For all the directness of its facture, and despite the candor of model Victorine Meurent’s knowing (yet somehow alienated) gaze, Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a manifesto of modern painting, has always proved problematic when it comes to critical and historical interpretation. At the time of its succes de scandale at the Salon des refusés in 1863, one critic admitted that he searched “in vain for the meaning” of it. Since that time, various readings...