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Olympia
Edouard
Manet -- French
Painter
1863
Paris,
Musee d'Orsay
Oil on
canvas
130.5
x 190 cm
(51 3/8 x 74 3/4
in)
Jpg: Mark
Harden's Artchive
When Olympia was
presented at the
Salon of 1865, out of all the paintings on the walls, and it is
believed
to have been thousands, it was Olyimpia that caused such an uproar that
authorities were forced to put two armed guards at the painting to
protect
it.
Edouard Manet
(1832-1883) is the
father of modern painting and his Olympia is now part of the hallmark
of
art history. It is hard for us to see this picture, knowing all that we
now know -- all the art that has come after -- and fully appreciate
just
how strikingly different Manet was. The uproar at the Salon was a
frontal
assault on the established methods of painting and the Salon was "the
field
of battle" according to Manet. This was not just an evolution of
thought
but a revolution against the sensibilities of the time. The critics
fought
back and so did the public -- Manet was intensely hated, scoffed at,
ridiculed
and made the butt of jokes.
One of the few more
sympathetic reviews
read as follows:
Jean
Ravenel
L'EPOQUE
"M.
Manet -- Olympia"
June 7, 1865
The
scapegoat of the Salon,
the victim of Parisian lynch law. Each passer-by takes a stone and
throws
it in her face. Olympia is a crazy piece of Spanish madness,
which
is a thousand times better than the platitude and inertia of so many
canvases
on show in the Exhibition.
Armed
insurrection in the camps
of the bourgeois: it is a glass of ice water which each visitor gets
full
in the face when he sees the BEAUTIFUL courtesan in full bloom
Painted of
the school of Baudelaire, freely executed by a pupil of Goya; the
vicious
strangeness of the little faubourienne,
woman of the night out of Paul Niquet,
out of the mysterries of Paris
and the nightmares of Edgar Poe.
Her look has the
sourness of someone aged, her face the disturbing perfume of fleur
de mal; the body fatigued, corrupted, but painted under a
single
transparent light, with the shadows light and fine, the bed and the
pillows
are put down in the velvet modulated grey. Negress and flowers
insufficient
in execution, but with real harmony to them, the shoulder and arm
solidly
established in a clean and pure light. The cat arching its back makes
the
visitor laugh and relax, it is what saves M. Manet from popular
execution.
(The
Impressionist and Their
Legacy, P. 40)
The Salon was the
showcase for
artist -- there were no others to speak of and it was here that art
patrons
and artist met, made contacts for future commissions. It's natural that
most artist would want to be sensitive to the public to some degree.
Manet
was no different in that respect. He very much wanted the public to
recognize
what he was trying to do and he was hurt by the outrage against him;
but
he was so firmly grounded in the belief that established art had grown
stale, its foundation of representing nature actually flawed and untrue
and with independent income he could support himself in the absence of
commissions. The war over the hearts and minds of the public was on and
it would essentially rage till the end of the century. By then art
would
never be the same.
It is interesting
to note that the
composition of Olympia is not significantly different than other work
that
had been seen at the time (see Olympia
in Juxtaposition).
What is different however, is that he has taken what was
essentially
a classical composition and placed it in a contemporary setting, using
a contemporary woman of common origins. This brought a sense of
immediacy
to the painting -- a here and now. This was outrageous to the
establishment
that a mere common woman, one even of questionable character, could be
the
center of, if not the object of beauty in high art. Models had been
used
in art forever but they had always played the part of a goddess, a
biblical
character or within the scope of a theme. Here Manet sets his subject,
a mere courtesan, as a goddess herself -- not merely playing
the
part of one; and it is this that just blew the Parisian public
away,
though they didn't want to admit it.
As we look
back at it now, Manet was not really being that revolutionary. His
ideas
of using common people are right in line with Gustave Courbet
(1819-1877)
but he just took it to the next level. And if we look at the political
history of France, the revolution and the overthrow of the aristocracy,
the art world was ripe for a change in the way we view things -- though
the viewing public (who were often upper class) had to be dragged
kicking
and screaming.
See Comparison
of Outrage to Manet and Sargent
Note
Faubourienne
A girl from the
working-class
suburbs of Paris.
Paul Niquet
owned a bar in the rue
aux Fers
frequented by down-market prostitutes
Mysteries of
Paris
Les Mysteres de Paris
was a melodramatic
novel about the city's underworld, by Eugene Sue, published in
1843
Edgar Allan
Poe
Poe's Short stories,
translated
by Baudelaire, had just been published in 1865 under the name of
Histories
Grotesques et Serieuses,
fleur de mal
'fleur du mal' - a
book of poems
by Charles Baudelaire published a little earlier - good strong stuff -
they must be in English somewhere, or certainly in your library (Philip)
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