Manet and Modern Beauty: The Artist’s Last Years an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, May 26–September 8, 2019; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, October 8, 2019–January 12, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Scott Allan, Emily A. Beeny, and Gloria Groom. Getty Publications, 384 pp., $65.00
During a visit to the eighty-five-yearold Claude Monet in the summer of 1926, Florence Gimpel, the wife of the Parisian art dealer Rene Gimpel, asked her host if he had known Edouard Manet. “Yes, he was a great friend, a great friend,” was the response. Monet told Gimpel that on April 29, 1883, he had received a telegram from Manet’s brother Gustave informing him that the painter was dying:
I saw him two days before his death. He…