From memory to oblivion: Manet and the origins of modernist painting

Manet has long been notorious for his quotations from and allusions to the Old Masters, especially in his masterpieces of the 1860s. But what has not been recognized is that a similar engagement with the art of the past characterizes the work of other leading painters in his generation. It is as if the most ambitious younger painters were all responding to a new situation, one that called for deliberate allusion to or adaptation of earlier works and styles in order that meaningful connection with painting's past not be lost. With the advent of the Impressionists, however, the situation changed abruptly: what now became crucial was the ability of a new work of art to "sustain comparison" with works from the past whose quality was not in doubt. And this is to say that the earlier work was increasingly divested of its sense of pastness in the interests of its authority in the present. These and related developments mark the first phase of pictorial modernism.