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 Portrait of Lise Campineanu (1878), which is in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and which is included in the Toledo exhibition. A late example of Manet’s portraiture, the painting includes a striking synthesization of not just Velazquez and Hals, but also of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who emerged in the mid-1870s as a leader of the impressionists. 

Somehow — and I honestly don’t know who or how — young Lise has quite an internet presence: She has a Facebook page, a Tumblr and a Twitter profile, which describes her as a “trustafarian hipster princess.” Totes.

My guests on this week’s MAN Podcast 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.