AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Modern and contemporary art- Courbet, The Stonebreakers
- Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge
- Manet, Olympia
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Munch, The Scream
- Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- The first modern photograph? Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
- Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss
- Analytic Cubism
- Matisse, Goldfish
- Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
- Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht
- Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
- Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
- Stepanova, The Results of the First Five-Year Plan
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater
- Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*short version*)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*long version*)
- Duchamp, Fountain
- Lam, The Jungle
- Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco
- Rivera, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park
- de Kooning, Woman I
- Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building
- Warhol, Marilyn Diptych
- Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden
- Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay
- Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks
- Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty
- Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware
- Basquiat, Horn Players
Manet, Olympia
Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
Édouard Manet brought to Realism his curiosity about social mores. However, he was not interested in mirroring polite parlor conversations and middle class promenades in the Bois de Boulogne (Paris’ Central Park). Rather, Manet invented subjects that set the Parisians’ teeth on edge.
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 it was rejected from the Salon. (It was instead 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.
(Text by Dr. Beth Gersh-Nesic)
. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.Want to join the conversation?
- I might have missed it in the video, was there a reason for the black cat?(11 votes)
- The black cat symbolizes promiscuity. This is emphasized further as it replaces the dog painted in Titian's Venus of Urbino, 1538 (which in contrast symbolizes fidelity.)(25 votes)
- Is this "naked" or "nude"? How do we tell the difference?(6 votes)
- Their technical definitions are identical, but they have different connotations. Nude just means no clothes and naked often has a "naughty" connotation.(10 votes)
- I'm interested in how the juxtaposition of the very dark skin of the servant with the brightly white skin of Olympia contributes to the meaning of the painting. Is it possible that Manet's presentation of harsher truths about sexuality and questions about the nature of our "looking" at such figures includes the black female servant intentionally? If this is a painting that is as much about painting as it is about the nude, as the narrators suggest at the end of the clip, what does the presence and rendering of the servant in relation to Olympia say about painting?(7 votes)
- Like they discussed at, It seems like there is flattening or posterization in the painting style of Manet's Olympia. To me, Manet seems to hint at poster design in Paris by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec about 20 years later. Is there a relationship there, or is that a false correlation? Did they know each other? 4:25(3 votes)
- The relationship here is that de Toulouse-Lautrec starts his artistic career in the midst of the Impressionist group. A group that publicly declared Manet the father of modern art and their hero, somebody who they respected enormously for paving the way to their avant-guardism. Thus Toulouse-Lautrec certainly knew Manet and his work, and even if they may not have known each other so closely as for exemple Monet and Manet, they sure must have met multiple times, for example at the bar Nouvelles Athènes in Paris.
Then ones again: if something else happens 20 years later and there is a kind of reflectiveness, then it should be logic to state that Toulouse-Lautrec hints at Manet, and not the other way around. But it's not even a hint, in the sense that it is just a continuüm of a visual culture.
It is also important to consider the differences and intrinsic characterisctics of the two forms of art: painting VS lithografic printing. What Manet evoked in his flattening style of painting was truly revolutionary (it went totally in against the academic rules of painting), and is in a sense indeed the start of modernism, if we look at Clement Greenberg who states that American Abstract Expressionism is modernism in its fullest sense because it is self-reflexive on the intrinsic quality of a painting being 2D or "Flat". At Manet's time though there were painters (like Delacroix for example) who painted relatively crude, with big and fat brush strokes that accumulated the paint in a 3D sense. This is something impossibile to achieve with lithography, thus it naturally leans more to a clear 2D vision.(4 votes)
- atare the little cherubs in the water sitting on a baby killer whale? what does it represent? 1:25(2 votes)
- Actually, that is a dolphin, and the cherubs represent love which is what the goddess Venus was patron of.(3 votes)
- What are anybody's thoughts about the role of the male gaze in the making of this painting? Was Manet subverting it by making us confront our motivations with looking at this painting, or condoning it?(1 vote)
- It was meant to shock. Look up this documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTjaVva1esQ
The girl was a popular prostitute. Lots of wealthy men wanted her, but no one wanted her picture hanging in an art Salon - not where their wives could see it.(4 votes)
- How did Giorgione not have armpit hair? @0:09(1 vote)
- Recall that this is a painting, not a photograph. A painter may put in or leave out whatever he or she chooses.(2 votes)
- Do people date people based off the beauty standard or the idea of beauty that is found in artworks?(1 vote)
- Your question seems to be about dating (going out with a potential or actual romantic partner). I think you're in the wrong course for that one.(2 votes)
- I think there’s a mistake: Baudelaire or butler? 7:40(1 vote)
- If it's in the closed captions, ignore it. In fact, turn off the captions if you can. They don't help much, and often they distract.(1 vote)
- Does Olympia have proper anatomy? @:35(1 vote)
- She looks rather proper to me.(1 vote)