Deja vu (literally) - Manet, Bellows and Picasso

Manet's The Railway from the National Gallery, Washington

If you go to most of the major shows as I do, sooner or later you will come across a work you have already seen in another exhibition. This phenomenon went into overdrive recently, when this happened at all three shows I went to most recently. I popped into the Royal Academy to catch the last week of the Manet show, and saw The Railway, which I had last viewed in Liverpool at the wonderful Walker Art Gallery exhibition Art in the age of steam some years ago (one of the best shows I have ever seen). As it is one of my favourite pictures, I was more than happy that it has been lent from Washington again. Two of the other paintings, Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Music in the Tuileries Gardns, I had seen before in the Courtauld and the National Gallery respectively. The Luncheon (lent from Munich) was new to me, and was easily worth the trip on its own  - Manet at his enigmatic best. The exhibition as a whole looked at Manet as a portraitist, and I have to say it failed to convince me that he had any great talent in this area. Furthermore, it is debatable that some of the paintings, such as those mentioned above, are actually portraits in the usual sense - they do use friends, acquaintances and members of his household as models, but they seem exercises in form and colour, and depictions of aspects of modernity, rather than attempts to capture the likeness and personality of the sitter. Only the two paintings of Zola and Berthe Morisot seemed both genuinely portraits and genuinely good; the others seemed to lack conviction to me, as if he knew he should be doing something else.

Upstairs, the RA was putting on a show of paintings and prints by George Bellows, an American painter of the first half of the last century who was best known for lively and sympathetic depictions of lower class New York life - part of a group known as the Trash Can artists. His best known work is Stag at Sheeneys, showing a brutal illegal boxing match. Bellows is also known for his highly accomplished prints of everyday scenes, and the print of a boxing match (very similar but not the same as the painting) I had seen at the British Museum years ago at a show of American prints. If anything I prefer the print, as it appropriately gives the scene the look of a newspaper illustration. His later paintings were unknown to me and of a wider range of subjects: some match Manet for their enigmatic quality - one commentator  identified this as a search for something he did not live long enough to find (he died at only 42). This was a very good introduction to an artist not well known in this country, just as illuminating as the Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven show at Dulwich Picture Gallery was with regard to Canadian work of the same period.

Before the RA visit, a friend and I went to the Becoming Picasso show at the Courtauld. In this case, seeing a painting again was also an opportunity to say goodbye. Girl with a dove has recently been sold to the Qataris for a reputed £20 million. This painting was much-loved in this country, but I'm not too sure it's worth that much; still, it will be a shame to see it go. The show as a whole was probably aimed more at those with a greater love of Picasso than I have (I never know where to draw the line between genius and charlatanism with that wily old goat), but it did demonstrate his incredible facility at the age of only 19. One half was from his first Paris show, and consisted of lively works influenced (but not slavishly) by most of the well-known artists of the day, while the other half was done later in the year after a great friend committed suicide and often pay homage to great Spanish artists like Goya, Valazquez and El Greco. They are much more melancholy and chart the beginning of the development into his blue period. I always look yet again at the rest of the Courtald exhibits when I visit exhibitions there, and thus came across the last example of deja vu - a small Picasso drawing of a nude woman which ably supported the claim that he was the greatest draughtsman since Michelangelo, and which I had seen not too long ago at a Royal Academy show of Spanish drawings. I'm beginning to enjoy all these second viewings, and look forward to meeting lots of old friends at future exhibitions..