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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
With a single shocking canvas depicting a prostitute in repose, Édouard Manet ushered in the brave nude world of modern art.
May 13, 2002 | She was unlike any naked lady who'd ever gone before. She wasn't Eve in the Garden or Venus on a foamy bed of waves. She wasn't a goddess or an angel or a shy bather caught off guard. She was a contemporary woman -- unabashed, unclad, unmistakably unallegorical. Her name was Victorine Meurent, but Édouard Manet called her Olympia. And she changed everything.
On first inspection, one might wonder what all the fuss was about. Manet considered himself a painter of still life, and perhaps that's why Olympia has such a quiet mystery about her. She lounges serenely, starkly unclad but strategically adorned -- a black ribbon around her throat, a single slipper on her left foot (the right one has dropped carelessly off), a voluptuous pink flower at her ear. Her hand is firmly clamped over her sex. The outer corners of her mouth are raised just a fraction, a moment away from a smile or a sneer. Her eyes are drowsily heavy-lidded but her posture is unmistakably alert. Compare her to any overheated, dishabille nymph of the baroque or rococo eras and she seems positively demure.
But there's something different about this female. For one thing, she's pointedly not doing anything. She ignores the bouquet that her black maid offers, and the kitten, tail at a highly suggestive full attention, that peers from the foot of her bed. She isn't bathing or dreaming or dressing. As we take her in, we realize that she's a woman naked and in bed for exactly the first reason a woman might be naked in a bed. She's there for sex, and she regards the viewer with a look that's part invitation, part dare. She's a mistress, or more likely a prostitute, but she sure as hell isn't a sprite named Springtime.
Manet was perhaps the world's first shock artist. Every modern provocateur who slices up a cow or assembles a Lego death camp owes him a debt of hype-making gratitude, but his influence exceeds his infamy. Well-bred, elegant and gentlemanly, Manet was as horrified by the response to "Olympia" as his critics were by the work itself.
He was a painter trained in the staid academic tradition but too exuberant to be constrained by it. Inspired by the audacious realism of Gustave Courbet and the otherworldly darkness of Spanish masters like Velázquez and Goya, the young Manet was inevitably drawn to less conventional themes than the gentle, drawing-room-ready tableaux of the Salon artists. But just because his style didn't run toward chubby cherubs didn't mean that Manet fancied himself an outsider. He maintained that he simply painted what he saw, and he showed his work because he sought acceptance. What he got was more vitriol, more fame and more lasting power than he'd ever dreamed.
When "Olympia" was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1865, it ignited a scandal over art and decency that has rarely been paralleled. Think Rudy Giuliani invented outrage? Critics eviscerated the work, and the crowds almost did the same. Antonin Proust later recalled that "If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration."
Victorianism wasn't strictly for the British, and no serious artist dared to paint a woman of such obvious ill repute without at least draping her in the exotic garb of harem girl. Yet here was a courtesan glorified in an homage to Titian's "Venus of Urbino" that was so obvious spectators called it parody. But it wasn't -- Manet didn't merely expose the prostitute to the eyes of the world, he had the audacity to worship her. It was blasphemy. How unfortunate for Manet's detractors that it was also exquisite.
It starts with the woman herself, and the fascinating face of Victorine Meurent. Meurent was Manet's longtime model, muse and companion, the subject of numerous canvases. Over the course of more than a decade, Manet invented her again and again as a boyish bullfighter, a street musician, a gracious lady in pink robes. In 1863, the same year he wed his wife Suzanne, Manet did two nudes of Victorine. The first, "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe," he exhibited at the Salon des refusés after being rejected by the official Salon.
But the sight of Meurent's naked presence at an otherwise buttoned-up picnic party proved too alternative even for the alternative crowd, and the work was thumped as "bizarre" and "risqué." Perhaps chilled by the reaction to "Le Déjeuner," Manet waited two years to show the other nude. But "Olympia," to whom not even an innocent skinny-dipping motivation might be ascribed, caused an even greater furor. In no other canvas did the collaboration between Manet and Meurent unleash such fervent response, and in none were they as hauntingly dazzling.
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