Olympia (Manet)

Olympia

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Artist	Édouard Manet
Year	1863–65
Dimensions	130.5 cm × 190 cm (51.4 in × 74.8 in)
Location	Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Olympia is a 1863 oil painting by Édouard Manet, depicting a nude white woman ("Olympia") lying on a bed being attended to by a black maid. The French government acquired the painting in 1890 after a public subscription organized by Claude Monet. The painting is now in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

During the time the painting was created, Napoleon III and the imperial court were the focus of interest in Parisian society. The historian Otto Friedrich describes the Second Empire as an "operetta empire", since Napoleon III only came to power after three attempted coups, he was not in direct succession to Napoleon, and his family ties to his namesake are questionable. This society also included Émilien de Nieuwerkerke, general director of the state museums and president of the jury of the Paris Salon, who owed his professional career to an extramarital relationship with Mathilde Bonaparte, cousin of the emperor. In this society, which was characterized by pretense and intrigue, the depiction of reality was in itself undesirable. But Manet did not see himself as part of this society, but rather as a member of an intellectual bourgeoisie, which he portrayed in his painting Music in the Tuileries.

The figure of Olympia was modeled by Victorine Meurent, and that of her servant by Laure. The painting caused shock and controversy when the painting was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon, especially because a number of details in the picture identified her as a prostitute.

The title of the painting is generally attributed to Manet's close friend Zacharie Astruc, an art critic and artist, since an excerpt from one of Astruc's poems was included in the catalogue entry along with Olympia when it was first exhibited in 1865.

Content

Contemporary audiences were shocked by Olympia's composition, combined with details identifying her as a demi-mondaine, or courtesan. These include the fact that the name "Olympia" was associated with prostitutes in 1860s Paris.

The orchid flower in her hair, her bracelet, pearl earrings, the oriental shawl on which she lies, and the upright black cat are symbols of wealth and sensuality. The black ribbon around her neck, in contrast with her pale skin and cast-off slipper, emphasizes the voluptuous atmosphere.

The painting takes inspiration from Titian's Venus of Urbino (c. 1534). Whereas the left hand of Titian's Venus is curled and appears to entice, Olympia's left hand appears to block, which has been interpreted as symbolic of her role as a prostitute, granting access to her body in return for payment. Manet replaced the little dog (symbol of fidelity) in Titian's painting with a black cat, a creature associated with nocturnal promiscuity. The aroused posture of the cat was provocative; in French, chatte (cat) is slang for female genitalia. Olympia disdainfully ignores the flowers presented to her by her servant, speculated by some to be a gift from one of her clients. Some have suggested that she could be looking in the direction of the door as her client barges in unannounced.

The painting deviates from the academic canon in its style, characterized by broad, quick brushstrokes, studio lighting that eliminates mid-tones, large color surfaces, and shallow depth. Unlike the smooth idealized nude of Alexandre Cabanel's La naissance de Vénus, also painted in 1863, Olympia is portrayed as a real woman whose nakedness is emphasized by the harsh lighting. The canvas alone is 130.5 × 190 cm (51.4 × 74.8 inches), which is rather large. Most paintings that were this size depicted historical or mythological events, so the size of the work, among other factors, caused surprise. Finally, Olympia is fairly thin by the artistic standards of the time. Charles Baudelaire thought thinness was more indecent than fatness.

According to Michel Foucault's analysis of Olympia, the light source that illuminates Olympia is on the spectators' side. The correspondence between the light source and the spectators' gaze gives them the impression that they are undressing the woman: "She is naked only for us since it is we who make her naked and we make her naked since by looking at her, we light her, since in any case our gaze and the lighting are one and the same thing." Manet tried to present reality with this relationship to spectators who almost always admired the ideal in a painting. As Manet himself said:

I render as simply as possible the things I see. So the Olympia, what is naive? There are hardnesses, I am told, they were there. I saw them. I did what I saw.

