Hans Haacke’s Art Has Long Targeted Museums. A Career Retrospective Tests Its Potency Today.

Édouard Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus (1880) is a winsome little painting of a pile of the vegetables on a bed of greens. It is one of the very greatest still lifes in art history (the brushwork on those greens!), and certainly one of Manet’s most alluring pictures. It is also a painting connected to the Nazis.
In 1974, artist Hans Haacke undertook the task of tracing the painting’s history, charting each time it changed hands since it was made in 1880 for the French art co