Across the room, Manet's "Lady With Fan (Baudelaire's Mistress)" (1862) is dissolving in another way.
French painter Edouard Manet's portraits will be showcased in a major exhibition at London's Royal Academy next year.
As you walk around the sparely hung rooms, you see immediately that Manet's portraits rarely conformed to 19th-century practice.
WSJ: Review: Manet's Different Strokes | 'Manet: Portraying Life' at the Royal Academy in London
The swift, stiff brushwork in Manet's "The Parisienne" (1875) makes one think of blue-black feathers, the iridescent wings of a grackle.
More than 50 paintings spanning Manet's career have been collected from around the world, from both public collections and private owners.
With her pallor and uncompromising stare, Manet's Olympia had shocked 19th-century viewers.
Of course, the search for a narrative that explains the image is hopeless, as is trying to explain Manet's relationship with the sitter.
WSJ: Review: Manet's Different Strokes | 'Manet: Portraying Life' at the Royal Academy in London
Like nearly every work in this show, Manet's real interest was the brush mark of the trousers, tablecloth, lemon zest, vase, coffeepot and smudgy cat.
WSJ: Review: Manet's Different Strokes | 'Manet: Portraying Life' at the Royal Academy in London
The Australia exhibition will follow such other high-profile events as a major survey of Manet's portraiture and a look at Mexican art between 1910 and 1940.
Stevens said that Manet's portraits have "not been studied in either exhibition or book form" before, despite the artist's "unswerving commitment to the genre of portraiture throughout his career".
It is a bizarre occasion, a million miles and over a century away from Manet's time, when Monet and Van Gogh were penniless and their art rejected, and the great Cezanne worked in glorious isolation.
The Royal Academy's Edouard Manet portraits show will kick 2013 off in blockbuster style when it opens in January.
At the Frick, there's a remarkably complete survey of Manet as a printmaker, reinventing broadly handled paintings as etchings and lithographs.
WSJ: Fine Lines | Frick Collection | Brooklyn Museum | by Karen Wilkin
Manet: Portraying Life will feature the 19th-Century French painter's "great works" alongside lesser known pieces.
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