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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.
The subject of Olympia was modeled by Victorine Meurent, while Olympia's 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.[1]
Content
Contemporary audiences were shocked by Olympia's confrontational gaze, combined with a number of details identifying her as a demi-mondaine, or courtesan.[2][3] These include the fact that the name "Olympia" was associated with prostitutes in 1860s Paris.[4][5]
The orchid flower in her hair, her bracelet, pearl earrings, the oriental shawl on which she lies, and the upright black cat[6] 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).[7][8] 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.[9] Manet replaced the little dog (symbol of fidelity) in Titian's painting with a black cat, a creature associated with nocturnal promiscuity.[9] The aroused posture of the cat was provocative; in French, chatte (cat) is slang for female genitalia.[10] Olympia disdainfully ignores the flowers presented to her by her servant, speculated by some to be a gift from one of her clients.[10] Some have suggested that she could be looking in the direction of the door as her client barges in unannounced.[10]
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 to be a real woman whose nakedness is emphasized by the harsh lighting.[2] 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.[11]
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.[12] 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.[13]
Though Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) had sparked controversy in 1863, his Olympia stirred an even bigger uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Conservatives condemned the work as "immoral" and "vulgar".[2] Journalist Antonin Proust later recalled, "If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration." The critics and the public condemned the work alike. Even Émile Zola was reduced to disingenuously commenting on the work's formal qualities rather than acknowledging the subject matter, "You wanted a nude, and you chose Olympia, the first that came along".[14] 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."[15]
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: "you've written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her."[16]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 Maria Rutledge, "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."[17]
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,
The black maid is not ... simply a darkly colored counterpart to Olympia's whiteness, but rather an emblem of the dark, threatening, anomalous sexuality lurking just under Olympia's hand. At least, this is the fantasy Manet's servant figure may well have aroused in the male spectator of 1865.[18]
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".[19] 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 titled "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity",[20] she asserts, "Olympia's maid, like all other 'peripheral Negroes'", is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery. While the confrontational gaze of Olympia is often referenced as the pinnacle of defiance toward patriarchy, the oppositional gaze of Olympia's maid is ignored; she is part of the background with little to no attention given to the critical role of her presence.
O'Grady points out that we know she represents 'Jezebel and Mammy' "and best of all, she is not a real person", rather she is object to the objectified and excluded from sexual difference according to Freudian theory.[20] While Olympia looks directly at the viewer, her maid, too, is looking back.[21] 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.[22]
Events
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.[23]
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.[25] There is also some similarity to Francisco Goya's La maja desnuda (c. 1800).[26]
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).[27] 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.
^Clark, T. J. (1999) The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. Revised edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p.86.
^ abO'Grady, Lorraine. "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity". The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. pp. 174–187.
^Jones, Amelia (2003). "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectator". The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader. New York: Routledge. pp. 94–105.
^West, Carolyn M (1 January 2008). "Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire and their homegirls: Developing an 'oppositional gaze' toward the images of Black women". Lectures on the psychology of women. Archived from the original on 9 May 2019. Retrieved 6 December 2016.
^Meyers, Jeffrey. (2004). Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt, p. 35; Beruete y Moret, Aureliano. (1922). Goya as portrait painter, p. 190.
^The Puzzle of Olympia. Phylis A. Floyd, 19th Century Art Worldwide, 2012. Retrieved 5 December 2012.
Ross King. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. New York: Waller & Company, 2006 ISBN0-8027-1466-8. See pages 105–108.
