By: Holland Cotter

The New York Times, November 3, 2006

hat happens when a powerful country with imperial ambitions forces its way at gunpoint into the affairs of another, distant country, of which it has no cultural knowledge, on the pretext of bringing enlightened governance? And that country meets the encroachment with violent resistance? You get disaster.

And what happens when art responds quickly and critically to that disaster? You get the paintings in ''Manet and the Execution of Maximilian,'' a small, taut historical show that puts the Museum of Modern Art back on the experimental, heterodox track that it began to explore six years ago in its ''MoMA2000'' project, and then all but abandoned.

In a New York fall art season given over to mild Modernist pleasures, this show, which opens on Sunday, is a reminder of Modernism's mutinous, myth-scouring origins. It achieves this by bringing one of art's great guerrilla path-cutters, Edouard Manet, onto the scene, wry, infuriated, ambitious, and painting like Lucifer.

Not that there's a lot of him here: eight paintings, three (and an oil sketch) on a single theme: the death by firing squad of the Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian in Mexico in 1867. But it's enough. Manet's images are electrifying. For him, painting was thinking, and his thoughts shoot out in bold, impetuous strokes, ricocheting off multiple targets.

One of his targets was the conservative French emperor Napoleon III. In the mid-19th-century this ruler, ravenous for new territory, had his eye on Mexico. When a reformist government under Benito Juarez came to power in the country, a privileged minority of landowners and clergy appealed to France for help, and Napoleon (counting on the United States being distracted by the Civil War) sent his army their way in 1862.

The initial invasion, under the pretext of collecting debts owed by Mexico, resulted in a mortifying French defeat, now celebrated by Mexicans as Cinco de Mayo. To provide a cover for a second one, Napoleon persuaded Maximilian, the idealistic younger brother of the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, to become emperor of Mexico, backed by the French military. Maximilian, who knew nothing in particular about Mexico, accepted the offer with a missionary zeal, giving Napoleon both a colony and a Hapsburg alliance.

But problems instantly arose. The new emperor arrived in 1864 and was led to believe by Mexican monarchists that he would be embraced. He wasn't. Popular support was for Juarez, pushed north by the French but poised to return. Maximilian, despite his liberal sentiments, made repressive moves, alienating everyone.

Napoleon soon realized he had a fiasco on his hands and wanted out. Maximilian was urged to abdicate, but stayed on, as his wife dashed in a panic to Europe to rally support. None came. The French Army departed. Juarez returned. Maximilian was arrested and, along with two of his generals, Miguel Miramon and Tomas Mejia, was tried for treason and sentenced to die. He was 35.

On the morning of June 19, 1867, the three were brought to open ground near a walled cemetery and shot by a squad of Mexican Army riflemen. Maximilian's end was agonizingly protracted. The initial round of fire didn't kill him; the coup de grace was botched and had to be repeated to finish the job.

Edouard Manet. The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. 1868–69. Lithograph on chine collé,

Only brief, often contradictory news reports reached Paris, but Manet instantly set to work on the first of the three large paintings he would do of the execution. All three are at MoMA. They are stunners.

Manet began the first picture (here from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with a few hard facts and strong political convictions. He had long been antagonistic to the French colonial enterprise, and he initially imagined the event in Mexico as something closer to an infernal hallucination than to reportage, a kind of moral nightmare.

Edouard Manet. Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. 1867

A mass of riflemen in sombreros fill its center, aiming at two figures to the left, both featureless and half obscured by gun smoke. The atmosphere feels choked and tight, the figures hemmed in by what may or may not be a low wall. There are other uncertainties: the presence of a third victim is sketchily suggested; the sombreros have been half repainted to resemble French-style military caps.

Did Manet alter the hat styles after learning that the riflemen were Mexican soldiers, not peasants, as he originally believed? Or did he simply decide against using exoticizing ''native costumes'' in the picture? Or did he want to make the execution squad look more French, thus pointing a finger at the real aggressor in the Mexican ordeal?

Finally, why did he leave evidence of his unresolved decisions for all to see? John Elderfield, chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA and organizer of the show, suggests that in preserving marks of revision, Manet declared his interest in reinventing the outdated genre of history painting, turning an art of pre-set ideals into one of mutable and unpredictable realities.

After a few months, though, he put that painting aside and started a new one with the same figures but now set against open ground and sky, dressed in natty uniforms, with facial features filled in. The resulting picture, finished and polished but politically too loaded to be exhibited, was put in storage in the artist's studio, where it suffered damage.

After Manet's death in 1883, his son cut this second picture into four pieces, discarding ruined sections. It was only a few years ago that the fragments were united on a single canvas by the National Gallery in London, and that version is at MoMA, an accidental embodiment of Manet's vision of history painting as an art of permanent incompletion.

Detail of a second version, cut up by Manet's son, who discarded ruined sections

The third version (from the collection of the Stadtische Kunsthalle, in Mannheim, Germany), begun in 1868, is the last and largest of the full-scale pictures. Manet has left his initial, hallucinated composition intact, adding more specific details: a dark-skinned Mejia receiving the first blast of rifle fire, a stoical, blond-bearded Maximilian; a matinee-idol Miramon. The only major change is that they now play out their roles against a high wall topped with a knot of spectators, who peer down as if into a bullring at carnage erupting, or about to erupt.

Edouard Manet. The Execution of Emperor Maximilian. 1868–69

By then the killing was more than a year in the past. Manet had had access to eyewitness accounts and had seen prints and photographs of the execution site, of the death squad posing, and of Maximilian's bloodied clothes. Mr. Elderfield includes a good amount of this material in the show—it is riveting—but he also locates sources for the paintings in other art.

Goya was an obvious, primary source. His ''Third of May, 1808,'' not in the show, and his brutal bullfight scenes were implicit comments on the French invasion of Spain under the first Napoleon.

Francisco Goya, The Shootings of May Third 1808, 1814

But another one was Manet's own earlier work, which, Mr. Elderfield contends, was subtly shaped by his awareness of French imperial predations. ''The Dead Toreador'' and the ravishingly strange ''Dead Christ and the Angels,'' both on the theme of victimization, are examples; they are on view here.

Edouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, probably 1864

Édouard Manet, The Dead Christ and the Angels, 1864

The argument Mr. Elderfield build s around the extraordinary pictures in the show fully unfolds in an exhibition catalog that is at once a tour de force of pictorial close reading and a vivid portrait of Manet as an artist-thinker who disarranged the pieties of the past, destabilized the verities of the present and planted depth-charges for detonation in the art of the future.

The Maximilian paintings certainly feel contemporary. They are, among other things, also touchstones in the recent history of crime-and-punishment imagery, from photographs of a corpse at AbuGhraib, to Eddie Adams's 1968 picture of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot at close range, to Gerhard Richter's photo-based paintings of dead members of the Baader-Meinhof group, terrorists who either died by their own hand in prison or were killed. The Museum of Modern Art owns the Richter series, ''October 18, 1977.'' It was exhibited as part of ''MoMA2000,'' to wide praise, and is on view now. Whenever it is shown it is, in effect, an exhibition in itself, and almost nothing the museum has offered since it reopened in new quarters has been anywhere near as challenging.

''Manet and the Execution of Maximilian,'' however, makes the grade, and at a perfect time. At present, the New York art establishment is rich, self-pleasured and largely asleep. Mr. Elderfield's terse show strikes an entirely different tone. It is as sharp, agitating and exciting as the sound of gunfire down the street, across the globe—the dominant music of Manet's day and our own.