“Olympia” by Édouard Manet, from scandal to emblematic work
Audio 02:30
Photograph of “Olympia” painted by Édouard Manet in 1863 and the original of which is kept at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
De Agostini via Getty Images - DEA / G. NIMATALLAH
By: Sarah Tisseyre
6 mins
Like every Sunday, we decipher an emblematic work of art.
Today, it's the turn of one of Édouard Manet's most famous paintings: Olympia.
This caused a resounding scandal when it was presented to the public in 1865 ...
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It was an avalanche of criticism that fell on Manet when he presented
Olympia
at the Salon of 1865 in Paris.
In the foreground, a young white woman, naked, stretched out on a bed.
A hand at the base of the legs, a foot shod with a mule, she fixes the viewer with a cold gaze… This is what, at the time, upset the representation of the female nude.
“
The female nude was quite accepted, but it had to be idealized and correspond to a mythological subject
”, explains Isolde Pludermacher, curator at the Musée d'Orsay, where the painting is exhibited.
“
You shouldn't have the impression of being in front of a real embodied body but of an idealized line in the drawing.
This is not the case in this painting by Manet.
"
And no, it is not a goddess that Manet represents, with a very free touch that appeals to his contemporaries.
She is a high-flying prostitute: a courtesan.
She does not have pink and pearly skin but rather a little yellow.
She receives a client's bouquet of flowers from the hands of a black maid.
And that's not all, because Manet also diverts the codes of classical painting, as we will see decades later.
“
Its classic model is evident today,
according to Isolde Pludermacher,
namely
Titian's Venus of Urbino that Manet had also copied ten years earlier when he was studying in Florence.
This is also part of the great subversion of Manet, it is that he not only deals, in a large format with a contemporary subject considered vulgar - linked to sexuality, to prostitution
-
but in addition, he parodies somewhere the great recognized masters of the Renaissance.
"
A founding painting for modernity in painting that the Musée d'Orsay had placed at the center of its exhibition on
The Black Model
two years ago, in 2019. Because if
Olympia
has been the subject of much ink for 150 years - y including even the cat with its round back at the courtesan's foot - hardly a line had been written about the black maid of
Olympia
until recently.
“
It was Denise Murell, an American art historian, who was struck by this void of comments on the figure of the black maid and who decided to devote a thesis to this maid and the representation of black models in the painting.
This thesis then became an exhibition, first in New York, then at the Musée d'Orsay in 2019
”, explains Isolde Pludermacher.
A pioneering exhibition, which will have enabled Laure to come out of oblivion.
In 1863, this black woman lived rue Vintimille in Paris.
It was she who posed for Manet alongside Victorine Meurent, one of the painter's favorite models, on whom, on the contrary, everything has been written.
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