The history of manet’s ‘olympia’ | thearticle

_Manet et manebit_ (He remains and will remain) Ever since Manet’s _Olympia_ (1863) appeared in the Paris Salon of 1865, it has aroused strong reactions ranging from disgust to admiration. 

Many modern critics have simply followed the mistaken assumption that _Olympia_ is a portrait of a prostitute.  But by looking carefully at the picture and analysing its details, you can see

that she is a courtesan, not a whore. Three important critics have explained how Edouard Manet boldly defied the traditional painting of the nude in his controversial masterpiece.  In 1926

Theodore Duret, French journalist and early advocate of Manet, perceptively wrote: “The proper function of the nude, as it was then conceived, was to assist in the rendering of fable,

mythology and ancient history. . . . Into this world of conventional goddesses, Manet presumed to introduce a modern Parisienne, an Olympia lying on a bed.” Thirty years later Kenneth Clark

observed in his classic study of the genre, “for the first time since the Renaissance a painting of the nude represented a real woman in probable surroundings. . . . To place on a naked body

a head with so much individual character is to jeopardise the whole [mythological] premise of the nude, and Manet succeeds only because of his perfect tact and skill as a painter.”  In 1982

John Richardson, the biographer of Picasso, added, “Her direct, unwavering and unavoidable gaze (which appears to follow the spectator around the room) implies a self-confidence, even

arrogance, at variance with accepted notions of paintings of the female nude.” Manet’s _Olympia_ imaginatively transformed Goya’s _Naked Maja _(1800), which had provoked the censure of the

Spanish Inquisition.  Maja’s luxuriant black hair frames her large eyes and tiny mouth, and cascades down to her shoulder.  Her arms, crossed behind her head, raise and spread her full but

perky breasts.  She has a narrow waist, and reveals a thin veil of pubic hair between her legs, which extend along the cushioned bed.  Fred Licht adds, “with her expression of relaxed

dreaminess . . .  she stares challengingly out of the picture, obviously aware of being looked over but quite indifferent to being on exhibition. . . . The utter lack of any ornament stands

in sharpest contrast to the pleasures suggested by the Maja.” Francisco Goya – The Nude Maja (1800). Duret provided a good description of Manet’s picture: “Olympia was painted nude, lying

upon a bed, with one arm resting on a cushion.  Beneath her is spread a kind of Indian shawl of a yellow tinge, slightly figured with flowers.  Behind the bed a negress is bringing her

mistress a large bouquet, the brilliant tones of which are juxtaposed with the utmost daring.  The whole is completed by a black cat, with arched back, placed on the bed at the side of the

negress.”  A modern critic has commented on her ornamental jewelry, her shoes and her pretty feet: “Shoulder-length tresses just brush her left shoulder. . . . She wears delicate

drop-earrings, a thin black choker tied in a bow, with a charm, and a thick gold bracelet, from which dangles a locket.  The only other things she wears are satin mules, medium heel, with

blue and gold trim.  The satin mules are of the closed-toe style, and the toes of her bare foot extend just past the shod one” and peep out enticingly. The painting of Olympia, reclining on

her amply pillowed bed, is structured by connected and contrasting colours.  The red orchid in her red hair is echoed in her red lips, the red flowers that decorate her fringed shawl, and

the maid’s coral earrings, red lower lip, red turban and red blossoms in her expensive bouquet. Olympia’s white-pearl-drop earrings form a triangle with the white oval-shaped faceted pendant

in her choker, which separates the mental and physical parts of her body.  The black choker is echoed in the Black maid and the black cat.  The maid’s dark skin and billowing gown contrast

to Olympia’s ivory-white skin and bare body.  The maid’s four claw-like black fingers clutching the bouquet echo the four paws of the black cat, with arched back and erect tail, that sits on

the edge of the bed.  The bright eyes of the maid and the cat stare out of their dark backgrounds like beams of light in the night.  The black cat and Olympia, who raises her head but

ignores the maid, both stare directly at the viewer.  The alert, protective and hostile cat, quivering with electricity, seems to be hissing at the approaching lover who’s about to enter its

domain. The vertical frame of the screen behind Olympia leads the eye down to her crotch.  Both modest and provocative, she conceals with spread fingers the sex that’s reserved for her

lover, while also drawing attention to it.  The viewer, who can look at Olympia but may not touch her, experiences voyeuristic and vicarious pleasure by seeing with his eyes what the

possessive lover will soon enjoy with his body. No one has noticed that Manet includes three subtle variants of her apparently concealed genitals.  Her red armpit hair and the fissure

between her shoulder and chest suggest the color and position of her pubic hair. The index and middle finger of her left hand, resting on her thigh, look remarkably like two spread legs with

visible public hair.  The same V-shaped cleavage with a dark pubic center also appears between her heel and her dangling shoe. Manet portrayed the square face and pointed chin of his

favorite model, the nineteen-year-old Victorine Meurent, in his _Déjeuner sur l’herbe _(_Luncheon on the Grass_) and _Olympia_.  A friend reported that “Manet, having met her by chance in

the middle of a crowd in the hall of the Palais de Justice, had been struck by her original appearance and her sculptural look.  She could scarcely have been more than twenty years old.” 

