Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Olympia

Édouard Manet
Olympia
1863
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

MONSIEUR MANET – Olympia The scapegoat of the Salon, the victim of Parisian lynch law.  Each passer-by takes a stone and throws it at her face. Olympia is a very 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 camp of the bourgeois: it is a glass of iced water which each visitor gets full in the face when he sees the BEAUTIFUL courtisane in full bloom.

Painting of the school of Baudelaire, freely executed by a pupil of Goya; the vicious strangeness of the little faubourienne, a woman of the night from Paul Niquet's, from the mysteries of Paris and the nightmares of Edgar Poe.  Her look has the sourness of someone prematurely aged, her face the disturbing perfume of a fleur du mal; her body fatigued, corrupted, but painted under a single, transparent light, with the shadows light and fine, the bed and pillows put down in a velvet, modulated grey.

 Jean Ravenel, from his review of the Salon of 1865 in L'Epoque, quoted as translated by T.J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York: Knopf, 1985)

Clark cites Jean Ravenel's piece as the only review with any positive content at all out of more than seventy contemporary newspaper and journal articles with discussion of this painting. They document extraordinary levels of rage and contempt excited by Manet's nude, as never at any other nude before. "They were perplexed by the fact that Olympia's class was nowhere but in her body: the cat, the Negress, the orchid, the bunch of flowers, the slippers, the pearl earrings, the choker, the screen, the shawl  they were all lures, they all meant nothing, or nothing in particular.  The naked body did without them in the end and did its own narrating." 

Édouard Manet
Woman lying on the beach (Annabel Lee)
ca. 1881
drawing
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Édouard Manet
On the Beach
1873
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Édouard Manet
The Balcony
1869
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Édouard Manet
Woman with Fans
1873
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Édouard Manet
Women at the Races
1865
oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum

Édouard Manet
Young Lady in Pink
1866
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Édouard Manet
Croquet at Boulogne
1871
oil on canvas
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City

Édouard Manet
Lady in Pink
ca. 1879-81
oil on canvas
Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden

Édouard Manet
In the Conservatory
1879
oil on canvas
Staatliche Museen, Berlin

Édouard Manet
Madame Manet on Blue Sofa
ca. 1874
pastel
Louvre, Paris

Édouard Manet
Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
1863
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Édouard, Manet
Olympia
1867
etching, aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Édouard Manet
Portrait of Victorine Meurent
1862
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Victorine Meurent, an artisan's daughter and a painter in her own right, was the model who posed for Olympia (and for the foreground woman in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe).  Manet's clothed portrait of her immediately above was painted earlier than any of the others.