The model for Olympia, Victorine Meurent, would have been recognized by viewers of the painting because she was well known in Paris circles. She started modeling when she was sixteen years old and she also was an accomplished painter in her own right. Some of her paintings were exhibited in the Paris Salon. The familiarity with the identity of the model was a major reason this painting was considered shocking to viewers. A well known woman currently living in modern-day Paris could not simultaneously represent a historical or mythological woman.

Critical reception

File:Paul Cezanne A Modern Olympia painting.jpg

Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia (c. 1873/74)

Manet's Olympia caused an even greater scandal than the one he had provoked a few months earlier with another painting also inspired by Venetian Renaissance painting, The Luncheon on the Grass.

In the mid-19th century, the nude was admissible if it was situated in an exotic or mythological space. In Manet's painting, the naked woman is strongly individualized, which is opposed to the traditional idealization of nudes. Her gaze is directed towards the spectator: it is this gaze, and the serious expression which excludes intimacy, which cause the scandal. Classical female nudities are "surprised" when coming out of the bath; they do not deliberately show themselves naked. The woman's gaze directed to the spectator contradicts this convention, and some art critics were scandalized by the character of the painting. Paul de Saint-Victor spoke of "Mr. Manet's stale Olympia".

Although Manet had clearly sought scandal by depicting a high-class prostitute ("Olympia" was in his time a pseudonym for a cocotte, the black servant represented her admirer who came to visit her and the black cat at the foot of the bed the symbol of lust), the avalanche of recriminations of which he was the subject despite the support of his friend Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola overwhelmed him quite strongly.

The critics, followed by the public, were overall repelled by the painting. "For this school everything lies in the accuracy of the rendering; it unfortunately affects a predilection for common or repulsive subjects", wrote a moderate critic. The medal of honor had been awarded to Cabanel, whose Venus, presented at the Salon two years earlier, by contrast represents the accepted taste of the time.

Jules Champfleury wrote to Baudelaire: "Like a man falling in the snow, Manet has left a hole in public opinion." Jules Claretie wrote in L'Artiste: "... these terrible canvases, challenges to the rabble, farces or parodies, who knows? ... What is this yellow-bellied odalisque, this cheap model picked up from I don't know where...". Saint-Victor added: "The crowd is thronging around M. Manet's wicked Olympia like a morgue". Théophile Gautier wrote in Le Moniteur Universel on 24 June 1865: "A pitiful model... The flesh tones are dirty... The shadows are indicated by more or less wide stripes of shoe polish." Ernest Chesneau wrote: "... an almost infantile ignorance of the basic elements of drawing,... a tendency towards incredible meanness." Amédée Cantaloube wrote: "Never before have our eyes seen anything so cynical: the 'Olympia', a sort of female gorilla made of rubber with a black border, lying on a bed and stark naked, imitating the pose of Titian's Venus." Félix Deriège wrote in Le Siècle on 2 June 1865: "This reddish brunette is of a perfect ugliness... The white, the black, the red, the green create a terrible din on this canvas." There were also caricatures of Olympia: on 27 May 1865 Bertall's Olympia appeared in the Journal amusant and in the same month Cham's Olympia in Le Charivari.

History

In 1884, the scandal was not over. The work was auctioned at the public sale of the artist's studio. His widow decided to buy the painting. In 1889, when an American amateur seemed interested in the work, Claude Monet decided to buy the painting from the widow in order to offer it to the Louvre Museum. He then launched a subscription to raise the 20,000 francs requested by the widow. Georges de Bellio best summed up the objectives of the operation: "It (the subscription) will have the triple merit of being a just tribute to the memory of this poor dear Manet, of coming to the aid of his widow in a discreet way and finally of preserving for France a truly valuable work". Monet maintained a very active correspondence that year. By mid-October, 15,000 francs had already been raised, however it seemed that the Louvre was not ready to accept the donation.

Monet had indeed asked the deputy Antonin Proust for his help in sounding out the museum. Proust replied that, if he was in favour of Manet's entry into the Louvre, this should be done through paintings other than Olympia. A temporary solution seemed to be to first have the painting enter the Musée du Luxembourg. At the same time, Suzanne Manet made it known through Le Figaro that she had no need of help. Unfriendly exchanges ensued between Proust and Octave Mirbeau, Monet's friend, through newspapers. However, the incident was quickly closed.

