Édouard Manet at the J. Paul Getty Museum with 90 exclusive works

The exhibition features more than 90 works of art, including a wide range of genre scenes, still lifes, pastels and portraits of favorite actresses and models, bourgeois women of his acquaintance, his wife and his male friends.

The acclaimed exhibition staged in Los Angeles titled Manet and Modern Beauty will close on January 12, 2020. Manet and Modern Beauty first explores Édouard Manet (1832-1883) in a major museum exhibition in his later years, following his rise to notoriety in the 1860s and the official launch of the Impressionist Movement in the early 1870s.

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, concentrating on the fashionable scenes of Parisian life and the fashionable women, and sometimes men, of his acquaintance. Too often dismissed as perfunctory by critics, these later works provide invaluable evidence of Manet's elegant social circle and suggest a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity while recording the artist's inept embrace of beauty and the visual pleasure of face of death.

Édouard Manet French, 1832 – 1883
Woman Reading, about 1880-1881
Oil on canvas

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 was organized in partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago and is supported by a grant from the Federal Council of the Arts and Humanities. In conjunction with the exhibit, Getty Publications released a catalog of the same name. With nearly 300 illustrations and nine essays by both established and emerging Manet scholars, the publication Manet and Modern Beauty presents a wide range of approaches to be addressed in a little-studied area of this great artist's oeuvre.

Cover image:

Édouard Manet, French, 1832 – 1883
Boating, 1874-1875, Oil on canvas
Measurements: 97.2 × 130.2 cm (38 1/4 × 51 1/4 in.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, HO Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. HO Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.115), 6/8 point
The J. Paul Getty Trust, Communications Department
7/9 points – The J. Paul Getty Trust
Communications Department
EX.2019.3.78