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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 5
Lesson 2: Realism- A beginner's guide to Realism
- Courbet, The Stonebreakers
- Courbet, A Burial at Ornans, 1849-50
- Gustave Courbet, A Burial at Ornans
- Courbet, The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life
- Courbet, The Artist's Studio, a real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life
- Courbet, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet
- Bonheur, Plowing in the Nivernais
- Bonheur, Sheep in the Highlands
- Millet, L'Angelus
- Millet, The Gleaners
- Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens
- Édouard Manet, Olympia
- Manet, Olympia
- Manet's Olympia
- Manet, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe
- Manet, The Railway
- Manet, The Railway
- Manet, Émile Zola
- Manet, The Balcony
- Manet, Plum Brandy
- Manet, In the Conservatory
- Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
- Manet, Corner of a Café-Concert
- Eva Gonzalès, A Loge at the Théâtre des Italiens
- Daumier, Rue Transnonain
- Honoré Daumier, Nadar Elevating Photography to the Height of an Art
- Realism
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Manet, Olympia
Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
Manet's Olympia painting challenges traditional art by presenting a modern, real woman instead of an idealized Venus. The artwork confronts viewers with Olympia's direct gaze and sexuality, making them question their motives for looking. New scholarship reveals the importance of Laure, the black servant, as a representation of Paris's diverse, modern life.
. 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(3 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?(2 votes)
- 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)
Video transcript
(soft music) - [Steven] There's a long
tradition of the female nude represented in the most
erotic sensuous way clothed by mythology or
clothed by sheer beauty. - [Beth] Mr. 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 Musee 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 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. 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] For one,
because it had the stamp of the official state. These were the leading artists of the time that were saying this art is of quality. And so of course it had
already marked 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 what 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 how do you know she looks like a real woman as opposed to a Venus? - [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's 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 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. - [Steven] This woman was
recognized as a courtesan. That is as 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 servant handing her flowers that
presumably have just come from one of her customers. But look at the way that
Olympia's looking out towards us. 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. - [Beth] When we use the word prostitute, we think of a figure of much lower class. And here we have a woman who's
a higher class prostitute. - [Steven] Important new
scholarship has helped us to better understand one of the two primary figures in this painting. - [Beth] New scholarship by
Denise Murell helps us see that this is part of
his attempt to capture modern life in Paris,
and modern life in Paris was decidedly diverse. - [Steven] Murell's research
opens up this painting. It tells us that this is a painting that is not just a reprise of the Venus in Titian's Venus of Urbino. But it expresses modernity in its inclusion of a black woman, a woman who had posed for
him for a gorgeous portrait. And even before that, on the side of a painting of "Children
in the Tuleries Gardens". - [Beth] There was a small black community in the Northern part of Paris, but after 1848 when territorial slavery was finally outlawed in France, that population grew and Laure lived only 20 minutes away from Manet and close to many of the other painters and prominent artists of the time. - [Steven] And look at the
way that Manet paints Laure in relationship to Olympia. Olympia is static,
almost like a sculpture. Whereas Laure seems to be momentary, seems to be a part of the modern world, seems to be in motion. - [Beth] We do not know Laure's last name. We think that she was
likely from the Caribbean or from Africa, but Laure
is mostly lost to history. - [Steven] And importantly,
this scholarship notes that Manet has dressed
her in modern clothing, but with a reference
still to the Caribbean and that can be seen in her head wrap. - [Beth] Most images at
this time of black figures were either exoticized, romanticized, or they're ethnographic. In other words, they are an attempt to capture a certain type, but Manet seems more
interested in presenting Laure as a modern black woman in Paris. - [Steven] The reaction of
the press was pretty vicious. - [Beth] The press said
Olympia looked like a cadaver. Manet outlined her in lack
and hardly modeled her flesh. - [Steven] Some of the
caricatures that were made of this emphasized the shadow
on her hands and feet and some of the press actually
of her hands being filthy. And 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 or around the breasts. And here Manet's kept that really flat. The areas that we do see
shadow are unexpected. So that press interpreted her hand as drawing attention to her sexuality, even though nudes for centuries had shown women with their hand
placed across their genital. - [Steven] You mentioned
the kind of flatness of her body and some
art historians even said she's a bit of a paper cutout. Manet and 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 peak out from under her slipper. There is this awkwardness
that remind to us that all of this is illusion. And that in fact there is
just this two dimensionality of this canvas. - [Beth] Manet is saying,
"I'm not gonna 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, and people at the time
in 1865 recognized it. - [Steven] So this is a painting
that is 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 own motives and desires." The great poet and art critic Charles Butler 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. (soft music)