Still Fresh As Ever

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Such choices are nothing but aesthetic. The eccentricity of some of Manet's still lifes parallels the oddity of his large figure-compositions, the sense of incompleteness and off-kilter scale, that the critics of his day hated and later modernists were inspired by. Still Life with Brioche, 1880, is a knockout of a picture, with that pink rose placed on, or perhaps stuck in, the rich yellow interior of the brioche. It's a vision of unshadowed joy in the full life of the senses--taste, smell and sight together. The rest is peculiar fragments: the cropped sides of two green pears, the glimpse of a truncated painting along the top edge and a black-and-white form that, after some peering, resolves itself as part of the head of a cat. Perhaps it is there because Manet loved cats. Or perhaps it is a quotation of the intently gazing cat in Chardin's big picture of dead seafood, The Ray. Or perhaps both.

In any case, the execution is so triumphantly free and direct, so conscious of the weight, texture and reality of things, that this small painting not only coheres but expands almost to monumental scale in your mind's eye. In it, as in so many of the pictures in this exquisite show, one sees why Manet inspired such passionate attachment among the younger Impressionists--and why his art, so vastly influential and yet impossible to imitate, remains a touchstone of freshness and originality long after his death.