LIFE AS MYTH
A FEMININE MYTH
Hsi Wang Mu, goddess of immortality
The girl with the peaches: portrait of Vera Mamontova (Valentin Serov)
Carnation Lily, Lily Rose (John Singer Sargent)
The mermaid at Clonfert Cathedral
Olympia (Édouard Manet)
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).
