The ‘Beauty’ of Edouard Manet’s later work showcased in new Art Institute exhibit

Although Édouard Manet has long been heralded as the father of Impressionism and one of the transformative painters of the 19th century, critics and art historians frequently dismissed his late works as too prettified and precious — the provocateur gone soft.

This perception began to change in 1990s, and three curators hope to definitively rebut it with “Manet and Modern Beauty,” the first major exhibition anywhere to examine the last years of the artist’s life before his untimely death in 1883 at age 51.

Showcasing more than 90 paintings, pastels and works on paper from the late 1870s and early ‘80s, the show will run May 26-Sept. 8 at the Art Institute of Chicago and then travel to the co-organizing J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

“It’s not that they [the late works] are more important than the unbelievably rule-breaking, transgressive works of the ‘60s and the more Impressionist works of the ‘70s,” said Gloria Groom, the Art Institute’s chair of European painting and sculpture, “but it’s still Manet making art and Manet being a great artist, so why wouldn’t we look at these, too?”

“Manet and Modern Beauty” is meant to be a kind of sequel to “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,” a landmark exhibition shown at the Art Institute in 2013. It was the first to delve into the interrelationships of the three cultural forces spelled out in its title.

Groom had hoped to include “Jeanne (Spring)” (1881) in that exhibition, but was unable to secure the loan of the overlooked masterpiece. The Getty Museum’s acquisition of the painting in 2014 led to the partnership that spawned this offering, which was going to be a small, focused study at first but evolved into a full-scale survey.

“The more we got to thinking about it,” Groom said, “the more we realized that this late period of Manet’s life was really interesting and that no one has really gone into it and tried to understand it.”

Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago

Although their last names are similar, Manet should not be confused with Claude Monet, the timelessly popular Impressionist who created nuanced, light-infused series of paintings of stacks of wheat and water lilies.

Employing a forward-looking flat, painterly style that made some critics deride his paintings as unfinished, Manet influenced the Impressionists and was in turn influenced by them, but he resisted direct involvement with the group.

He became famous for controversial paintings such as “Olympia” (1863), a provocative nude portrait of a prostitute, and his updated takes on history painting like his three versions of the “Execution of Emperor Maximilian” (1867-69).

But in the last years of his life, illness forced Manet to reduce the scale of his paintings, and he turned for inspiration to the themes of “beauty, fashion and happiness” enshrined in Charles Baudelaire’s influential 1863 essay, “The Painter of Modern Life.”

He painted primarily floral still lifes and portraits of women from all walks of life with whom he had an easy rapport. “He was courteous, he was funny and he just really enjoyed women’s company,” Groom said. “He didn’t see them as either harlots or angels of the hearth. He really saw them as who they were. In the 19th century, that was rather unusual.”

The centerpiece of the exhibition is “Jeanne (Spring),” part of a never-finished set of figurative embodiments of the four seasons. The work was shown at the prestigious 1882 Salon, its popularity at the time eclipsing the now better-known “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.”

Jeanne (Jane) Demarsy, a young singer-actress who later gained attention as Venus in a revival of Jacques Offenbach’s opera “Orpheus in the Underworld,” is shown in profile against a colorful backdrop of rhododendrons.

“I think it is what he [Manet] was all about in the last four years of his life,” Groom said. “ ‘Spring’ is a decoration. It’s a fashion plate. It’s not really a portrait, but it’s portrait-like. It’s everything that people thought La Parisienne embodied.”

Following the Salon and some later exhibitions, the painting entered a private collection and was largely forgotten. Groom hopes this exhibition, where “Jeanne (Spring)” will be reunited with “Autumn (Méry Laurent)” (1881 or ’82) for the first time in 36 years, will help the work regain the recognition it deserves.

Other highlights of the show include:

• “In the Conservatory” (ca. 1877-79), oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Berlin. In this ambiguous work, a bearded man leans on a park bench where a seated woman looks off in the distance and seems to ignore him. Playing the two roles were Jules Guillemet and his wife, who were friends of the artist.
• “Café-Concert Singer” (ca. 1879), oil on canvas, private collection. This sketch-like image is part of a group of late-career portraits of what Groom called “types de Paris,” everyday figures from around the city who were in some ways “more Degas-like subjects.”
• “Mr. Eugène Pertuiset, the Lion Hunter” (1881), oil on canvas, São Paulo Museum of Art, Brazil. This 59¼-by-67½-inch portrait is the largest of the late works, and Groom described it as “wackadoodle wonderful.” It depicts the wild-game hunter kneeling next to a lion-skin trophy in what is probably a fictionalized garden.

The exhibition is the first at the Art Institute devoted to Manet in more than 50 years, and it will be accompanied by an in-depth, 384-page catalog, including eight essays and a selection of the artist’s letters.

Kyle MacMillan is a local freelance writer.