Manet: Portraying Life

http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/

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.