Hello, this is David peacock
I am returning to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for the mayonnaise if it called mayonnaise and modern beauty
now Manny exhibits are
rare when I hear there's a Manet exhibit I jump I make plans. I saw this on the second day. They don't happen often
most of his paintings are in great
museums and the ones in private collections don't come out very often
but the Getty Museum is one of the top museums in the world and they have the clout and
the resources and the leverage to to organize and display the best quality paintings in the world
The exhibit
opens with a
portrait by Manet's contemporary his professional friend Henri Fantin Latour
Fantin Latour painted this painting the way you're taught in the academies in France how to paint
The background is brown. It's basically a very
brown and black painting there's a little bit of blue in the tie but it does show that Manet's
levels in society, he was at the top levels of society. His father was a judge and it was a conservative family
So when he went into painting it was pretty much a shock to his family
I want to focus here on the hands
The left hand has a glove the right hand does not going to be following some other gloves and Manet's paintings
Now the first painting we're going to talk about is this portrait of Jeanne?
This was shown in the salon of 1882 in France. And it's Manet at his best
It's a great composition. You can see the
umbrella on her shoulder and her
arm is a v-shape and it kind of makes a triangle
In the composition her face is very pleasantly done and she's a very attractive
woman with a her beautiful dress she's wearing
the background is developed and I thought I'd show a photograph of Jeanne and
put it together with the pain kind of show
This does look like her doesn't exactly look like her there's slight differences
he enhanced the lips
It just goes to show how if ManetT paints you he's gonna make you look better Manet made his subjects look interesting
Just to return to her elbow here. I kind of go
concentrated on her elbow because he did such an amazing job on this arm. It's so realistic I can feel it
but he had a lot of paint built up there on the dark blue where her
dress was pushed up and it just makes it more convincing the body and head fit together very well
Now we're gonna move on to another portrait of a woman
and see that this is not quite as great as the other one and I pointed out the
Umbrella on her shoulder and a bent arm. That was really well done
This one her body kind of is hidden there and because she's wearing dark clothes
So I'm criticizing Manet here and I want to make a point about how I look at paintings. I'm sharing my
individual thoughts about Manet's paintings. I don't work for the Getty. I don't have a PhD
I don't speak with an institutional voice I speak with my individual voice
then we move on to another painting which is a cafe scene which has been reproduced many times and you see the
waitresses looking directly at the viewer and there's something about the way Manet's  has his people look out at the viewer. That's so
realistic, even though you know
it's a painting you feel a connection to that person in the painting, but this one's amazing
I like the worker guy smoking there and
Often times when I look at Manet if you look at it for a while you were rewarded with something
you didn't see the first time you looked at it. And in this case, I see the half
portrait of the singer on the stage
 
So here we are
with one of the most famous paintings that we see
reproduced all the time and as I go to museums and look at the plates a lot in books. Sometimes I see these
paintings that are famous and I've seen the images so often in books like I come to kind of
discount them but when I saw this the blue of it is absolutely
amazing of the
The water and I spent some time when I was making this film
I spent some time doing color correction trying to do it right it's difficult because Manet has the
cold blues and then he has the warm flesh. And so you have to
balance that either it comes out too cold or too warm
And I did spend some time to try to get that as accurate as I could. I think it looks pretty good to me
But I don't know what your monitors like this man is just has such presence in this boat
He's holding the tiller now
one of the things that you notice is that the woman is not quite as well done as the man and
I think what happened there was that
Manet was a very
improvisational painter and it to me and this is backed up by some of the notes in the book
He put in the woman later on, you know, he had the guy there he looks so amazing, but he needed something else
So he put the woman there
But the one of the tell tale signs that she was put in later is there's no real connection between her and him in
Manet painting the connections between the viewer and the connections between the people in the painting is often
extraordinary and really well felt so that was a clue to me that that they weren't really connected
That I thought he did that later
sometimes when I see a painting like this with such majesty one of the most beautiful things in the entire planet
I think who am I to criticize Manet? This is a pastel portrait, and I wanted to get your attention toward the hat
Manet was a very sensitive to women's fashions and he
Seemed to like the hats the clothes the makeup the hairstyles
He took such joy in looking at women
Here's another cafe scene. You've got the look to the background. You see a singer on the stage
Then you see the waitress drinking her beer, and then that the man and the woman at the counter
But they're all kind of connected and you do feel a sense of place and the community of these people
 
