Olympia, oil painting by groundbreaking French artist Édouard Manet, created in 1863. The painting aroused shock and controversy when it was first exhibited but came to be considered a masterpiece of modern art.
During the 1860s, Manet was France’s most notorious artist. Two years after the furor that surrounded his Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, he scandalized the public once again by exhibiting the provocative Olympia. In both pictures, Manet was reinventing an Old Master painting, translating it into a modern idiom. In doing so, he was well aware that he was crossing the boundaries of contemporary taste. So, when Olympia was shown at the Salon of 1865, the model was derided as “a female gorilla” and “the Queen of Spades stepping out of the bath.”
The controversy stemmed from 19th-century attitudes to the nude. Here, the problem lay not in the nakedness of the model, but in its context. Manet’s source, for example, was a famous Renaissance painting, the Venus of Urbino (1538) by Titian, which was deemed perfectly respectable. Similarly, many 19th-century artists were able to exhibit highly erotic pictures of Venus or Diana without censure. Provided that the subject was presented as a classical goddess or nymph, however thin the disguise, nudity was not an issue.
Manet’s picture was shocking because the nude was modern. As a result, many critics interpreted her as a prostitute. Worse still, her direct gaze placed the spectator in the role of the prostitute’s client. Manet did nothing to counter this interpretation. The woman is wearing a single slipper, which was a conventional symbol for loss of innocence, while the orchid in her hair was believed to have the qualities of an aphrodisiac.
The Black servant, who stands behind Olympia’s lounge and offers her a bouquet of flowers, may have also played a role in the painting’s poor reception at the Salon. Art historian Denise Murrell argues that the figure creates a confusing composition, which, like Manet’s thick brushstrokes, is a break from academic painting. The figure stands close to the foreground, where she competes for attention, but her dark skin causes her to recede into the background, leaving the viewer unsure where to look. Murrell also observes that Manet depicts the servant as an independent working woman, rejecting the stereotype of Black women in earlier paintings as exotic foreigners. She argues that to the majority-white audience of the Salon, the Black maid represented how, fifteen years after the abolition of enslavement in France, the racial makeup of the Parisian working class was changing, a fact which viewers were likely unwilling to acknowledge.