Can a Museum Show Manet and Be Modern?

Question: Speaking of “internal confusion,” what’s Manet doing at the Museum of Modern Art?
Answer: He’s there because chief curator John Elderfield wants him to be.
Elderfield’s monographic show, Manet and the Execution of Maximilian is undeniably engrossing, but it makes you wonder how the museum could justify past deaccessions of works that supposedly didn’t fit in with the post-1880 modernist canon. Like the large array of Pissarros in last year’s “Cézanne and Pissarro” show, the invasion of 1860s Manets is justified on the grounds that he was a modernist precursor. The Pissarros’ presence was also properly understood as an exercise of curatorial prerogative: MoMA curator Joachim Pissarro is the artist’s great-grandson.
What’s next, Prud’hon? Elderfield is author of a major volume devoted the drawings of that early 18th-century artist.