And I thought I'd do editing experiment here and put the two cafe scenes together to create enlarge the scene
Now we move on to
Manet's wife Suzanne and
if you want to get into some more depth about
his relationships with women there is lots of material out there, but I'll leave it up to you
to explore that
subject
And here's a little doggie. I'm sure this will please many of the viewers a few weeks ago
I was bitten in the ankle by one of these monsters. So this painting frightened me
Now we move on to another portrait of a woman
Now here Manet just painting this woman
it's a very simple portrait and he doesn't have his superpowers where he's
creating a super image like the boating image. This is just him, you know practicing
It's a loose
oil painting, but it's still formidable
Then we move on to a woman bathing a couple things about this one
The composition is memorable and it he's almost creating a symbol to me
He's got his superpower compositional all abilities going here
another thing that I thought of is there's the quote by Degas where he says "when I did the ballet
dancer's MANET copied me." Well, here's an example of a woman bathing and I believe it was done before Degas
did women bathing and in
in my mind
Degas copied Manet. I
Want to point out the way he did the pastel here. He's very fast little with his
chalk and on the bottom of the tub
You can see he turned it sideways to do a wide swab to cover the side of the tub
Now next we're going to move on to
The image of a woman dressed as the opera singer Carmen now
This is a salon painting
So we spent a lot more time
getting the details and the finish and making it look perfect because this is going to be seen by the
thousands of people who visit the salon
One thing I want to point out is the colors are really nice in the original that I'm the scene at the Getty
but when I go to the
Philadelphia Museum of Art  who owns this painting. This is the image that get down from the internet
it's all dark and dowdy, so I tried to bump it up a little bit in Photoshop and it gets a little better
But it's not the colors aren't working very well
But I'm just really disappointed and some of these big museums
who hold these paintings and  that is a did a terrible job on that image
You just have to be kind of a beginner intermediate in Photoshop to make something look better
I'm really  shocked that they didn't make that effort
Now we're moving on to a
notable portrait of Manet's great friend from childhood all through his life Antonin Proust
Manet
wrote that he made a special effort to make this a memorable portrait and he succeeded the
stance is so simple. But Manet has a way of making it so believable. He looks so comfortable in his attire
You know he has his hand on his hip
He's very competent and he's holding his cane it's the kind of interesting - comparing to there with the first painting
I showed by Fontan-Latour where he had a glove on his left hand and his right hand did not have a glove
This one is the opposite where the glove is on the right hand and I
kind of think that was kind of a fashionable thing that men did where men
took a glove off one hand for whatever reason maybe to shake hands with other people
I'll leave that to the fashion historians to figure out. Now
let's look at some of the details of the painting that are very well done
 
Here's another portrait of a woman I'm not going to say anything I'll just let you enjoy this
 
