A Manet leads the way

When Edouard Manet’s “Masked Ball at the Opera” arrived at the Whitechapel Art Gallery a few weeks ago, the Observer, the Independent and the Guardian newspapers sent photographers. BBC2 sent a camera crew. On loan from Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, the painting and its setting made the evening news.

“We were founded 100 years ago to bring great art to the people of London’s East End, and the audacity of having a Manet here caught the press’ imagination,” Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick says. “It took our show from the culture pages and put it in the news pages.”

There may be more artists and art collectors in the neighborhood than there used to be, but Whitechapel High Street is still primarily the purview of recent immigrants from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. So a Manet in the neighborhood is rare indeed.

Manet’s masterwork leads “Faces in the Crowd: Picturing Modern Life From Manet to Today,” a monumental exhibition at the Whitechapel through March 6. Record crowds paying as much as £8.50 (about $16) apiece have packed galleries proffering more than 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films and videos created since Manet’s 1873 painting.

“Masked Ball at the Opera,” sometimes considered the landmark urban painting, is the first picture you see upon entering the exhibition, which essentially traces modern art through portraits of the urban figure. Marcel Duchamp’s “Hinged Mirror Photograph” from 1917 is around the corner, and so are works by Max Beckmann, Edward Hopper and Edvard Munch.

There are Paris street scenes from photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassai, New York subway riders from Walker Evans and photographs of German workers from August Sander, as well as less familiar photographs of South Africans by David Goldblatt, Raghubir Singh’s images of urban India and Song Dong’s videos of Shanghai.

“Faces in the Crowd,” its name drawn from an Ezra Pound poem, is basically chronological. Pop artist George Segal’s 1964 “The Dry Cleaning Store,” which concludes the show’s first half, is set at the base of stairs leading up to galleries dotted with video monitors. You hear the video pieces even before you see them, particularly the incessant laughter of Bruce Nauman’s “Clown Torture” and, to a lesser extent, the briskly edited anchors in Omer Fast’s video collage, “CNN Concatenated.”

Whitechapel director Blazwick calls “Faces in the Crowd” “a kind of what-if: Is it possible to tell a different story of Modernism? If the classic story of modern art is the story of abstraction, we wanted to ask whether you could tell another story, which was equally innovative, equally avant-garde, but through a very traditional form, which is figuration. Our other question was: How have the most important artists of the 20th century seen us? How have they pictured modernity?”

Blazwick and her co-curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy, opted for Manet as a starting point. “It came out of thinking: Where does this begin?” Blazwick says. “We think Manet is a pretty good place to start because he invented modern art, in a way. He does two things: He paints in a modern way and paints modern things. It’s not just the way he paints but what he paints.”

American photographer Jeff Wall says in the show’s catalog that his 1979 “Picture for Women” references and comments on Manet’s 1981-82 “Bar at the Folies-Bergere.” French surrealist photographer Claude Cahun’s costumed self-portraits of the 1920s downstairs are reflected in those of American Cindy Sherman’s 1980 photographs upstairs, and similar reiterations wend their way through the show.

The Economist suggested that “Faces in the Crowd” offers a master class in 20th century photography, and Christov-Bakargiev adds that the two curators wanted to discuss how television and film were influencing contemporary artists. “In an age of television and film, it’s natural that artists not necessarily continue the history of abstract modernism,” says Christov-Bakargiev, whose museum will host the exhibition April 5 to July 10.

Several artworks came from across town but others from as far away as Sydney, Beijing and San Francisco. Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator at Tate Modern, compliments the exhibition’s ambitions in going outside what she calls “the usual European-North American axis.” Many of the artists in this show came to the curators’ attention at international art biennials in Venice, Sao Paolo, Johannesburg, Istanbul and elsewhere, says Blazwick, who has long championed non-Western art.

London critics have referred to “Faces in the Crowd” as “bustling,” “invigorating,” “imaginative,” “thought-provoking” and “ambitious,” but they haven’t necessarily agreed with its premise. The Sunday Times, for instance, termed it “a brave failure” by an institution that, despite being “a mere minnow in the international sea world” of museums, “almost succeeds in rewriting the entire story of modern art.” The Financial Times called it “a valiant, comforting, hopelessly flawed argument yet an unmissable show.”

Their sheer ambition in tackling such arguments helped win them the goodwill of colleagues, artists, dealers and collectors, the curators concede. “It’s not only because we have a good Rolodex,” Christov-Bakargiev says. “Edvard Munch’s ‘The Day After,’ loaned by the National Gallery in Oslo, is a very rare painting to see outside Oslo. But the museum decided this was a serious rereading of modernity in art and wanted to contribute to that discussion.”

Three years in the making, the show also profited from some good luck. There was, for instance, the private collector in London who had just refurbished his home. Blazwick, who was visiting him on another matter, saw in his basement a Walter Sickert painting she soon snared for the exhibition. And seeing another “sensational” work -- (Rene Magritte’s “The Infinite Recognition,” from 1933) at a pre-sale display at Christie’s London auction house, the curator “put a marker on it, and they were kind enough to persuade the new owner to lend it to us.”

Getting many of what the Sunday Times called “impressive imports” wasn’t so easy. Several major artists were subjects of retrospectives at other European museums, including both Hopper, at London’s Tate Modern, and Manet, at Madrid’s Prado Museum, affecting both lender supply and inclination. “Historical works are rarely loaned for group exhibitions, which is correct in terms of conservation, but made it difficult,” Christov-Bakargiev says. “It’s also difficult to achieve historical loans for what is basically an exhibition of contemporary art.”

The curators postponed their show a year, in fact, waiting to get certain artworks and particularly the right Manet. Even after the National Gallery of Art agreed to lend the Manet, they confronted still more problems getting the Hopper image they wanted. “I have to admit that by the end, Carolyn and I were begging,” Blazwick says. “To get the Edward Hopper [an untitled, lesser-known image from 1922], I sent an e-mail to the Whitney Museum titled, ‘On bended knee.’ ”

Because the Whitechapel has no collection in the conventional sense, Blazwick says, the gallery didn’t have much to barter with except lender respect for its history. Founded in 1901, the Whitechapel debuted such now-celebrated British artists as Lucian Freud and Gilbert & George, introduced Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock to Britain, and has been referred to in the Guardian as “where our love affair with Modern art began.”

In mid-January, the Whitechapel announced receipt of a Heritage Lottery Grant of £3.3 million (about $6.2 million) toward a capital campaign of £9.9 million (about $18.6 million) to expand next door to the Passmore Edwards Library, which is vacating its Victorian housing for new quarters. When the expansion is completed in 2007, Blazwick says, the gallery will double in size with more programming and year-round exhibitions.

The library once housed great collections of Yiddish books, becoming known as the “University of the Ghetto,” and London’s East End was long a haven for Jewish immigrants. Blazwick calls theirs “a neighborhood of aspiration,” noting that when people here prosper, they generally move on. Mosques have replaced synagogues, and KFC and Indian restaurants are more common than delis these days. A family workshop on the show in January was given in both English and Bengali.

Lured by both low rents and the presence of the Whitechapel, first artists, then galleries started coming to the East End in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Blazwick estimates that there are 10,000 artists within one square mile of the gallery and about 120 galleries. Noting all the medieval alleyways, empty warehouses and shuttered factories, she says, “There are great buildings and immense poverty, which means it’s fertile ground for artists.”

Artists and other art people have flocked to “Faces in the Crowd,” helping push attendance toward 3,000 a week, a record for paid exhibitions at the Whitechapel. “It’s been incredibly popular,” observes the Tate’s Wagstaff. “I found it an immensely stimulating exhibition both in itself and the way it made me think about its arguments. It’s a supreme example of thematic shows museums rarely do these days.”