SUMMER 2008

WATERSHED ART

Vertumnus: Portrait of Rudolph II (Giuseppe Arcimboldo)

Nude descending a staircase, No. 2 (Marcel Duchamp)

The kiss (Gustav Klimt)

Luncheon on the grass (Edouard Manet)

Olympia (Edouard Manet)

The scream (Edvard Munch)

Impression, Sunrise (Claude Monet)

The sleeping gypsy (Henri Rousseau)

Carnation Lily, Lily Rose (John Singer Sargeant)

The girl with the peaches: portrait of Vera Mamontova (Valentin Serov)

Sunday afternoon on the island of La Grande Jatte (Georges Seurat)

The Arnolfini Marriage (Jan Van Eyck)

 

 

SUMMER 2008

OLYMPIA (ÉDOUARD MANET)

Olympia. Édouard Manet. 1863. Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.   When other artists correct nature by painting Venus they lie. Manet asked himself why he should lie. Why not tell the truth? Emile Zola (1840-1902), writer, commenting on Olympia When the Salon exhibited Edouard Manet's Olympia in 1865, an enormous uproar followed. Though fellow artists realized the significance of the work, the more conservative public and critics were not as receptive. They termed Olympia, "vulgar" and "immoral." Antonin Proust, a journalist and friend of Manet, noted: If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration. Much of what happens on the canvas of Olympia was not new. Manet depicts a naked prostitute surrounded by symbols laden with racial, sexual and gender stereotypes. Erotic symbols were already in the painting vocabulary of French art patrons. Nudes as subjects were familiar as well. What made Olympia disquieting to the Victorian sensibility was that she was nude, she was a prostitute, and she looked directly at the viewer. Modern art commentary has called the overall effect of the gaze "confrontational". I would expand that idea further and say that, by looking directly back at the viewer, Olympia transcends her status as sexual object and becomes a sexual being. This was revolutionary. Notes Olympia has its source in Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538) and Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (1510).