Courbet himself, seeing the “Olympia” exhibited at the Salon of 1865, exclaimed: “But it’s flat, there’s no modeling here! This is some kind of Queen of Spades from a deck of cards, resting after a bath!

To which Manet - always ready to fight back - replied: “Courbet, in the end, tired of us with his models! To listen to him, the ideal is a billiard ball.”

Gustave Courbet I was not alone in misunderstanding the works Edouard Manet. I wonder how the modern public will receive “Olympia”: will they be just as furiously indignant and point at the painting with umbrellas, which is why the museum staff will have to hang the painting higher so that visitors do not spoil it? Most likely no. Pushkin Museum im. Pushkin presents an exhibition of the legendary “Olympia” surrounded by several more images female beauty. This material proposes to trace the fate of the main work Edouard Manet, who went down in history as “a passionate polemicist against bourgeois vulgarity, bourgeois stupidity, philistine laziness of thought and feeling.”

Edouard Manet is often known to everyone as an impressionist, but he began to paint revolutionary paintings even before the popularization of impressionism in paintings of the 19th century century. The artist not only wanted to tell the truth about his time, but also to change the system of salon art from the inside with the help of plots. By the way, his style differs from other impressionists in that he works with portraits, and not with nature in different time day, in his manner one can trace larger strokes, and the color scheme does not completely get rid of dark tones, as, for example, in Pierre Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet or Edgar Degas.

As mentioned earlier, critics and artists did not favor the artist’s desire to change salon art. Then, in the dominance of mythological stories, Manet dared to paint pictures about the life that surrounds him: he painted his contemporaries, who could be unremarkable and not have a high status in society, but be interesting for sketches and paintings. The most important thing is the truth, for which he was rejected in the salon art. Of course, Mane also had defenders, including Emile Zola And Charles Baudelaire, A Eugene Delacroix supported his paintings for salons. Emile Zola on this occasion he remarked: “Look at the living persons walking around the hall; look at the shadows cast by these bodies on the parquet floor and on the walls! Then look at the pictures Manet, and you will be convinced that they breathe truth and power. Now look at the other paintings smiling stupidly at you from the walls: you can’t recover from laughter, can you?” .

Edouard Manet studied with Couture, salon artist, but realized that the simulated poses of sitters on quasi-historical or mythological subjects are “an idle and useless activity.” He was inspired by several main themes: painting Italian Renaissance (Filippino Lippi, Raphael, Giorgione– “artists of pure and bright harmony”), creativity Velazquez mature period. He was also influenced french painting XVIII century ( Watteau, Chardin). He copied "Venus of Urbino" Titian, which became the starting point for the emergence of Olympia. Edouard Manet wanted to write the Venus of his time, that is, to some extent it was an ironic rethinking of mythology and an attempt to raise modernity to high classical images. But critics did not favor this approach at the Paris Salon of 1865; the name itself referred to the heroine of the novel (1848) and the drama of the same name (1852) Alexandre Dumas son"Lady with Camellias" There Olympia is presented as an antagonist main character, who is also a public woman (her name has become a household name for all the ladies of her profession).

In fact, the artist wrote Quiz Meran, who posed for him in different guises: she was also a girl with “ Railway" and a boy in an espada costume. Returning to Olympia, it must be said that Edouard Manet worked with colors that convey body shades without harsh differences in light and shadow, without modeling, as noted Gustave Courbet. The depicted woman is drying after bathing, which was the first name of the painting, but over time, as we know, another name was assigned to it.

Female images that surround Olympia in the Pushkin Museum. Pushkin is a sculpture (cast) of Aphrodite ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles, "The Lady at the Toilet, or Fornarina" Giulio Romano, "The Queen (King's Wife)" Paul Gauguin, who, as you know, took his reproduction of Olympia on a trip and created enchanting paintings under its influence.

sculpture (cast) of Aphrodite by the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles

Plot

On the canvas we see the bedroom of a young woman. Nude girl reclining. The maid brought her a bouquet from a fan, but the heroine seems to notice that the audience is looking at her, and therefore does not pay attention to the maid, but looks directly.

