Art Institute of Chicago
May 26 to September 8, 2019
J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center
October 8, 2019, to January 12, 2020
The Art Institute of Chicago and the J. Paul Getty Museum will each present Manet and Modern Beauty, an exhibition on view May 26–September 8, 2019 at the Art Institute of Chicago and October 8, 2019–January 12, 2020 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. This exhibition focuses exclusively on Édouard Manet and will be the first to center on his last years, bringing together an impressive array of genre scenes, still lifes, pastels, and portraits of fashionable women—favorite actresses and models, bourgeois women of his acquaintance, and his wife—as well as intimate male friends.
and Autumn (Méry Laurent), the pair comprises the only two completed works in a project to portray the seasons through paintings of stylishly attired women.
These works are part of an impressive array of “femmes Manet,” both portraits and single-figure genre paintings of women that range across the social spectrum. Supplementing this display will be the delicate and rarely seen letters Manet wrote to his acquaintances, featuring exquisite illustrations of fruits and flowers.
Punctuating the presentation are major multi-figure paintings, including
In the Conservatory
and Boating,
both shown in the 1879 Salon, that focus attention on modern social and gender relations. Together these works showcase the final flowering of Manet’s talent as he put his work, ever responsive to the moment, under the influence of modern life.
“With every artist, there is the artist we know and the artist we
don’t know, and our job at the Art Institute, where we have such
wonderful examples of all of the Impressionists, is to take you into the
realm of something that you didn’t know,” said Gloria Groom, Chair of
European Painting and Sculpture, David and Mary Winton Green Curator at
the Art Institute of Chicago. “There are a number of Manet’s more
familiar Salon paintings in the exhibition, but also delicate drawings,
pastel portraits, and illustrated letters that speak to a more intimate,
unknowable, unknown artist, one who always manages, despite his
challenges, to take your breath away.”
At both venues, the exhibition will present more than 90 works of art, including approximately 50 paintings, numerous pastels and many works on paper (letters, watercolors, prints) and historical publications. At the Art Institute of Chicago the exhibition will also include historical costume accessories.
“What is so remarkable about Manet’s final years is how creative he managed to be in spite of his rapidly declining health,” notes Scott Allan, Associate Curator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “His heightened interest in pretty parisiennes, the still lifes of fruits and flowers that he painted while confined to the studio, the garden pictures he did while seeking rest cures in the suburbs, and the letters he wrote and illustrated with watercolor while he was away from his friends and Parisian society – all of these show the ailing artist’s passionate attachment to the delicate beauties and fleeting pleasures of this world. Manet’s last works are among the most gorgeous and vibrant he painted but also, given his personal circumstances, the most poignant, and they reveal a more intimately human side of an artist so often lionized as one of the great heroes and rebels of modern art.”
Manet and Modern Beauty is organized by Gloria Groom, Chair of European Painting and Sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator, the Art Institute of Chicago; and Scott Allan, Associate Curator of Paintings, and Emily Beeny, Associate Curator of Drawings, both at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
At both venues, the exhibition will present more than 90 works of art, including approximately 50 paintings, numerous pastels and many works on paper (letters, watercolors, prints) and historical publications. At the Art Institute of Chicago the exhibition will also include historical costume accessories.
“What is so remarkable about Manet’s final years is how creative he managed to be in spite of his rapidly declining health,” notes Scott Allan, Associate Curator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “His heightened interest in pretty parisiennes, the still lifes of fruits and flowers that he painted while confined to the studio, the garden pictures he did while seeking rest cures in the suburbs, and the letters he wrote and illustrated with watercolor while he was away from his friends and Parisian society – all of these show the ailing artist’s passionate attachment to the delicate beauties and fleeting pleasures of this world. Manet’s last works are among the most gorgeous and vibrant he painted but also, given his personal circumstances, the most poignant, and they reveal a more intimately human side of an artist so often lionized as one of the great heroes and rebels of modern art.”
Manet and Modern Beauty is organized by Gloria Groom, Chair of European Painting and Sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator, the Art Institute of Chicago; and Scott Allan, Associate Curator of Paintings, and Emily Beeny, Associate Curator of Drawings, both at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Catalogue
This stunning examination of the last years of Édouard Manet’s life and career is the first book to explore the transformation of his style and subject matter in the 1870s and early 1880s. The name Manet evokes the provocative, heroically scaled pictures he painted in the 1860s for the Salon, but in the late 1870s and early 1880s the artist produced quite a different body of work: stylish portraits of actresses and demimondaines, luscious still lifes, delicate pastels, intimate watercolors, and impressionistic scenes of suburban gardens and Parisian cafés.
Often dismissed as too pretty and superficial by critics, these later works reflect Manet’s elegant social world, propose a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity, and record the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty and visual pleasure in the face of death.
Featuring nearly three hundred illustrations and nine fascinating essays by established and emerging Manet specialists, a technical analysis of the late Salon painting
Jeanne (Spring), a selection of the artist’s correspondence, a chronology, and more, Manet and Modern Beauty brings a diverse range of approaches to bear on a little-studied area of this major artist’s oeuvre.
This volume is published to accompany exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago May 26 to September 8, 2019 and the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center October 8, 2019, to January 12, 2020.
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