The Getty Center is currently showing an exhibit on Édouard Manet’s later works, including his paintings Spring (which they purchased in 2014 for $65 million) and his award winning - though atypical painting - Monsieur Pertuiset, the Lion Hunter. They exhibit featured many of his famous paintings along-side illustrated letters to friends, unfinished works, and many of his flower paintings.

Manet is often considered the father of Modernism because he broke from the prominent realistic style of the day to a painterly style. His art was the beginning of the Impressionism movement by inspiring his fellow artist and friends (Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Gauguin, among others) to follow his lead.

Manet was from a wealthy family and was considered a dandy (a fashionable man-about-town). He frequented cabarets (night clubs) and enjoyed the life and energy of a transforming and modernizing Paris. He often painted beautiful women in the latest fashions. His painting Spring was an extremely popular painting because it embodied what was seen as the perfect example of a modern Parisian woman of the time. He captured what it was like to live in Paris in the mid to late 1800s - the fun, the beauty, the mix of people and classes, and the fashion of the times.

Later in his life he suffered from painful nerve damage in his legs due to contracting syphilis earlier in his life. For his treatments he left Paris for the suburbs where but that left him feeling alone and isolated from the life he loved in the city. While away, he found a new love of painting flowers and gardens. When he returned to the city he wasn’t able to visit the cabarets he enjoyed because of the paralysis in his legs so his friends often brought the party to his studio to watch him paint.

Manet’s style is painterly but he still considered himself a realist. He worked very hard to make his painting seem spontaneous an effortless. He often would scrape down a painting to its underpainting and start again if it looked too labored. Because he came from a realistic tradition but approached painting in a different way and focused on contemporary subjects rather than historical or biblical images he bridged the gap from Realism to Modernism.

I good book to learn about the Impressionists and their time is Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

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