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The Prints of Zola
48" x 60"
1996 Artist's Collection
Manet's small painting within a painting suggests what the original work looks
like, surrounded here by the sort of play with scale familiar to us from the
graphics of modern print and TV advertising. Manet's portrait of his friend
pays tribute to his new artistic sources. Zola holds in his lap an illustrated
history of European art, while behind him the influence of Spanish painting,
represented by Goyas engraving of Velasquez' Feast of Bacchus, and Japanese
woodblock prints are juxtaposed with a print of his own Olympia. It was the
first recognition in a major painting of the impact of the growing art reproduction
industry on a modern sensibility and was thus, for me, a direct ancestor of
my paintings.
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