"Olympia" by Edouard Manet, 1863

The girl's nakedness is covered only by jewelry. There is an orchid hidden in her pulled back hair. On her feet are elegant slippers. At the foot of the bed is a black kitten, whose pose suggests that he, like the owner, noticed the spies.

The model, Quiz Meran, was called a shrimp for her diminutive size.

The plot largely repeats Titian's Venus of Urbino. However, in Titian, the women in the background are busy preparing the dowry, which, together with the sleeping dog at the feet of Venus, should mean home comfort and fidelity. And in Manet, a black maid carries a bouquet of flowers from a fan - flowers are traditionally considered a symbol of a gift, a donation.

"Venus of Urbino", Titian, 1538

Manet was also influenced by the poetry collection of his friend Charles Baudelaire “Flowers of Evil”. The original concept of the painting had to do with the poet’s “catwoman” metaphor, running through a number of his works dedicated to Jeanne Duval.

A representative of Parisian bohemia, model Victorine Meurand, nicknamed Shrimp for her miniature size, served as a model not only for Olympia, but also for many others female images from paintings by Manet. Subsequently, she herself tried to become an artist, but did not succeed. There are also suggestions that the artist used the image of the famous courtesan, the mistress of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Marguerite Bellanger.

Context

Today “Olympia” is considered a masterpiece, and the plot is a textbook for early impressionism. Then, in 1865, at the Paris Salon, ordinary people and art connoisseurs had a completely different opinion.

Newspapers competed in the sophistication of insults. “No one has ever seen anything more cynical than this Olympia,” wrote a contemporary critic. - This is a female gorilla, made of rubber and depicted completely naked, on a bed. Her hand seems to be in an obscene spasm... Seriously speaking, I would advise young women expecting a child, as well as girls, to avoid such impressions.”

Contemporaries considered Manet a painter and a dropout

The frightened administration placed two guards at the painting, but this was not enough. The crowd was not afraid of the military guard. Several times the soldiers had to draw their weapons. The painting attracted hundreds of people who came to the exhibition only to curse the painting and spit on it.

As a result, the painting was moved to the farthest hall of the Salon at such a height that it was almost invisible. The French critic Jules Claretie enthusiastically reported: “The shameless girl who came out from under Manet’s brush was finally assigned a place where even the basest daub had never been before.”

At the first exhibition, Olympia was protected from an angry crowd

Really, you ask, this was the first naked woman on canvas. Of course not. Far from it. But before Manet, nudes were always unearthly: goddesses, heroines of myths and other ladies who never existed were depicted nude. Manet depicted a naked hetera, providing the canvas with a variety of details that leave no doubt that this is not Venus, not Athena, or any other goddess. And the style of the few pieces of jewelry and the style of the girl’s shoes indicate that Olympia lives in modern times, and not in some abstract Attica or Ottoman Empire.

The orchid in Olympia's hair is an aphrodisiac. The neck decoration looks like a ribbon tied on a wrapped gift. A removed shoe is an erotic symbol, a sign of lost innocence. A sagging kitten with its tail raised is a classic attribute in the depiction of witches, a sign of bad omen and erotic excess. Even the dark-skinned maid was a reminder that some expensive prostitutes in 19th-century Paris kept African women whose appearance evoked associations with the exotic pleasures of oriental harems.

The last straw was that the girl from Manet’s canvas has the same name as the heroine of Alexandre Dumas’s novel “The Lady of the Camellias” (1848). For the artist’s contemporaries, this name was associated not with the distant Mount Olympus, but with a prostitute.

Even among his friends, few dared to speak out and publicly defend the great artist. Among these few were the writer Emile Zola and the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the artist Edgar Degas said then: “The fame that Manet won with his Olympia and the courage that he showed can only be compared with the fame and courage of Garibaldi.”