(Picasso later met his muse and model Marie-Thérèse Walter in the same way.  He approached her outside the Galeries Lafayette in Paris in 1927, when she was seventeen, and remarked, “You

have an interesting face.  I would like to paint you.  I am Picasso.”  She’d never heard of him.)  Victorine later became a successful painter herself and exhibited in the Salons of 1876 and

1879. Edouard Manet – Luncheon on the Grass (1863) Juliet Wilson-Bareau explains that _Olympia_’s “subject matter was bound—if not actually calculated—to outrage the moral sentiments of the

day, since prudery flourished in France under the Second Empire just as in Victorian England.”  Manet finished the painting in 1863, but anticipating trouble and despite the encouragement

of his close friends, nervously held it back for two years.  Exhibited in the Salon of 1865, it was furiously condemned by the disgusted public and press—outraged critics called Olympia a

“bundle of laundry” and “a female gorilla”—which stoked the fires of controversy and increased the circulation of newspapers.  Toward the end of the exhibition the threat of physical

violence forced the officials to station guards nearby and place the picture high up where it could escape both attention and attack.   Georges Bataille notes the astonishing transformation

of taste in only a few decades, by asking, “what further heights might have been reached by the passions of the crowd, had they been able to foresee that 40 years later, in 1907, the object

of their deprecation would take its place in the Louvre?” The English art critic Roger Fry wrote that Manet was devastated by the assault on _Olympia_: “The papers howled with rage; wherever

he was recognized he was a marked man.  This refined gentleman, who belonged to the most cultured circles of the professional class, was really believed by the public to be an almost

inhuman monster of depravity, because he had painted two pictures [including _Luncheon_] which repeated two favourite themes of the old masters.  The effect of this on so sensitive a nature

was violent.”  Manet tried to defend himself, stating, “I interpret what I see as straightforwardly as possible.  _Olympia_ is a case in point.  People have objected to the harsh contours,

but they were there.  I saw them.  I painted what I saw.” The Black woman suggesting exotic sensuality and the black cat symbolizing sexual promiscuity were both portrayed in the poetry of

Manet’s friend Charles Baudelaire.  _Chatte_ in French slang, like “pussy” in English, refers to a woman’s sexual organ.  Baudelaire derived his cats from his translation of Edgar Allan

Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” which begins by noting that sagacious black cats are popularly regarded as witches in disguise.  In Poe’s story the cat, which has magical powers, represents the

return of the narrator’s repressed consciousness and leads to his inevitable self-destruction. Baudelaire’s _Fleurs du Mal_ had also been condemned as obscene in 1857, and he had fled to

Brussels in 1864 to avoid imprisonment for debt. Appealing to Baudelaire for understanding and sympathy, Manet lamented, “I am being subjected to a hail of insults.”  Baudelaire, who knew

how it felt, tried to fortify him: “Do you think you are the first to whom such a thing has happened?  Are you a greater genius than Chateaubriand or Wagner?  People ridiculed them just as

much, but they didn’t die of it.”  Baudelaire told mutual friends in Paris that the painful attacks on Manet could have a beneficial effect: “Manet has a powerful talent, one that will last.

  But he has a weak character.  He seems to be desolate and dizzy with shock. . . . When you see Manet, tell him this: that torment—whether it be great or small—that mockery, that insults,

that injustice are excellent things, and that he would be ungrateful if he were not thankful for injustice.  I know well that he will have some difficulty understanding my theory; painters

always want immediate success.  But really, Manet has such  brilliant and facile ability, that it would be unfortunate if he became discouraged.”  As his wounds gradually healed, Manet

accepted Baudelaire’s paradoxical theory and told a friend: “This war with knives has hurt me very deeply.  I’ve suffered cruelly, but it has been a great stimulus.  I wouldn’t want any

artist to be praised and flattered at the beginning.”  As Nietzsche declared: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” The first edition of Les Fleurs du mal with author’s notes. Manet was

also defended by some of his greatest contemporaries.  In 1867 Emile Zola described _Olympia_ as Manet’s “masterpiece” and stated: “It will remain as the most characteristic example of his

talent, his greatest achievement. . . . The pale colouring of the child’s body is charming.  She is a young girl of sixteen . . . a contemporary girl, the sort of girl we meet every day on

the pavements. . . Some people attached an obscene significance to it.”  Countering the attacks and minimising the sexual content, Zola called Olympia an innocent child and young girl.  He

described the amazing nude as quite ordinary, ignored her sensuality and didn’t mention her luxurious surroundings. In 1876 the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, choosing an accurate but hotly debated

term, called Olympia a courtesan and defended the morality of the painting: “Olympia, that wan, wasted courtesan, showing to the public, for the first time, the non-traditional,

unconventional nude.  The bouquet, still enclosed in its paper envelope, the gloomy cat. . . and all the surrounding accessories, were truthful, but not immoral.”  The novelist J.-K.

