In its glory days, under the directorship of the likes of Bryan Robertson in the 1960s, or Nicholas Serota in the 1980s, the Whitechapel Art Gallery had a reputation for unparalleled boldness – a reputation tarnished by its subsequent decline to the condition of just another modern art musuem on the modern art circuit, a repository for the tired gestures of an increasingly academic avant-garde. But the Whitechapel’s new exhibition, “Faces in the Crowd”, comes across as an attempt to recapture its old sense of adventure and curatorial devil-may-care. A teeming cornucopia of a display, with works begged and borrowed from all quarters, the show takes as its theme “the picturing of modern life”. Although the word “modern” has for the purposes been taken to define a period stretching from 1870 to the present – “From Manet to Today”, as the assonantly rhyming subtitle has it – which narrows the focus a little, the subject remains, to put it mildly, dauntingly large. The exhibition ostensibly sets out to tell the entire story of the modern world as it has been reflected in figurative painting, sculpture, film, photography, installation and performance art during the last century and a quarter. It was never going to be easy to squeeze all that within the compass of the Whitechapel’s one-up, one-down gallery spaces, however artfully compartmentalised they may have been for the occasion; and the overall effect veers between the entertainingly hectic and the irritatingly manic.

So many of the individual exhibits are so outstanding that the show is definitely worth a visit – “vaut le detour”, as the old Michelin Guides used to say – despite the inevitable shortcomings produced by the extreme amplitude of its theme. The first of many stunners is Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera, of...

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