Manet’s ‘Olympia’: How the controversial painting opened doors to modernism

The painting

Confidently seated on her bed, gazing directly at her viewers, Manet’s central protagonist in the forefront on the canvas is the well-known sex worker Victorine Meurent. Her hair is dressed in a bun and an orchid flower, she has her legs crossed and her left hand placed over her genital area, even as she appears to be slinging her shoe and wearing nothing except a black ribbon on her neck.

Her black servant, reportedly modelled after a woman named Laure, brings her a bouquet of flowers, ostensibly from a client, and a black cat on the right is witness to the scene as much as it is a part of it.

Why was it controversial?

First exhibited at the prestigious Parisian Salon in 1865, the composition was considered bold for several reasons, including the deliberate use of a real-life model as opposed to a fictional protagonist that had been the norm. While the artist quoted several iconographic references — including Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s Maja desnuda — Manet’s nude was not coy like her predecessors.

The viewing of the work elicited a strong public response and shock. A note on the work on the Musée d’Orsay website reads: “Venus has become a prostitute, challenging the viewer with her calculating look. This profanation of the idealised nude, the very foundation of academic tradition, provoked a violent reaction. Critics attacked the ‘yellow-bellied odalisque’ whose modernity was nevertheless defended by a small group of Manet’s contemporaries with Zola at their head.”

In “Manet: A Radicalised Female Imagery in Artforum (1975), art historian Eunice Lipton pointed out how Manet had “robbed” the art historical genre of nudes of “their mythic scaffolding…” Some critics felt that the work even mocked Titian’s paintings, presenting a version of it that was starker and more direct.

How the work marked the onset of modernism

Painted at a time when mythological and historical depictions and landscapes dominated art, Manet’s “Olympia” was revolutionary in its approach as the artist had dared to depict a nude figure who wasn’t mythical but a “working class” girl. Rooted in realism, his subject was ostensibly sensual and not apologetic of her sexuality. With her, Manet had defied the accepted norms of feminine portraiture with soft features. With its flat shapes and highly contrasting colours, the realist work was also representative of his admiration for Japanese prints.

It marked a shift from the classical tradition to modernism with its revolutionary approach and was one of the several works by Manet that rejected the academy tradition (that preferred classical techniques and layering, and paintings of renowned people, events and mythological stories). Manet was paving the way for the impressionists, who were proponents of lighter and loose brushwork.

Who was Edouard Manet?

Known to challenge traditional techniques of representation in the latter part of the 19th century, Manet was a French artist often acknowledged as the founding father of modernism. Eldest son of an official in the French Ministry of Justice, he pursued a career in art after attempting to become a naval officer twice. Commenting on contemporary life, his subjects belonged to his present and often included family and friends who would role-play everyday scenes for the artist.

Failing to receive much support for his radical works, which included life-size tableaux of barmaids, courtesans, and bullfights, it took him a lifetime to bring acceptance to what became a more liberated art language.

He died on April 30, 1883, a year after his painting “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” received mixed reviews at the Parisian Salon. “They are raining insults on me. Someone must be wrong,” the artist wrote in a letter to his friend, French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire.