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Manet and the Post-Impressionists: a checklist of exhibits

This is a major article, a key study in the discipline which will have a lasting and long-reaching effect on our knowledge of the collecting, writing, and teaching of modern art. It originated in the discovery of five different versions of the exhibition catalogue for Roger Fry’s seminal Manet and the Post-Impressionists, and the realization that they provided the evidence to show that works of art were replaced by others during the course of the exhibition, and also that major art dealers in Paris played a key role in the selection of work. A pain-staking analysis of the catalogues, press reviews including many unpublished ones, dealer’s records, correspondence and first- hand accounts enabled the identification of a large number of hitherto unknown works by Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso in the exhibition. This empirical research dispels the idea that Manet and the Post-Impressionists was made up of second-rate paintings, and shows that the previous literature is unreliable and wrong. The article provides a new provenance and exhibition history for important examples of modern art, many of which are now in museum collections. Many of these hitherto unidentified pictures subsequently acquired an iconic status within the history of modern art, a discovery which raises important questions about the role of the art dealer in this history, and the influence of Fry’s show on subsequent collections of modern art. The article should be read together with a chapter by the author in Anne Helmreich and Pamela Fletcher, eds.,The Rise of the London Art market, 2011, pp.85-97 that examines the connection between the commercial art world and the historiography of modern art that Manet and the Post-Impressionists inspired. It is evidence that research in the rapidly growing field of exhibition histories is a significant aspect of the discipline.