On February 7, 1890, Monet was received by the Minister of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and gave him the letter formalizing the donation of the work to the Louvre, with the list of subscribers, on the condition that the painting be exhibited either at the Louvre or at the Luxembourg. The decision was made by Gustave Larroumet, then director of Fine Arts. He replied that the work could be admitted to Luxembourg but without any assurance of exhibition. This response did not satisfy Monet, who was supported by the deputy Camille Pelletan. Finally, the Louvre gave the assurance that the painting would be exhibited.

In March 1890, the painting was purchased from Suzanne Manet for 19,415 francs and entered Luxembourg shortly after.

The painting was kept at the Musée du Luxembourg from 1890 to 1907. It was then assigned to the Louvre. In 1947 it was transferred to the Galerie du Jeu de Paume. In 1986 it was finally assigned to the Musée d'Orsay.

Precedents

In part, the painting was inspired by Titian's Venus of Urbino (c. 1534), which in turn derives from Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (c. 1510). The Titian has two fully clothed women, presumably servants, in the background. Léonce Bénédite was the first art historian to explicitly acknowledge the similarity to the Venus of Urbino in 1897. There is also some similarity to Francisco Goya's La maja desnuda (c. 1800).

There were also pictorial precedents for a nude white female, often pictured with a black female servant, such as Léon Benouville's Esther with Odalisque (1844), Ingres' Odalisque with a Slave (1842), and Charles Jalabert's Odalisque (1842). Comparison is also made to Ingres' Grande Odalisque (1814). Manet did not depict a goddess or an odalisque but a high-class prostitute waiting for a client; it has often been argued that Titian did the same.

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  Giorgione, Sleeping Venus (c. 1510), also known as the Dresden Venus

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  Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538)

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  Francisco de Goya, La maja desnuda (circa 1797–1800), known in English as The Naked (or Nude) Maja

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  Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, (1814)

Homages

• A Modern Olympia, Paul Cézanne, c. 1873/74
• La Blanche et la Noire, Félix Vallotton, 1913
• Olympia, René Magritte, 1948
• Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982.
• Untitled (Detail of Maid from Olympia), Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982.
• Crown Hotel (Mona Lisa Black Background), Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982.
• Portrait (Futago), Yasumasa Morimura, 1988.
• Odalisque I. Looking at Manet. Olympia and A Family, Louis le Brocquy, 2005.
• "Somms Recreating Old Masters: Series 1", Mark Shipway, c. 2015.

See also

• List of paintings by Édouard Manet
• 100 Great Paintings, 1980 BBC series
• 1863 in art

References and sources

Sources

• King, Ross (2006). The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. New York: Waller & Company, pp. 105–108. ISBN 0-8027-1466-8.
• Le Ninèze, Alain (2021). La femme moderne selon Manet. Paris: Ateliers Henry Dougier.
• Lipton, Eunice (1999). Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model & Her Own Desire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8609-2
• Main, V. R. (2008). A Woman with No Clothes On: A Novel. London: Delancey Press. ISBN 978-0-9539119-7-4.
• Wildenstein, Daniel (1996). Monet ou le Triomphe de l'Impressionnisme. Cologne: Taschen.

Further reading

• Hamilton, George Heard (1954). Manet and His Critics. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, pp. 65–80.
• Jedlicka, Gotthard (1941). Edouard Manet. Zürich: Rentsch.
• Murrell, Denise (2018). Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
• Reff, Theodore (1977). Manet: Olympia. New York: The Viking Press, Inc.

External links

External video
Edouard Manet's Olympia From Smarthistory

• Olympia at the Musée d'Orsay
• Phylis A. Floyd, The Puzzle of Olympia
• Seibert, Margaret Mary Armbrust. A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of Édouard Manet. Diss. The Ohio State University, 1986.