Olympia
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Olympia by +douard Manet (1832-83) was painted in 1863 and exhibited at the Salon in 1865, where it caused an immense sensation. The painting, which is oil on canvas, measures 130.5 x 190 cm and currently hangs in the MusTe d'Orsay in Paris. One of the most important paintings of the nineteenth century, the Olympia depicts a young prostitute stretched out on pillows and sheets on a long bed in an elegant room. She wears earrings, a bracelet, a slim choker, one of a pair of high-heeled slippers, and a flower in her hair. A black maid in a pale pink dress stands behind the bed offering a newly-arrived bouquet and a black cat stretches itself at the foot of the bed. But the young woman stares directly out at the viewer. The furor raised by the painting was due to Manet's frank realist approach, which encompassed his unusual method of painting, the nature of the model's profession and, perhaps more than anything, the direct, unabashed quality of her stare. Despite the great precision of the image there is nothing labored about Manet's approach. The details of the various stretches of cloth, for example, are brought out in intense, quickly painted strokes that convey the sense of volume and texture. The matte quality of the maid's dress, the fringe and embroidery of the dressing-gown and the dull sheen of the green drapes all create the instant impression of being painted in laborious detail. It is only after looking again that the viewer takes in the rapidity of the b
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s a faint echo of the left.
Thus Manet used a very solid and basic compositional device but managed to subdue its symmetry in order to direct the viewer's attention to first, Olympia's bold stare and, second, the splayed hand placed in her lap. There is certainly no mistaking the painter's intention in designating the points in the painting that attract the viewer's immediate attention. The sexual connotations of Olympia's nakedness are not ambiguous.
Women such as Manet's Olympia were a relatively new subject. Certainly there are examples of courtesans in earlier painting. One of the most famous is Titian's so-called Venus of Urbino (1538) which was a direct inspiration for Manet's painting. But the French Realists of the mid-nineteenth century raised the subject "to the status of a major issue" (Nochlin 199). The literary realists produced dozens of works in which prostitutes of all levels were central or major characters. And painters, including Courbet, Manet and Degas, not only dropped all the guises in which the female nude was customarily presented but made it perfectly clear when the women they depicted were prostitutes of one sort or another. Certainly, as Nochlin points out, the "famous courtesans of the Seco
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Some common words found in the essay are:
, Canaday Manet's, Manet Degas, Salon Manet, Courbet Manet, Charles Baudelaire, Ingres' Odalisques, French Realists, Titian Ingres, Manet's Olympia, compositional device, ideal beauty, pink dress, black cat, left-hand triangle, black maid, dark triangle, painting insists, courbet manet, beauty idealized,
Approximate Word count = 1888
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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