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14 | T UESDAY, AUGUST 13, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Culture

I wonder how often he thought back on

it: the outrage, the reproaches, the

shame, the folly. In 1865, two years

after they rejected his “Déjeuner sur

l’herbe,” the gatekeepers of the Paris

Salon, Europe’s most prestigious exhi-

bition, accepted two paintings by

Édouard Manet. One was a slablike,

Spanish-influenced religious scene of

Christ mocked by Roman legionaries.

But it was the other that eclipsed more

than 3,500 other works in the Salon

and set off a scandal that makes the

recent brouhaha at the Whitney Bien-

nial look as stately as a Noh drama.

Visitors shouted and bawled in front

of “Olympia,” a radically flat depiction

of a common prostitute, her servant

and her cat with pitiless candor. Art

students threw punches. Security

guards had to be called in. The news-

papers published brutal caricatures of

Manet and his models, and art critics

savaged the picture as “vile,” “ugly,”

“stupid,” “shameless,” a work that

“cries out for examination by the in-

spectors of public health.”

A more bohemian artist might have

relished the hatred. Not Manet. He was

a bourgeois Parisian, hungry for public

approval and civic honors, even as he

painted works of such frankness that

they kept him outside the establish-

ment. He had struck the first blows for

modern art, but it came at a punishing

social cost. And as he got older, he

leaned away from the plainness of his

scandalous youth to paint flowers, fruit

bowls and fashionable women, all in a

lighter, pleasanter key that found favor

even in the hidebound Salon.

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 through Sept.

8 at the Art Institute of Chicago, which

focuses on the art of Manet’s last six or

seven years before his 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 repu-

tation of one of Manet’s last paintings,

“Jeanne (Spring),” which the J. Paul

Getty Museum in Los Angeles ac-

quired in 2014 after the picture had

spent more than a century in the shad-

ows. Painted in 1881 — and first exhib-

ited in the 1882 Salon with the much

more famous “A Bar at the Folies-

Bergère” (not on view here) —

“Jeanne” depicts a fashionable Parisi-

enne 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 dec-

ades 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), de-

picting 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 pri-

vate 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.

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 wom-

an 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 breakup? a reconciliation? — is the

woman’s up-to-the-minute outfit: a

form-fitting gray dress with an accor-

dion-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 fa-

vored 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 col-

lection 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 oppo-

nents 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 Ma-

net’s 1881 portrait of the exiled Com-

munard Henri Rochefort and his two

great late 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 left-

ward” in France, and these maritime

paintings with a political prisoner form

the last act in Manet’s interweaving of

historical 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? Is it only because I think

art has a higher vocation than deliver-

ing 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 his art

would at last redeem an ugly society.

But Manet knew that there is as much

rebellion and insight in a dress, a bou-

quet 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.”

Appreciating Manet, all dressed up

ART REVIEW

CHICAGO

BY JASON FARAGO

An exhibition in Chicago

explores the artist’s later,

more fashionable years

THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Clockwise from left: one of Édouard Manet’s last paintings, “Jeanne (Spring),” from

1881, the centerpiece of the exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago; “Flowers in a

Crystal Vase,” circa 1882; and “Olympia,” from 1863, now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

FRANCOIS GUILLOT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

THE WALTERS ART MUSEUM

From left, “In the Conservatory,” circa 1877–79, one of the last major works by Manet, depicting a fashionable couple who live their

private lives in public; “The Café-Concert,” circa 1879; and a detail from a letter from Manet in July 1880.

STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN, NATIONALGALERIE

SAINT HONORÉ ART CONSULTING, PARIS

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