Along with Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” (which can never leave Paris, per the terms of its donation), “Olympia” is the kill shot of European tradition, and the daybreak for an estranged visual regime still with us 160 years later. Everything that inflamed those first viewers — the forthright artifice, the flat and heavy brushwork, the unsentimental gaze — has made Olympia’s boudoir into the Kilometer Zero of modern art....
The scandal wasn’t the nudity itself. The Salon walls were jammed with bare-breasted Aphrodites. It was Manet’s unabashed depiction of a prostitute performing as an Aphrodite — in an unadorned new style that made Olympia look like nothing more than a cutout on a stage set.
“Falsity was what made her modern,” the art historian T.J. Clark once wrote....
Of course, in our day, attention must be paid to the other woman in the picture:
[T]he painting has always been a double act. It’s a self-conscious chiasmus of two women, both on the job. One Black and one white. One clothed and one nude. One whose gaze stays within the painting, and one who peers right out from it. Those oppositions get crossed and complicated in “Olympia”....
The nude and the clothed are also at issue in "Luncheon on the Grass." Nudes are conventional in art, but when you put them in a scene with clothed people, it gets "complicated." We no longer enjoy the fantasy world of nudity and need to think — or worry — about why they are nude.
This makes me think of the old witticism "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society." Did Mark Twain say that? According to Quote Investigator, maybe, and Mark Twain certainly did write:
Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.
And Bob Dylan wrote: "Even the president of the United StatesSometimes must have to stand naked."
I asked Dall-E to create an image of President Trump in the style of Manet's "Olympia," and I didn't think it would, and I was right:
I'm just trying to meet the times head-on and rewrite the rules of culture as the world outside jerks forward.
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Mark Twain is one of the greatest Western stoic thinkers of all time. A modern Marcus Aurelius. The man was wisdom in 140 characters or less 120 years before tweeting was a thing.
Change my mind.
"You walk into the room with your pencil in your hand
You see somebody naked and you say, who is that man
You try so hard but you don't understand"
It's a nice painting. I wonder if I'm too old to get a job pretending it's more than that and writing about the pretext.
The results of your request to DALL E would've been hilarious. Too bad it declined!
Olympia’s hand is strategically placed, but if you look closely, you can still see her furry pussy. And it has teeth.
- Krumhorn
Needs commentary from Jeff Toobin.
@Althouse, try again, this time asking Dall-E to make a picture based on “Olympia,” but using prominent women in case Dall-E objects to nude poses of men. You might try Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Maxine Waters, for instance.
Do tell me more
of that wise troubadour
you saw in '64
Your gaze fixed
upon injustice
everywhere; behind the heart's door
RSM +++
Baby on a cold, gray metal slab.
The unenviable lurch of social progress to a diverging religion (i.e. behavioral protocol, model). Diversity, too. Eyes down here.
"Even the president of the United StatesSometimes must have to stand naked."
Which is why the American people rejected Hillary, to spare themselves that horror. They said, if we must see one of these people naked, let it be Trump. It won't be pleasant, but Hillary...Good Lord! Even with her clothes on she could make a freight train take 20 miles of dirt road.
Went to Wiki to see what all the fuss is about and, appears Olympia is a rip-off of Venus of Urbino?
Following Althouse’s link to Olympia took me to the Wiki page for Victorine Meurent, who was Manet’s model for the central figure in “Olympia,” and, interestingly enough, she is also believed to be the nude woman in the foreground with the challenging gaze in Manet’s equally famous “The Luncheon on the Grass.” She posed both nude and clothed for numerous paintings by Manet, but she also posed for a number of other French artists. She herself was also an accomplished artist, and Wiki can’t resist pointing out that her paintings were accepted for display in the 1876 Paris Salon juried exhibition, when Manet's work was rejected.
She would have been 18 when she posed nude for Manet’s two pictures, and she lived for another 65 years.
"I don't know art, but I know what I like." I'm very old. I remember when Life Magazine would occasionally come out with art issues that featured many such great works of art. Some of those Leda & The Swan paintings were really hot.
Sure, put a working girl on the canvas and the whole art world goes nuts, despite the known transgressive antisocial behavior of so many artists of the era.
But there is another way to enjoy the modern while honoring the past. The recreation of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus by Uma Thurman in the movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, inspired a large number of young men, and some young women, to appreciate the classic style of art over the modern. I strongly urge all artists to include more such homages to the classic in their work, especially if Uma Thurman or artists like her are involved.
It was the "Kill shot" to European Tradition. Well, that means it was the Kill shot to Painting meaning anything to the vast majority of people. Next stop Abstact painting and christ in a bottle of piss.
I always love how the liberal/leftist at the NYT's celebrate the victory of "modernism"and the "Counter-culture" instead of celeberating the "counter-culture's" great works of art. Of course, there a very few. name one great work of art in last 40 years. We have Bob Dylan winning Nobel Prizes. The last famous painter was Warhol and he painted soup cans. Classicial Music, Jazz, and Opera dead. you can argue Anglo-saxons don't really do culture, but what to account for the rest of the world?
We have plenty of artists, but we have no great art.
As for the painting, i have a hard time seeing the black maid and don't care about her. She's obviously there as a contrast to the prostitute, plus she's hard to make out. Which was deliberate. I'm also assuming having a black attentant was probably another clue that she was a prostitute in 1863.
As for the painting, i have a hard time seeing the black maid and don't care about her. She's obviously there as a contrast to the prostitute, plus she's hard to make out. Which was deliberate. I'm also assuming having a black attentant was probably another clue that she was a prostitute in 1863.
Matisse's Pink Nude must be mentioned as a direct sequel of Manet's transgressive painting.
Note that if you put the hands and feet at the edge of the painting, you don't need to paint in the toes and fingers, a significant savings in time and effort and pink paint.
Manet is my favorite artist. I took an art history intro class in college, and he was the one for me. Can’t explain why. I still remember walking into the room at the Musée d’Orsay and seeing the huge Dejeuner dur l’Herbe and just gasping. Then I turned around and there was Olympia. Same reaction. Be worth a trip to NYC….
Sargent is right up there for me now also.
Not sure if the article mentioned the book Olympia: Paris in the Time of Manet (Friedrich). Recommended.
And we end up with Balthus' "The Guitar Lesson"
It was a kill shot that led directly to the decadence of the Fin De Siecle, with Egon Schiele raping his models and painting emaciated, grotesque, shattered women, as Huysmans wrote Au Rebours (Against Nature), in which neurotics seek extreme escape from reality and despise the bourgeoise; women's bodies are further degraded by artists indulging in angry gender-bending, and satanism and darkness are toyed into tedium by the very bored.
Then came the first of two World Wars.
Despite what the NYTimes critic implies, we are not in the "kill shot" era but at the decadent end of a cycle that began in 1963 and is ending with the same dull, neurotic ennui of the last fin de siecle.
But aren't we supposed to not be talking about dead white males?
mikee said...
"Note that if you put the hands and feet at the edge of the painting, you don't need to paint in the toes and fingers, a significant savings in time and effort and pink paint."
How much time and effort can it really take to draw fingers and toes with crayons? He didn't even stay in the lines.
I think I saw a movie about that Olympia painting. Or it might’ve been a documentary.
"Writes Jason Farago, in "The 19th Century’s Most Scandalous Painting Comes to New York/'Olympia,'"
Bullshit.
The Origin of the World
Gustave Courbet (1866)
https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-courbet/the-origin-of-the-world-1866
Maybe the Amish were right all along.
Realism:
I guess maybe!!
Manet just leaves me cold. I don't see the talent.
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