Olympia (Manet)

Olympia is an 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.

The figure of Olympia was modeled by 19 year-old Victorine Meurent, and that of her servant by Laure. Olympia's confrontational gaze 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 confrontational gaze, 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 choker 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. Some have suggested that she could be looking in the direction of the door as her client barges in unannounced. The canvas is 130.5 × 190 cm (51.4 × 74.8 inches), a large size that was conventionally associated with edifying depictions of episodes from history or mythology, not tawdry scenes of prostitution. Finally, Olympia is fairly thin by the artistic standards of the time. Charles Baudelaire thought thinness was more indecent than fatness.

The model for Olympia, Victorine Meurent, started modeling when she was sixteen years old and later became an accomplished painter in her own right. Her paintings were exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1876, 1879, 1885, and 1904. He paid tribute to Manet's honesty, however: "When our artists give us Venuses, they correct nature, they lie. Édouard Manet asked himself why lie, why not tell the truth; he introduced us to Olympia, this fille of our time, whom you meet on the sidewalks."

Olympia's maid

Although originally overlooked, the figure of the maid in the painting, modelled by a woman named Laure, has become a topic of discussion among contemporary scholars. As T. J. Clark recounts of a friend's disbelief in the revised 1990 version of The Painting of Modern Life: "For God's sake! You've written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her!" Olympia was created 15 years after slavery had been abolished in France and its empire, but negative stereotypes of black people persisted among some elements of French society. In some cases, the white prostitute in the painting was described using racially charged language. According to Marie Lathers, "references to Blackness thus invaded the image of white Olympia, turning her into the caricatural and grotesque animal that Black people are frequently made to represent in the nineteenth century."

Many critics have applauded Manet in his use of white and black in the painting, an alternative to the tradition of chiaroscuro. Charles Bernheimer has responded,

According to Timothy Paul, some black feminists, including Lorraine O'Grady, have argued that it is not for artistic convention that Manet included Laure but to create an ideological binary between black and white, good and bad, clean and dirty and as such "inevitably reformulates the Cartesian perspectival logic that allows whiteness to function as the only subject of consideration". When paired with a lighter skin tone, the black female model stands in as signifier to all of the racial stereotypes of the West.

Confrontational gaze and oppositional gaze

In Lorraine O'Grady's essay "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity", In her essay "Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire and Their Homegirls: Developing an Oppositional Gaze toward the Images of Black Women", Catherine West concludes that by claiming an oppositional gaze we can identify, criticize, resist and transform these and other oppressive images of black women.

Events

Purchase for France

After being alerted by John Singer Sargent in 1888 that Manet's widow, Suzanne was apparently in financial difficulties and that she intended to sell the painting, possibly to an unknown American, Claude Monet became determined to acquire his friend's painting for France. He then launched a yearlong campaign to raise the 20,000 francs that was being asked for Olympia. The asking price was relatively low compared to prices paid by other artists. Around the same time, paintings by Jean-François Millet were sold for 750,000 francs and by Ernest Meissonier for 850,000 francs. Georges de Bellio best summed up the objectives of the campaign: "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."

Antonin Proust, both a childhood friend of Manet and a former arts minister was in favour of Manet's entry into the Louvre, but felt that this should be done through paintings other than Olympia. A misunderstanding in the press over the donation lead to Proust challenging Monet to a duel. A temporary solution seemed to be to first have the painting enter the Musée du Luxembourg instead. At the same time, Suzanne Manet made it known through the pages of the Le Figaro newspaper that she had no need of financial help. By November Monet had raised 18,559 francs. In 2016, the painting was displayed in Moscow and St. Petersburg as part of a Franco-Russian diplomacy effort.

In January 2016, a Luxembourg performance artist, Deborah De Robertis, lay on the floor in front of the painting nude and mimicked the pose of the subject. She was arrested for indecent exposure.

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). Titian's 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.

File:Giorgione - Sleeping Venus - Google Art Project 2.jpg|Giorgione, Sleeping Venus (c. 1510), also known as the Dresden Venus

Tiziano - Venere di Urbino - Google Art Project.jpg|Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538)

File:Goya Maja naga2.jpg|Francisco de Goya, La maja desnuda (circa 1797–1800), known in English as The Naked (or Nude) Maja

File:Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814.jpg|Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, (1814)

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Homages

A Modern Olympia, Paul Cézanne, c. 1873/74.
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.
Odalisque I. Looking at Manet. Olympia and A Family, Louis le Brocquy, 2005.
"Somms Recreating Old Masters: Series 1", Mark Shipway, c. 2015.

Braun-Vega's appropriations

Olympia is used as a subject for recurrent appropriations in the paintings of the Peruvian artist Herman Braun-Vega. He reinterpreted it for the first time in 1982 to create a portrait of a couple of friends in a humorous staging. The painting titled Robert and Odile Zantain (The Lesson...) shows Olympia in a hospital bed, her abdomen marked by a recent scar. Mrs. Zantain, dressed in her surgeon's attire, poses as Dr. Tulp in The Anatomy Lesson, while her husband assumes the role of another character in Rembrandt's painting. Thus, from 1982 to 2001, Olympia found herself in unexpected situations: in the middle of town in front of a newsstand, in a Peruvian market among fruit stalls, under the gaze of curious teenagers, in the tropics, by the sea, wearing a turban in the Parc de Sceaux, or in the company of Ingres' bather and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the drawing A New Turkish Bath.

References and sources

References

Sources

King, Ross (2006). The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. New York: Waller & Company, pp. 105–108. .
Lipton, Eunice (1999). Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model & Her Own Desire. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Main, V. R. (2008). A Woman with No Clothes On: A Novel. London: Delancey Press. .

External links

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.