Baudelaire wrote to Manet: “So, again, I consider it necessary to talk to you - about you. It is necessary to show you what you are worth. What you are asking for is simply stupid. They laugh at you, ridicule irritates you, you are treated unfairly, etc., etc. Do you think that you are the first person to find yourself in such a situation? Are you more talented than Chateaubriand or Wagner? But they were bullied no less. But they didn't die from it. And so as not to awaken excessive pride in you, I will say that both of these people - each in their own way - were examples to follow, especially in a fertile era, while you are only the first in the midst of the decline of the art of our time. I hope you will not complain about the unceremoniousness with which I present all this to you. You are well aware of my friendly affection for you.”

The fate of the artist

In 1867, Manet organized his own exhibition and became a central figure of the artistic intelligentsia of Paris. Young artists such as Pissarro, Cezanne, Claude Monet, Renoir, and Degas unite around him. They usually met at the Guerbois café on rue Batignolles, so they were conventionally called the Batignolles school. What they had in common was their reluctance to follow the rules official art and the desire to find new, fresh forms, as well as the search for ways to convey the light environment, the air enveloping objects. They sought to get as close as possible to how a person sees a particular object.

Manet was the first to depict a naked hetaera in a painting

Manet, who was before others French artists got carried away Japanese art, abandoned the careful transfer of volume and the elaboration of color nuances. The lack of expression of volume in Manet’s painting is compensated, as in Japanese prints, by the dominance of line and contour, but to the artist’s contemporaries the painting seemed unfinished, carelessly, even ineptly painted. Therefore, Manet was called a dropout and a painter, and he rarely went to the Salons - the artist had to build separate barracks for his paintings or organize exhibitions in his workshop.

Success finally came in the 1870s, when the famous art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought about 30 of his works.

In 1874, Manet refused to participate in the First Impressionist Exhibition. Why he made this decision is difficult to say. According to one version, the culprit was Paul Cezanne, who put his “Modern Olympia” on display. The picture partly quoted Manet, but the plot was transformed - a client was added. Manet perceived Cézanne’s painting as a lampoon of his “Olympia” and was deeply offended.

"Modern Olympia", Paul Cezanne, 1874

Subsequently, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Henri Fantin-Latour, Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Rene Magritte, Francis Newton Sousa, Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck, Felix Vallotton, Jacques Villon, Erro, wrote their own versions of scenes from the life of Olympia. Larry Rivers. In 2004, a cartoon depicting George W. Bush. in the Olympian pose, was removed from display at the Washington City Museum.

After the Salon, Manet’s “Olympia” spent almost a quarter of a century in the studio. The next time the world saw it was in 1889 at an exhibition on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Great French Revolution. A rich American wanted to buy it for any money. Then Claude Monet launched a campaign to save the painting from emigration: he collected 20,000 francs and bought “Olympia” from the artist’s widow in order to donate it to the state.

Edouard Manet. "Olympia"

For us, “Olympia” is as classic as the paintings of the old masters, so it is not easy for a modern art lover to understand why an unprecedented scandal erupted around this painting, first shown to the public at the Paris Salon exhibition in 1865. It got to the point that Manet’s work had to be assigned armed guards, and then completely hung from the ceiling so that the canes and umbrellas of indignant visitors could not reach the canvas and damage it. Newspapers unanimously accused the artist of immorality, vulgarity and cynicism, but critics especially criticized the painting itself and the young woman depicted in it: “This brunette is disgustingly ugly, her face is stupid, her skin is like that of a corpse,” “This is a female gorilla, made of rubber and depicted completely naked...; I advise young women expecting a child, as well as girls, to avoid such impressions.” “The Batignolles Washerwoman” (Manet’s workshop was located in the Batignolles quarter), “Venus with a Cat”, “... a sign for a booth in which a bearded woman is shown”, “... a yellow-bellied odalisque”... While some critics were sophisticated in their wit, others wrote that “ art that has fallen so low is not even worthy of condemnation.”

