Edouard Manet`s Olympia essay

You invaded my sorrowful heart

Like the sudden stroke of a blade

Bold as a lunatic troupe

Of demons in drunken parade

Charles Baudelaire, “The Vampire,” The Flowers of Evil

I saw her for the second time in my life. The first time I saw her was in Paris a long time ago at the Musée d’Orsay; and today, we met again, eye to eye, at the Metropolitan Museum.

Olympia by Edouard Manet travelled to New York from Orsay in Paris. The gallery was crowded, and I heard some voices whispering in front of the canvas, “Oh, how beautiful.” Victorine Meurent, the woman Manet painted as Olympia, remembered the crowded gallery in the official salon in Paris in 1865, the year Manet first exhibited the work. People were shocked at seeing her, mocking her with countless caricatures; whispering to each other about how ugly she is, how unproportioned her body is; comparing her pale white skin to a dead person from the morgue.

Now it is 2023, and Manet’s genius is known to everyone. Countless books have been written about the painting, and yet, if I would have to describe the feeling I had when I saw her gaze, I was a victim at her mercy. Victorine Meurent possesses a true beauty. Her gaze confronts like a stroke of a blade, empowered with its strength, and she doesn’t ask for permission to look at you or for you to look at her.

The true genius of Manet is not only that he revolutionized Art back then—first, with the no less scandalized Luncheon on the Grass in 1863; then, in 1865, with Olympia. The true genius of Manet is that what he did is still provocative and shocking.

Luncheon on the Grass

I see a woman in total command. Victorine’s gaze becomes visceral in my body, which we so rarely can attribute to a woman’s portrait in Art. The cult of beauty and sexuality in the Western tradition relies on this notion of women’s sensuality, the fantasies of fairytales mostly written by men.

We are not looking at her; on the contrary, she is looking at us, and there is no space for her to please the spectator, no space for sensuality, and no space for me to escape her gaze.

Charles Baudelaire, the French poet known for The Flowers of Evil, a contemporary and close friend of Manet, revolutionized and broke free of the portrait of beauty in literature as being something we call sensual, refined.

Baudelaire had his own story of condemnation after the publication of his most famous work Les Fleurs du Mal; before Baudelaire, there was Flaubert’s trial on Madam Bovary.

Manet was agonized; he asked his friend, Baudelaire, to come and rescue him.

Baudelaire could not rescue him. He knew the price his friend had to pay for his act of bravery, the act of freedom to portray someone as obviously naked rather than conventionally nude.

So many prolific art critics and art historians wrote about the Olympia. The number of books is infinite. It is still one of the most fascinating and disturbing images in the tradition of Western Art. One critic observed that the figure was naked rather than conventionally nude. Here is something that, by definition, makes us sweat if we encounter it in a work of art, what we call being naked rather than conventionally nude.

Maybe we can try speaking the conventional language of what it means. What does it mean to be naked rather than nude? What it meant in 1865 is no different than what it means in 2023. Is it the kind of image we can attribute to pornography? Perhaps, like the Sleeping Venus by Giorgione, which is known as the Masterpiece of Renaissance Venus.

The Sleeping Venus

The painting has often been called a poetic evocation of sensuality, which we can only associate with an idyllic great beauty. She is dreaming, stretches her arm behind her head; her red lips, the sensuous curves of her body, her flesh in a soft creamy color is contrasted to the white silk drapery. The lover, the goddess, the passive beauty.

Sydney Joseph Friedberg writes, in Painting in Italy, 1500-1600: Volume 35,

The shape of being is the visual demonstration of a state of being in which idealized existence is suspended in immutable slow-breathing harmony. All the sensuality has been distilled off from this sensuous presence and all incitement; Venus denotes not the act of love but the recollection of it. The perfect embodiment of Giorgione’s dream, she dreams his dream herself.

Maybe speaking in the conventional language of eroticism, Manet’s Olympia is not trying to denote the act of love, neither to embody any of the spectators’ dreams, nor to dream his dreams herself. She is not interested.

That was a bold statement from a woman, whom we all know is a courtesan.

Never had a woman, a prostitute, the sensual flame of male fantasies, so deliberately confronted the spectator.

Olympia is often considered the beginning of Feminism in the Western Art Tradition. The confronting gaze still puzzles the spectator. That, perhaps, it is deliberately crossing the line between the true genius of Giorgione and the true genius of Manet. Both artists have the power to invade a heart with the sudden stroke of a blade; sensuality, eroticism, beauty is not refined, neither love or desire. And, most important, it is not only sensual; sometimes, it is demonic, sometimes monstrous, in its desires. The suffering and love are inevitable, yet it is the only sacred place for us to feel naked rather than nude.

Indeed, Olympia can be compared to the Etruscan funerary woman’s sculpture.

Etruscan sculpture

As feminist art historian Eunice Lipton wrote in her book: This is a woman who can say “yes” as she could say “no.” The Etruscan women had more independence and more freedom compared to other ancient civilizations; women were equal to men. Looking at the Etruscan funerary sculptures, we cannot deny the power of the image, the power and stillness the woman possesses.

I was looking at Manet’s Olympia, without any hope of escaping her unflinching gaze. I asked to redeem my cowardice: I am at her mercy.

Disdainfully she said to me:

You are not worthy to lift

From your wretched slavery

Charles Baudelaire, “The Vampire,” The Flowers of Evil