Manet, Olympia Video Lecture - Humanities/Arts

(piano playing)
Steven: There's a long
tradition of the female nude
represented in the most
erotic, sensualist way.
Clothed by mythology or
clothed by sheer beauty.
Beth: It's a tradition that goes
back to the ancient Greeks and Romans
in sculptures, for example,
of the goddess Venus,
modestly covering her body after her bath.
And Manet in this painting
that we're looking at here
at the Musée d'Orsay, is clearly
drawing on those traditions
but doing something radically modern.
Steven: The immediate model for
Manet was Titian's Venus of Urbino,
except that he's stripping away the
academic technique of the representation
of space, of the turn of the body,
but he's also stripping
away that veil of mythology.
Beth: And here at the Musée d'Orsay, we
can see in traditional nudes as Venus
painted in a traditional
way, clearly the images
that Manet's Olympia is speaking to.
Steven: So by academic art, we're
talking about the kind of art
that was sanctioned by the official
Academy that was associated
with the government of France.
Beth: It didn't challenge,
particularly, it satisfied.
Steven: Well for a couple of reasons.
For one, because it had the
stamp of the official state.
These were the leading
artists of the time,
they were saying this art is of quality
and so of course it had
a ready market value.
But at the same time it was art that
was formulaic, that was expected.
Beth: Well there was an idea that
there was a definition of great art
and there was no point in looking
for what was new or different
because great art was self evident,
great art was based on the
classical and the Renaissance.
And what someone like Manet
is doing is challenging
those very established ideas.
Ideas that seemed as natural as
the sun coming up in the morning.
She's not a Venus, her name is Olympia
and she looks very much like a real woman
in a real apartment in Paris.
Steven: So wait a minute, so how do
you know she looks like a real woman,
as opposed to a Venus?
We don't know what a Venus looks like.
Beth: Her features are not idealized.
They're not perfected.
When we look at ancient Greek sculpture
or Renaissance paintings of the nude
we have a woman who is
perfectly beautiful.
And you can see her face is asymmetrical
and her lips are a little bit too thin,
she doesn't have that perfection.
Steven: In addition, the
representations of the academic artists
always show Venus or
other nudes in a coy way.
This woman is looking directly at us.
She is sentient, she is thinking
and she's confronting us
even as we look at her.
Beth: And so there was a real
problem I think for the viewers
of this painting.
There's no way to look at her and
pretend that it was about beauty.
One was confronted by her
sexuality, there was no way to say,
"I'm just looking at the ideal image
of Venus, of the idea of beauty."
Here the reality of a
nude woman is present.
Steven: And it's even coarser
than that because this woman
was recognized as a courtesan,
that is a kind of prostitute.
Beth: The name Olympia was common for
prostitutes at that time in Paris.
Steven: And what we're seeing
here is Olympia's servant
handing her flowers that presumably
have just come from one of her patrons,
one of her customers.
We must have, as the
customer, walked into the room
and startled the cat at the foot of
the bed, as well as the two figures.
And so there is this vulgarity here,
there really is doing even more
than just stripping away the
mythology that's confronting
19th century Paris with
its own corruption.
Beth: When we use the word
prostitute we think of a figure
of much lower class and here we
have a woman who is obviously
a higher class prostitute.
Steven: The reaction of the
press was pretty vicious.
Beth: The press said she
looked like a cadaver.
She looked like she was dead.
Manet outlined her in black
and hardly modeled her flesh.
Steven: What's interesting is
that some of the caricatures
that were made of this emphasize
the shadow on her hands and feet,
and some of the press actually
spoke of her hands being filthy.
It's interesting that
those are the only areas
where there's significant modeling.
Beth: Where one would expect to
see modeling on the female nude
would be in the abdomen,
around the breasts,
and here Manet's kept that
really flat and you're right,
the areas that we do see
shadow are unexpected
so the press interpreted her
hand as drawing attention
to her sexuality even though nudes
for centuries had shown women
with their hand placed
across their genitals.
Steven: You mentioned the
kind of flatness of her body
and some art historians even said
she's a bit of a paper cut out,
but Manet of course in so
much of his work really does
reject the clear articulation
of represented space
and confronts the viewer
with the complexity
of painting on a two-dimensional surface.
And an area where you can really
see that are, for instance,
in the way the toes peek
out from under her slipper.
There is this awkwardness that reminds
us that all of this is illusion
and that in fact there is just this
two-dimensionality of this canvas.
Beth: There's a kind of unmasking.
Manet is saying, "I'm not going to
pretend that my painting isn't paint.
"I'm not going to present you
with this perfect illusion,"
the way that academic artists are doing
where you don't even see a brush stroke.
So he's insisting on
unmasking that illusion
and then he's insisting on unmasking
the illusion of our own interests
in looking at these images.
He's reminding us that our
interest here is a sexual one.
Steven: Right, in so many
traditional representations
of the nude because the figure
is not looking out at us,
we can comfortably look at her.
But here we're confronted by
her gaze and by her thinking
and there is a much more
problematic experience here.
Beth: And that's in the fact
that she's a real woman,
she's contemporary and the
way she picks her head up,
the way she looks out at us,
the angularity of her body,
it's in all those things.
And people at the time,
1865, recognized it.
Steven: So this is a painting that
is only partially about the nude.
This is a painting about
art making and about
the kinds of conventions that
exist in art and making us,
the viewer, aware of those conventions
even as we look at this painting.
Beth: Manet is saying let's
be honest about the materials,
let's be honest about the subject
and our motives and desires,
and I think that that is a really
interesting thing for art to do.
The great poet and art
critic Charles Baudelaire
called on artists to paint
the beauty of modern life
and I think Manet is taking up that call.
Steven: Manet is inventing what
beauty could be for the modern world.
(piano playing)