Reddit reviews The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers

It really depends on what she is interested in, it is a very broad subject. Here are some of the better things I've read in the past few years, trying to make up for a lack of art education in school:

History of Modern Art

Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas

Color in Contemporary Painting: Integrating Practice and Theory

After Modern Art 1945-2000

Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction

Modern Sculpture: A Concise History

Sculpture since 1945

The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers

Aesthetics

The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color

Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

(Sorry to be slow to respond; I just got back from work.)

Thanks for your long, thoughtful comment.

My critique of the painting grows out of the long history of paintings like this and how they were used. There's a ton of writing on paintings like this -- just as there were a TON of paintings like this -- which were hung in men's bedrooms/private spaces. Such paintings might now seem pretty tame but at the time they were not. According to art historians, they were painted precisely to help with male desire. (See, for example, T. J. Clark's The Painting of Modern Life, about painting in Paris in the 19th century; the book shows page after page of paintings just like the The Massage and discusses their "uses." Another commenter here mentioned John Berger's Ways of Seeing (book or video. Or watch Hannah Gadsby's amazing Nanette on Netflix.)

But even through they seem pretty tame now, such paintings still feed attitudes about women. And the attitude toward women this painting presents is all in-line (for me) with what we are seeing now in the Kavanaugh hearings, for example: The attitude toward women of this painting, like the apparent attitude of Kavanaugh and the other "Renate Alumni" guys, is that women exist for men. Women are supposed to be passive objects for male desire.

Compare this painting to Manet's Olympia, for example, which also shows a white woman and a subservient black woman. The white woman looks directly at viewers, meeting their eyes, making it hard to think of her as just an object to look at; in the painting we discuss here, by Debat-Ponsan, the white woman's face isn't even shown. Both paintings put women of color in secondary, passive positions.

One painting alone is not going to teach men to believe that women are passive objects. But it is precisely because there are THOUSANDS of paintings like this, shown over and over and in different places, that they can teach attitudes I think we don't want to have toward each other.

So I clearly disagree with you that this painting and the current male-dominated-political drama have nothing to do with each other. This painting, as part of a long tradition of representations of women in art and film, has a large part to play in how men learn to think women are their playthings.