Édouard Manet's Olympia
Watch this video and read the accompanying article, which discusses an
important artwork by the Realist painter Manet. Pay attention to the
painting's modern characteristics and how its contemporary audience
reacted.
Édouard Manet brought his curiosity about social mores to Realism. However, he was not interested in mirroring polite parlor conversations and middle-class promenades in the Bois de Boulogne (the main park in Paris). Rather, Manet invented subjects that
set the Parisians' teeth.
Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
In 1865, Manet submitted his risqué painting of a courtesan greeting her client (in this case, you), Olympia, of 1863, to the French Salon. The jury for the 1865 Salon accepted this painting despite their disapproval of the subject matter because
two years earlier, Manet's Luncheon on the Grass created such a stir when the Salon rejected it. Instead, it was exhibited in Emperor Napoleon III's conciliatory exhibition, the Salon des Réfusés, or the Exhibition of the Refused.
Crowds came to the Salon des Réfusés specifically to laugh and jeer at what they considered Manet's folly).
Somehow they were afraid another rejection would seem like a personal attack on Manet himself. The reasoning was odd, but the result was the same; Olympia became infamous, and the painting had to be hung very high to protect it from physical attacks.
Manet was a Realist, but sometimes his "real" situations shocked and rocked the Parisian art world to its foundations. His later work was much tamer.
Saylor Academy Knowledge Check
Source: Beth Harris, Steven Zucker, and Beth Gersh-Nesic, Smarthistory, smarthistory.org
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License.