Olympia
Édouard Manet (1832 to 1883) · 1863
A young woman lies naked on a bed of white linen and looks straight at you. She wears nothing but a black ribbon at her throat, a bracelet, a flower in her hair and one satin slipper. A Black maid brings her a bouquet wrapped in paper, presumably from an admirer, and at the foot of the bed a black cat arches its back. The model was Victorine Meurent, who also posed for the Luncheon on the Grass, and the name Olympia was a common working name among Parisian courtesans. Everyone who saw the painting in 1865 understood that they were looking at a prostitute receiving a client, and that client was, uncomfortably, the viewer.
Manet borrowed the pose from Titian's Venus of Urbino, a painting he had copied in Florence, but he stripped away every softening convention. The body is flat and pale, painted with almost no shading, so that Olympia seems pressed against the picture surface rather than resting in space. The contours are drawn in hard dark lines. Look at how little modelling there is in the hand that covers her lap, and how the sheets are built from broad strokes of grey and white. Critics said it looked unfinished and vulgar. Today those same qualities read as the beginning of modern painting, where the surface of the canvas is allowed to speak for itself.
The Salon of 1865 hung Olympia so high on the wall that guards had to be posted to protect it from angry visitors. After Manet's death, Claude Monet organised a public subscription in 1890 to buy the painting for the French state so that it would not be sold to an American collector. It entered the Louvre in 1907 and came to Orsay when the museum opened. Notice the bouquet: it was painted in a few quick strokes and yet you can identify the flowers, a small demonstration of everything Manet's critics refused to see.
Did You Know? Monet raised nearly twenty thousand francs from fellow artists and friends to buy Olympia for France in 1890, then had to lobby for years before the Louvre agreed to hang it.
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