This is the great paradox of the 19th century’s greatest painter, and it’s the crux, too, of the exhibition “Manet and Modern Beauty,” on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, which focuses on the art of Manet’s last six or seven years before his early death in 1883, at the age of 51. Fresh, charming, a bit evasive and almost too stylish, “Manet and Modern Beauty” sticks up for these later portraits, genre scenes and still lifes — which the last century’s art historians, enraptured by “Olympia” and her ilk, tended to dismiss with the three Fs: frivolous, fashionable and (worst of all) feminine.
“Manet and Modern Beauty” has a further mission: to pump up the reputation of one of Manet’s last paintings, “Jeanne (Spring),” which the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired in 2014 after more than a century in the shadows. Painted in 1881 — and first exhibited in the 1882 Salon with the much more famous “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (not on view here) — “Jeanne” depicts a fashionable Parisienne lost in thought as she walks through a garden.
Its forthright cheerfulness comes as a challenge to those of us still hung up on the brawnier, more shocking image of modernity Manet forged two decades earlier with “Déjeuner” and “Olympia.” (The show will travel to the Getty in October; it’s been organized by Gloria Groom, the Art Institute’s chair of European painting, and the Getty curators Scott Allan and Emily Beeny.)
Manet’s embrace of beauty in the late 1870s went together with a keen gaze on the social milieu of the new Third Republic, finally recovering from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and throwing off an old moral order. Brilliant scenes of Paris cafe culture — including “Plum Brandy” (1877), depicting a glum woman musing over a drink and a cigarette at a marble table, and “The Café-Concert” (circa 1878-79), in which a top-hatted gent and a working-class woman nurse beers together — display an engagement with public leisure and sexual mores that would culminate in the optical and social riddle of the “Bar.”
Many late still lifes, too, make a virtue of pleasure and urbanity. One astounding painting here, from a private collection and not exhibited in nearly 20 years, depicts a half-dozen oysters and a chilled Champagne bottle with arresting briskness, and includes a Japanese fan that would have been the height of fashion. “One must be absolutely modern,” Rimbaud commanded a few years previously, and Manet held fast to that principle — treating the cafes and parks of Paris as not just sites of enjoyment but also venues where new life was made from scratch.
Manet had always been an adept of women’s fashion, and “Manet and Modern Beauty” looks carefully at how clothing and accessories work to signal modernity in the artist’s late work.
In the large, tight, equivocal “In the Conservatory” (circa 1877-79), a woman on a bench stares impassively into the middle distance, while a man leans down in silent vexation. Their left hands, each sporting a wedding band, dangle near each other but do not touch. What compounds the painting’s ambiguous force — is this a flirtation? a break-up? a reconciliation? — is the woman’s up-to-the-minute outfit: a form-fitting gray dress with an accordion-pleated train, set off with a silk belt and bow and enlivened with a hat, glove and parasol in jasmine yellow. The picture is as open as “Olympia” is blunt, and Manet captures it all with indefinite, flowing brush strokes that give it a startling freshness.
Unlike the plein-air Impressionists who worshiped him, Manet was a studio artist to the end, and as his health began to fail in 1879 he took to smaller formats, sometimes aimed at the market and often shared with friends. He wrote letters that included exquisite sketches of plums, chestnuts, even a shrimp.
Pastels become a favored medium after 1880, especially for pictures of women. Small, luscious still lifes of fruit and flowers, made when Manet was in chronic pain, display a judiciousness that makes them even more delectable. (One here, of four apples balanced precariously on a white table, is on loan from the collection of Jeff Koons.)
“Manet and Modern Beauty” owes a lot to feminist scholarship on the artist over the last 30 years, and even the curators’ choice of walls of muted rose and dusky lilac signals their embrace of the “feminine” epithet that opponents of the late work once hurled. But there have always been many Manets, and even the later, tenderer Manet coexists with an artist of deep political engagement and historical sweep. The glaring absences in this exhibition — even more than the “Bar” — are Manet’s 1881 portrait of the exiled Communard Henri Rochefort, as well as his two late great seascapes, both titled “Rochefort’s Escape” and painted in 1880-81. As Mr. Allan writes in the catalog, Manet’s last years coincided with “an epochal political shift leftward” in France, and these maritime paintings with a political prisoner form the last act in Manet’s long interweaving of historical painterly styles and current events.
I suspect those works are not here so as to leave the last word to “Jeanne,” the Getty’s prize, who also appears on the catalog’s cover and on posters all over Chicago. May the gods of French painting forgive me, but “Jeanne” is a banal and overly refined picture, and its marriage of fashion and foliage tips exhibits a vulgarity wholly unlike the cool, careful “In the Conservatory.” The curators make hay from the fact that in 1882, visitors and critics at the Salon preferred the bright, pleasant “Jeanne” to the darker, stranger “Bar.” But I’m not sure why the same contemporary critics who slimed “Olympia” now get to have the definitive word on which Manets matter most.
I made three passes of “Manet and Modern Beauty,” and between the second and third I went upstairs to see the Art Institute’s most prized Manet: the pancake-flat “Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers,” which survived the outraged crowds of the 1865 Salon. Its blank background and disdain for illusion are miles away from the floral profusion of “Jeanne.” And I tried to shake my conviction that “Jesus Mocked” — a masterpiece of candor, so proud to be a two-dimensional slab of oil and canvas — counts for more than the fashionable scenes below.
Why do I value this early Manet so much more? It is only because I think art has a higher vocation than delivering joy?
Or is it because, poor modern boy that I am, I have been trained by more than a century of artists and writers to be suspicious of beauty — that ruse, that luxury, that feminine thing? The received history of modern Western painting, over which Manet looms like our great bourgeois Allfather, can feel like a succession of attacks on beauty by generations of arrogant men, each more certain than the last that their art would at last redeem an ugly society. But Manet knew that there is as much rebellion and insight in a dress, a bouquet or even a pile of strawberries if he could see past their surfaces to the richness within. That is another path to modernity, grounded in what his dear friend Baudelaire, in “The Painting of Modern Life,” called “beauty, fashion and happiness.”
Jason Farago is an art critic for The Times. He reviews exhibitions in New York and abroad, with a focus on global approaches to art history. Previously he edited Even, an art magazine he co-founded. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for art criticism. @jsf