“Manet and Modern Beauty”, will be the first exhibition held by the Art Institute of Chicago devoted exclusively to the painter in over 50 years. This retrospective, co-organised with the J. Paul Getty Museum, focuses on the transformation of Manet’s style in his later years.
It features more than 54 paintings, ranging from genre scenes and still lifes to portraits of fashionable women as well as of intimate male friends.
Among these is a portrait of the young model-actress Jeanne Demarsy, entitled “Jeanne (Spring)”. The painting was intended to be the first of a series representing the four seasons as fashionable Parisian women. Along with “Autumn (Méry Laurent),” which is also on show in “Manet and Modern Beauty,” the works remain the only completed ones in the project.
The exhibition will also display rarely seen letters Manet wrote to his acquaintances, which include illustrations of fruits and flowers; garden pictures, which themselves often feature fashionable women; and flower studies.
“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 lionised as one of the great heroes and rebels of modern art,” noted Scott Allan, the Associate Curator of Paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in a statement.
“Manet and Modern Beauty” will be on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from May 26 to September 8. It will then be displayed at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles from October 8 to January 12, 2020. – Relaxnews