Huysmans noted the superb colours and Olympia’s subtle expression, and described her as “very lovely, background of green curtain, bluish white sheets, her head looks at you in a teasingly

enigmatic way.” Gauguin copied _Olympia_, Cézanne and Picasso painted variants, and Cézanne also recognized its originality and importance: “We must keep _Olympia_ in sight.  It’s a new step

in painting.  Our Renaissance begins there: it’s a real painting of things.  Those pinks and whites lead us along a path our sensibilities knew nothing of before.”  Zola and Mallarmé, both

friends of and painted by Manet, as well as Huysmans and Cézanne, were brilliantly perceptive.  The contemporary journalists who attacked the painting have been completely forgotten; the

sharp-eyed critics are still remembered for their novels, poems and art. The weirdest misreading came from the poet Paul Valéry in an otherwise appreciative essay of 1932.  In “The Triumph

of Manet” Valéry called him a “great artist” yet exclaimed: > The cold and naked _Olympia_, that monster of banal sensuality, is > ministered to by a negress.  _Olympia_ shocks, 

inspires a sacred > horror; she dominates and triumphs. A scandalous idol, she has all > the force of a public exposure of one of society’s wretched > hypocrisies.  Her empty head 

is separated from her essential being > by a thin band of black velvet.  Impurity personified—whose > function demands the frank and placid absence of any sense of > shame—is 

isolated by that pure and perfect stroke.  A bestial > Vestal of absolute nudity, she invokes a dream of all the primitive > barbarity and ritual animality which lurks and lingers in 

the ways > and workings of prostitution in the life of a great city. Valéry’s wildly off-the-rails description—monster, scandalous idol, impurity personified, bestial Vestal, barbarity,

animality and (contra Mallarmé) prostitution—does not match the actual beauty of the picture.  Aroused and infuriated by _Olympia_, Valéry seemed to be exorcising his own sexual demons and

falsely imagined what was not there. Art historians have since sharply disagreed  about whether Olympia is a crude prostitute or a pampered courtesan.  Olympia originally and most accurately

referred to a goddess on Mount Olympus in ancient Greece.  Manet brought her down from the mythological heights and placed her in a contemporary setting.  Her name has been ignored by many

modern critics who have preconceived notions and ignore the visual content of the picture, blindly follow a fashionable but ill-informed trend and try to spice up their dull analyses with  a

bit of scandal.  These respectable academic scholars, who prefer gender to sex, are fascinated by the forbidden fornication of prostitutes, revert to the reactionary disgust of 1865 and

want to condemn all models as whores. Françoise Cachin (1983), casting aside all doubts, asserts that “Manet had, quite simply, without equivocation, painted a prostitute on her couch [i.e.

bed], ready for action, expecting a client [i.e. lover].”  The influential Marxist critic T. J. Clark (1984), to whom all scholars bend the knee, categorically asserts that Manet “depicted a

prostitute . . . with a prostitute’s stare.”  Clark tries to justify his degradation of Manet’s model by stating, “its usual French form, Olympe, is given as one of a list of thirty-five

common _surnoms_ for prostitutes . . . Olympia was a well-known prostitutes’ name.”  But the name is not decisive, and French women blessed with the other 34 names on that infamous list were

certainly not all prostitutes.  Sander Gilman (1985), in the convoluted style appropriate to _Critical Inquiry_, states, “While the  number of terms describing the various categories of the

prostitute expanded substantially during the nineteenth century, all were used to label the sexualised woman.”  Ignoring all ambiguity, Alan Krell (1996) exclaims, “it seems clear that it

is a painting of a prostitute.” The worst offender is Nancy Locke (2001), who recalls, “recent art-historical accounts of Manet’s _Olympia _. . . have concentrated in varying ways on the

extent to which Manet’s painting represented a contemporary prostitute of some kind.”  She then makes her own dubious contribution, with the inevitable “perhaps” and “probably”: “The

interior is hers: the maid and cat know her, so she is no streetwalker.  Her accessories and maid are worthy of a bourgeois home, as opposed to a bordello.  Yet her nudity and her look out

