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Manet’s Unique Vision

In the nineteenth century, figures in art were not expected to directly address the viewer. Manet inverted this convention, establishing eye contact between the subject of the painting and the beholder. Visitors to an exhibition were no longer comfortable in an elevated and secure position in front of a painting. Manet’s paintings teased them. In ‘Olympia’, the female figure’s brazen stare challenges the viewer: they find themselves locked in the gaze of a prostitute.

Olympia, the naked courtesan lying on her canopy, glares fiercely, yet melancholically, out of the painting. She knows that she has to be passive and available, and consciously affects this. When the work was first exhibited in 1865, French audiences were shocked. They felt offended and attacked, calling Olympia ‘vulgar’, ‘a female gorilla’. The painting was even banished to a barely visible place in a corner of the exhibition.

Prostitution was omnipresent but clandestine in nineteenth-century Paris, occupying the so-called chambres séparées: private side-rooms in varietés and café-concerts. And although the activities happening behind closed doors were generally known, nobodywanted them to be put on display – least of all in an oil painting. Manet, however, intended to reveal rather than conceal through his art, and he did so in an eclectic manner: blending influences of pornographic photography with conventions traditional to the medium of painting. He even dared to incorporate compositional allusions to the Old Master Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which would have been obvious to art connoisseurs. Basing the portrait of a courtesan on that of goddess was considered a scandalous affront.

Contemporary critics claimed that Manet’s paintings would ‘knock a hole into the wall’. The paintings not only created a space in convention through which modernism would rush, but also smashed through the fourth wall. The beckoning gaze of the woman in the picture forced the beholder into a direct dialogue. The spectator was no longer allowed the indulgence of being a voyeur; for when one views a Manet, seeing is intrinsically linked with being seen: Olympia looks back at you. The French expression çela me regarde alludes to this thought, meaning both ‘it looks at me’ as well as ‘it concerns me’.

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