IN art, the periphery informs the centre. Apparently 'mar- ginal' phenomena - such as varnish or frames - can be extremely important, both aesthetically, and in terms of a picture's meaning. Most avant-garde paintings from the 1870s to the 1900s are now far removed visually from the effects originally sought by the artists: varnish is one of the main culprits. This article looks at the issue of varnish on modern paintings from the impressionist period to that of the Fauves. It argues that, as far as artists themselves were concerned, varnish was not a finish to be applied automati- cally or arbitrarily to paintings. In addition to altering markedly the appearance of the object, varnish - or the lack of it - carried an ideological message: the decision not to varnish signalled the modernity not only of the work but also of the artist. A history of the debates concerning pic- ture varnishing forms the context in which a more detailed analysis of impressionist and Fauve paintings can be loc- ated. When contemporary art criticism, treatises on tech- nique, the opinions of dealers and artists, and the actual paintings themselves are examined, a pattern of views emerges which gives new significance to the problem of varnish.

and Michael Fried have seen Manet's uses of past images as exposing the significant place of EDOUARD MANET's painting presents a complex and con- troversial case of the modern artist's relation to preceding tradition. Scholars from Germain Bazin to Michel Foucaultthe museum in nineteenth- century experience. For Bazin, Manet's engagement with the art of distant masters exemplified the museum's rise as a site of artistic instruction. The variety of the museum collec- tion, he argued, promoted stylistic freedom, substituting choice for the tradition of apprenticeship to a single master. Later, Foucault associated Manet's archival enthusiasm with the museum's function as a new imaginative space of the nineteenth century. Its collected paintings, he affirmed, gen- erated further paintings out of themselves, new images implied by the relation of past works to each other, and to the modern viewer. More recently, Michael Fried, drawing in part on the theory of Harold Bloom, has regarded Manet as challenging the influence of museum painting, distorting the normal practice of selective imitation in an ambitious summarisation of earlier schools and styles.