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With Manet – Painting the Gaze, starting at the end of May 2016 on the occasion of the its reopening, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting an exhibition of superlatives: With masterworks by Édouard Manet (1832-1883) it features one of the most important pioneers of modern painting, one who had revolutionized art in the 19th century like no other. The theme of the show, Manet’s gazes, presents the artist’s work from a new perspective. His paintings, attracting the crowds to the Paris Salons already in the 19th century, had raised veritable storms of protest. This was mainly due to his painterly strategy of creating an intriguing relation between the figures in the picture and the observer with a previously unknown immediacy. This manner of directly addressing the observer has continued to fascinate viewers until today. Manet’s paintings reveal how »seeing« within the public sphere of the Paris metropolis has undergone perpetual changes ever since the 1860s – a transformation that Manet and his contemporaries had pointedly dealt with in their art. By reverting to old masters, as for example to the great Spaniards Velázquez and Goya, but at the same time dealing with the topics of modern life, Manet developed the new pictorial language of his time.