at the viewer, even as the gift of flowers arrives, would suggest that she is perhaps between customers, and thus not a kept woman and probably not a high-class call girl, either.  _Olympia_

seems less to recall the brothel than to foreshadow the _maison de rendez-vous,_ the decorous class of nineteenth-century Parisian houses of prostitution.”  This is a perfect example of

poor reasoning based on unconvincing evidence and leading to an absurd conclusion.  Even more absurdly, she insists, with the usual “possible”: “it is possible, then, that the _Olympia_ is

not only wearing his mother’s bracelet, but also posing in the family home.”  But it’s not at all clear and logical why Manet would pollute the respectable home of his parents by bringing in

a prostitute. Three contributors to _Manet and Modern Beauty _(2019) disagree with each other and even with themselves.  Scott Allen says _Olympia_ depicts  a “titular prostitute”; Leah

Lehmbeck calls the painting a “contemporary image of a prostitute.”  Bridget Alsdorf also states that Olympia was “widely recognised as a prostitute.”  But changing tack in the same wobbly

essay, she also—and more correctly—notes that the bouquet of “flowers aligns Manet’s practice as an artist of the _demimonde_” and that Olympia is a courtesan. Alsdorf focuses on but does

not clarify whether Olympia is a prostitute or a quite distinct _demimondaine_ or courtesan.  Both terms signify a woman supported by and exclusively devoted to a wealthy lover, who treats

her with courtesy, respect and affection.  _Olympia_’s setting is comfortable and elegant, not at all vulgar and squalid. There’s no alluring red lantern hanging outside her door.  She’s

completely different from the raddled whores portrayed by Félicien Rops and Jules Pascin, and from Edgar Degas’ _The Madam’s Name Day _(1877), in which the naked whores — obese, misshapen

and ugly — face forward and blatantly display their tangled bush.  In _Olympia_ by contrast, the maid’s bountiful bouquet (not sent to whores) announces the lover’s imminent arrival through

the parted green curtain and open rear door, which resemble a stage set.  Manet’s _Nana_ (1877) portrays the next scene in this intimate drama, when the top-hatted gentleman-lover

impatiently waits and watches the _en deshabille _Nana dress herself, before he will later undress her. Three early French critics emphasised Olympia’s maidenly chastity and innocent youth.

  In his 1863 poem “Olympia”, the painter Zacherie Astruc called her “The august maiden, keeper of the flame”, and Manet adopted this title for his still unnamed picture.  The painter

Jacques-Emile Blanche (1925) emphasised the connection to Baudelaire and Olympia’s delightful skin, and ironically compared her to the conventional nudes of the Prix de Rome artists whom

Manet had opposed: “Baudelaire was attracted by the savour of the _Olympia_, that marvel of still, incomplete gracefulness, and was stirred by the touch of perversity of that bewitching maid

painted in silver, milk and soft rose, who [modestly] lays her hand on that part of herself which a winner of the Rome Prize would have veiled.”  Theodore Duret (1926) agreed that “today

she appears as chaste as any of the nymphs of mythology,” which was (as we have seen) the traditional portrayal of the nude.  Emile Zola (1867) had described her as “a young girl of sixteen”

with a well-developed “child’s body.” The far more perceptive and convincing interpretation, based on Manet’s actual portrayal, is that the once-maidenly Olympia is not a prostitute but a

courtesan.  Theodore Reff, in his influential book devoted to _Olympia_ (1976), calls her the bold and elegant “starkly naked yet fashionable . . . wealthy courtesan who [in the reign of

Napoleon III] was then at the height of her power and notoriety.”  Richard Shone (1978) writes, “this slim young _demimondaine_ . . . has the persistence of an icon, inviolate in her

self-assurance.”  Manet’s biographer Beth Brombert (1996) sensibly and persuasively concludes that Olympia is not a whore: “Though a courtesan rather than a deity, she is not a sordid

streetwalker, victim of society.  The opulence of her bed, the stylishness of her mules, the presence of a well-dressed servant, and the extravagant bouquet clearly indicate her status.”

Other art historians have perversely and repeatedly described Manet’s Olympia as a prostitute.  But she doesn’t work in a whorehouse or walk the streets or have sex with any man able to pay

for her services.  Like many kept women in life and literature, then and now, she has a wealthy lover who maintains her in comfortable circumstances and provides jewelry and an attendant

maid.  She awaits his arrival, naked and ready to pleasure him.  Like a true gentleman, he sends her a bouquet of flowers and, as the maid discreetly withdraws from the scene, delights in

her body before exclusively enjoying her favours. _Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published five books on art: Painting and the Novel, The Enemy: A

Biography of Wyndham Lewis, Impressionist Quartet, Modigliani: A Life and Alex Colville: The Mystery of the Real. _ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to

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