music at the Tuileries Gardens offered a tantalising promise of what is to come. Manet broke all the rules of composition with this piece in 1862, and even now it's dizzying to look at - you automatically search for the focal point in the centre, but there's little more than a haze of grey to suggest hats and bonnets.