Photo: The fifer.

The exhibition proper continues further on, room after room of Manet interrupted only once, where three of Manet's paintings of the Execution of Maximilian hang with Goya's devastating The Third of May 1808 execution scene. Goya shows us peasants pleading and cowering before their assassins. Manet painted the moment of the fusillade itself, the puppet emperor dismissed in smoke. But Goya is worse, truly harrowing, where Manet can only illustrate. The only troubling moment is the little crowd of onlookers borrowed from a bullfight scene. Long before his visit, Manet had been obsessed with Spanish subjects, with an exotic (not to say erotic) and largely invented "Spanishness". Dancers, guitarists, capes and hats, imagined and perhaps cliched "Spanish" situations had provided him with numerous subjects. Something more than simple fancy dress must have attracted him, although an affectation for things Spanish had been fashionable in Paris in the 1850s. This, but not his love of Spanish painting, had already waned in his art by the time he came here. Drawn to the frankness, to the light and timbre and directness of Velázquez, he was also attracted by the dressing-up box, the dress and manners of folkloric Spain. Even his magnificent and believable The Dead Toreador had been painted before his trip, although what we now know as the stark painting of the single, dead figure was cut out of a larger composition, Incident at a Bullfight, which he had failed to get into the 1864 Salon. Lorca once remarked that a dead man is more alive in Spain than in any other place in the world. Manet's Toreador, already dead, was resurrected after Madrid. The Spanish Singer, the awkward, left-handed guitarist sitting precariously on his bench, with that eye-catching and possibly significant cigarette end smoldering on the floor in the foreground; the portrait of Victorine Meurent, who had earlier been the naked, profoundly uncomfortable woman in his Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, now dressed as a matador in a purely fictitious corrida (how Manet loved to play such cross-dressing games); his young man dressed as a majo (wearing the same hat as Mademoiselle Meurent) - one might say that all these paintings are no more than occasions for exotic pictorial drama. But more than affording Manet colour and strangeness and theatricality, they also gave him its opposite: blackness (and what blacks), a pictorial austerity and unforgiving light he can have known only from other paintings. Inevitably, we view Manet - the man and the artist - as a product of his time and place. But, in this exhibition, we begin to ask what time, what place? Manet's profundity is really all in our confrontation with the material presence of his paintings, the inescapable phantoms he puts before us. They are here, but they also inhabit a psychological, temporal, physical elsewhere. Nowhere is this better seen than in Bar at the Folies-Bergères, on loan from the Courtauld Institute in London. I always approach this painting as though I'm stepping up to the counter for a drink. I become stuck there somehow, not so much indecisive as momentarily trapped and transfixed. Which side of the mirror are we on, which side of Manet's painted surface? What kind of invitation is this painting? Yearning for a drink, I'll never get as much as to be included in this painted scene. The barmaid looks right through me. No, she's looking somewhere else. Painted gazes cannot meet. Others, Manet seems to be saying, are unknowable. And to those painted others, so are we. Presence is everything. That such painting can exist with such perilous psychological complexity, is suddenly a shock again. I felt disabled by Manet in Madrid, winded.

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