The Modern Art Notes Podcast

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights “Manet: Portraying Life,” a new exhibition of Edouard Manet’s portraits opening Sunday at the Toledo Museum of Art. It is the first exhibition devoted to Manet’s portraiture. Toledo organized the exhibition in association with the Royal Academy in London, where it will travel next.

This is a detail from Manet’s famous The Railway (1872-73) at the National Gallery of Art. If the model — Victorine Meurent — looks familiar, it’s because you’ve seen her in many other Manet paintings, including here and here and most famously here. Meurent is best remembered today as a model, but she was also a painter whose had work accepted into the Salon. The Railway is the last Manet painting for which Meurent modeled; her first appearance in a Manet is included in the Toledo show as well.

My guests are exhibition co-curator Lawrence Nichols, the senior curator of European and American painting and sculpture before 1900 at Toledo and Gary Tinterow, the former head of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and now the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. While at the Met, Tinterow was the curator of the 2002 exhibition “Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting.”

Download the program to your PC/mobile device. Subscribe to The Modern Art Notes Podcast via iTunes or RSS. See more images of Manets discussed on the program.