I was communing with a fantastic Turner at the somewhat unholy show of Paul Allen’s collection at EMP when an elderly woman pointed out a pair of paintings to her husband.

“Oh, this is Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec,” she said, walking toward them. Her husband walked to the labels to verify his wife’s testimony, which was entirely wrong.

The piece she mistook for a Toulouse-Lautrec was a chaste Degas pastel of a woman (in a hat, if I’m remembering correctly) by the piano. The painting she called out as a Manet was an ominous bedroom scene by the living artist Eric Fischl.

But this woman’s unintentional pairing brought to mind ideas more interesting than the curator’s. Manet and Fischl are actually a great match. Manet’s solidity, modernity, and early insertion of commodity culture in the relations between the sexes—pure Fischl, all of it (or more like the other way around). The blue-and-white stripes in the Manet Venice scene that hangs directly across from the Fischl at EMP began to vibrate in concert with the striped back of Fischl’s woman, who stands in the sunlight coming through the blinds.

Then I started to think about Toulouse-Lautrec’s seductive graphic style in his portraits of spent prostitutes, and the connections to Fischl through Balthus, the contrast to Degas, and I realized how a single T-L would make this whole show kinkier, more bodily.

Thank you, marvelously mistaken elderly woman.