MANET

MANET • SEING. Painting the Gaze | May 26th - Sep 04th 2016 | special exhibition
catalogue for special exhibition | 256 pages | 156 illustrations | hardcover | Michael Imhof Verlag | german edition

From the end of May 2016, to mark its reopening, the Hamburger Kunsthalle will be showing a comprehensive exhibition on Édouard Manet (1832-1883). He was one of the most important pioneers of modern painting, who revolutionized art in the 19th century like no other. The subject of the exhibition, Manet's glances, presents the artist's work in a new perspective. His paintings, which were already crowd pullers in the Paris Salon exhibitions in the 19th century, triggered veritable storms of protest. This was mainly due to his pictorial strategy of creating a tense relationship between the people in the picture and the viewers with a previously unknown directness. The latter fascinates to this day. Manet's paintings illustrate how seeing in public in the modern metropolis of Paris has been changing inexorably since the 1860s - a change that Manet and his contemporaries made the subject of their art pointedly. With top-class loans from international museums, the exhibition offers the unique opportunity to see the whole of Manet from his early work to his late work - an opportunity that has not been available in Germany for decades.
The extensive catalogue includes essays by Michael Diers, Dorothee Hansen, Joachim Kaak, Matthias Krüger, Michael Lüthy, and Barbara Wittmann, as well as contributions by other authors from the Hamburger Kunsthalle.