And now we move on to another
portrait of Manet's wife Suzanne now this portrait was done much later in his life and
When he was close to death from syphilis
His wife is sitting here and you can kind of see a lot about his technique because he fills in the basics of the shapes
Very well and and that's one of his strengths and he obviously does the basics first and then he goes in for the details later
Which is his own method and a lot of great artists, they they have their own method
they have their own way of painting they have their own way of drawing and
Manet
definitely had distinct ways of doing everything especially color
now in a previous image I mentioned how the
internet plate from the museum was in poor quality
Another example as this painting which is in the National Gallery in London the Tate Gallery. I download the image
It looks like this and also the image that the get the Getty book that goes along with this exhibition
It seems to have the same image
Which is very dark and it's really disappointing that they printed this image hopefully in a later edition
They can get a better quality image
for example in this image
The color of a dress is really pink
It looks you know, it's dark but it looks kind of like light red, but when I saw it
It's a great amazing pink and then you see the blue marks on the dress. It really works well together
so I like this to this painting, but I'm disappointed that you
would not enjoy it from looking at the plate
Okay, so I'm not gonna mention any more about these bad
museum images but they're out there and I really think that it's a valid criticism they this should be fixed
To return to this amazing painting. It's really amazing
You can see he had these big zigzag lines in blue too on her dress
and that's very unusual for him to have that kind of a wide stroke and
It shows how he kind of adapts his
stroke to the image but it also might be he was kind of tired. This was toward when he was ill
Now this one it actually looks kind of like a Degas. I don't know who did it first
It's not that big a deal to me, but it's interesting that he kind of
obsessed a little bit about the outline, which he doesn't usually do
And that's kind of something Degas does so
I don't know how that came about but that's the one thing of that I noticed about
this is now he's really going over the outline very
several times
so we move on to this painting of a woman with a hat and I
kind of think this is kind of a joke in a way that sometimes
even in today's fashions a woman will acquire a male
fashion attribute, in this case a top hat and put it on her head and it's kind of a very
Confident woman will do it, but you can see the hats kind of small
It doesn't fit the same way it fits on a man
so I kind of think this is like a fashion a very high fashion thing to do and
I like the way that the hands and the gloves are just barely done in
But he'd still get the feeling of what's going on. Then we move on to another
remarkable man a painting called The Plum in the National Gallery of Art in the United States, a very nice plate, and
one thing I read about this painting and some people say she's bored. Some people say she's
interested, you know, it's amazing. Everybody has a different opinion on her thoughts, but I think she looks interesting
She's  cognizant of what's going on. Sometimes when I look at these cafe paintings
I imagine there's music going on in the background
So if someone's just sitting there, you know, they're probably listening to music or just enjoying looking around
now there is another painting by Degas and this is done before Manet a
woman in a cafe and it's interesting because
When I read about it, it's the same model in both paintings and look at the difference between the two models
I'm not going to tell you what I think I'm gonna leave that up to you
I will say that the model herself said that Degas made her look like an idiot
Okay, next we're gonna move on to this
Lion hunter. I'm not gonna pronounce his name. It's too difficult for me, but it is a person who collected Manet paintings and
he was a kind of a braggart and he bragged about his lying hunting in the colonies and
He was also  an amateur painter now
I've written down six things wrong with this painting
The first major thing is that he's put a tree trunk on the left-hand side
It readjusts the whole frame of the painting and if you take in an art class, they tell you never to put a line
right down the side of the painting because it cuts it in half. Well in this case in two thirds
Okay. Number two is the lion is horribly done
You can't even see the body of the lion. And the thing is there's a French painter named Eugene Delacroix
Who paints lions and he's the best that ever was and you don't want to compete with Eugene Delacroix
And so he's in a position where he's he looks like he's trying to hide the lion, but it's really poorly done
Okay, number three the for the forest. There's no foilage in the forest, which he's usually very good at
The figure is kind of floating is not firmly on the ground
The colors for a Manet they're just like it seems like about four shades of colors
Which is he's not using his
incredible ability
What else do I have?
the composition is just kind of awkward and dumb so
Why did this happen this guy?
he made Manet angry and Manet
purposely ruined the painting by all these things I've mentioned
That's you know, maybe he insulted Manet's painting. He's an amateur painter
He could have easily pretended he was much better than he was
Manet was very conceited about his paintings like most great painters. So
for some reason
Manet just ruined this
So let's go to a
Drawing of the and you can see that he hardly even sketched out the lion
It's just so basic and you know, Manet is not known for animal paintings
He has some bulls and some horses and a parrot is kind of well done in one of the other ones, but
he always has them as background things and he's not really
concentrating on them
That  drawing was up for auction
The price for the drawing was three hundred and eighty six thousand dollars
 
Here is an excellent pastel portrait
 
Okay, so here's an example of a painting that you're not going to see very often in
Museums because it's in a private collection
It was shown in exhibitions in 1905
1950 to
1986 and in
2000 and 2001 so so if you don't see it and if this Manet exhibit, you'll probably won't come up again in your lifetime
 
And here's a painting called Skating and refers to the
fad of roller skating which was done by where the man in the back is rollerskating
 
And we move on to this portrait of Monsieur Brun and
I have to tell you
if I drove 100 miles to the Getty just to see this painting it would have been worthwhile
This is an absolutely amazing painting. This painting has only been shown in an exhibition once in
1945 and that exhibition was in Paris
This is a small painting
It's 21 inches by 14 inches and he captures this guy and the white clothes
he's wearing. You can feel the guy's flesh underneath the white clothes. It's so well done
I was shivering when I looked at it. Now
some people in the audience may not be able to appreciate something unless they know the value of that object
Well, this painting came up for auction at Sotheby's and it sold for
5.4 million dollars now. I'll tell you something. I
like this painting so much. I would pay 10 million dollars for this painting
Now this
video is
Turning out to be limits longer than I thought so I'm gonna leave out a lot of some drawings here and some of the paintings
but we're gonna move on to the towards the end where he does the fruits and the
flowers, so I'm really running out of superlatives to describe Manet
Looking at a Maneti painting is like watching a flying unicorn. I mean, I can't even believe the way he did these peaches. It's absolutely
Amazing. You can just feel the freshness the ripeness the colors and here's some
strawberries and
Then you have some of these plums with he draws the waxy surface
 
So when I look at these Manet paintings
I have a physical reaction inside my body in my solar plexus in my
chakra, I
feel it expand. I feel it warm
I get sensations in my solar plexus and it just elevates my spirit
 
Now we're gonna close out with one of the last paintings that Manet did it has no figures in it
It's just this house. It has a tree in the middle, but it doesn't cut off the whole painting and
Manet is the master of
composition, so he might have had a reason to do that and I'm gonna trust his genius on that one
I want to thank everyone for watching this film
