Manet and Modern Beauty explores for the first time in a major museum exhibition Édouard Manet’s (1832–1883) last years, after his rise to notoriety in the 1860s and the formal launch of the Impressionist movement in the early 1870s. The exhibition features more than 90 works of art, including an impressive array of genre scenes, still lifes, pastels, and portraits of favorite actresses and models, bourgeois women of his acquaintance, his wife, and his male friends.
Manet died at the age of 51 in 1883, after a long and painful illness. Declining health forced him to adjust his working habits: during the last six or seven years of his life his output was generally more intimate in both scale and subject, focusing on fashionable scenes of Parisian life and the stylish women, and sometimes men, of his acquaintance. Too often dismissed as superficial by critics, these later works provide valuable testimony to Manet’s elegant social circle and suggest a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity, while recording the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty and visual pleasure in the face of death.
Manet and Modern Beauty is curated by Getty curators Scott Allan and Emily Beeny, and Gloria Groom, chair of European Painting and Sculpture and David and Mary Winton Green Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. It has been co-organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Also, be sure not to miss Drinking in the Past: The Intoxicating Art of Impressionism on Wednesday, January 8 and Friday, January 10, 2020. French café and bar culture inspired discourse, drinking, and the subject matter for many Impressionist works of art. Join Maite Gomez-Rejon (Artbites) in an exploration of the multilayered history of Édouard Manet’s late-19th-century Paris. Then, raise a glass to Manet and discover four fabulous champagnes selected by Ian Blackburn (wineLA). Tickets $75; ages 21 and over. Complimentary parking.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Getty Publications released a catalog of the same name. Featuring nearly 300 illustrations and nine essays by both established and emerging Manet scholars, the publication Manet and Modern Beauty brings a diverse range of approaches to bear on a little-studied area of this major artist’s oeuvre.
The presentation in Los Angeles is made possible with major support from Elizabeth and Bruce Dunlevie. It is sponsored by City National Bank and generously supported by Ellen and David Lee and Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Holmes Tuttle.