Edouard Manet. "Olympia"

No attacks on the Impressionists (with whom Manet was friendly, but did not identify himself) are comparable to those that befell the author of Olympia. There is nothing strange in this: the impressionists, in search of new subjects and new expressiveness, moved away from the classical canons, Manet crossed another line - he conducted a lively, uninhibited dialogue with the classics.

The scandal surrounding Olympia was not the first in Manet’s biography. In the same year of 1863 as “Olympia,” the artist painted another significant painting, “Breakfast on the Grass.” Inspired by the painting from the Louvre, Giorgione’s “Rural Concert” (1510), Manet reinterpreted its plot in his own way. Like a Renaissance master, he presented naked ladies and clothed men in the lap of nature. But if Giorgione's musicians are dressed in Renaissance costumes, Manet's heroes are dressed in the latest Parisian fashion. Manet borrowed the location and poses of the characters from the engraving of the 16th century artist Marcantonio Raimondi “The Judgment of Paris”, made from a drawing by Raphael. Manet's painting (originally called "Bathing") was exhibited in the famous "Salon of the Rejected" in 1863, where works rejected by the official jury were shown, and extremely shocked the public.

It was customary to depict naked women only in paintings with mythological and historical subjects, so Manet’s canvas, in which the action was transferred to modern times, was considered almost pornographic. It is not surprising that after this the artist had a hard time deciding to exhibit “Olympia” at the next Salon in 1865: after all, in this painting he “encroached” on another masterpiece classical art- painting “Venus of Urbino” (1538), painted by Titian. In his youth, Manet, like other artists of his circle, copied a lot of classical paintings from the Louvre, including (1856) a painting by Titian. Subsequently working on Olympia, with amazing freedom and courage he gave a new meaning to a composition that was well known to him.

From Venus to Olympia

Let's compare the pictures. Titian's painting, which was supposed to decorate a large chest for a wedding trousseau, celebrates the joys and virtues of marriage. In both paintings, a naked woman lies with her right hand resting on pillows and her left hand covering her womb. Venus coquettishly tilted her head to the side, Olympia looks directly at the viewer, and this gaze reminds us of another painting - “The Nude Swing” by Francisco Goya (1800). The background of both paintings is divided into two parts by a strict vertical descending to the woman’s womb. On the left are dense dark draperies, on the right are bright spots: Titian has two maids busy with a chest of clothes, Manet has a black maid with a bouquet. This luxurious bouquet (most likely from a fan) replaced roses (the symbol of the goddess of love) in Manet's painting. right hand Titian's Venus.

Titian. "Venus of Urbino"

A white dog is curled up at Venus’s feet, a symbol of marital fidelity and family comfort; on Olympia’s bed, a black cat flickers with green eyes, “coming” into the picture from the poems of Charles Baudelaire, Manet’s friend.

Manet borrowed pearl earrings in his ears and a massive bracelet on Olympia’s right hand from a painting by Titian, and he added several important details. Olympia lies on an elegant shawl with tassels, on her feet are golden pantolets, in her hair is an exotic flower, on her neck is a velvet with a large pearl, which only emphasizes the defiant nudity of the woman. Spectators in the sixties of the 19th century unmistakably determined from these attributes that Olympia was their contemporary, that the beauty who took the pose of the Venus of Urbino was nothing more than a successful Parisian courtesan.

The title of the painting aggravated its “indecency.” Let us recall that one of the heroines of the popular novel (1848) and drama of the same name (1852) by Alexandre Dumas the Younger “The Lady of the Camellias” was called Olympia. In Paris in the mid-19th century, this name was for some time a common noun for “ladies of the demimonde.” It is not known exactly to what extent the title of the painting was inspired by the works of Dumas, but the name stuck.

"Queen of spades from a deck of cards"

Manet “offended” not only the morality, but also the aesthetic sense of the Parisians.

To today’s viewer, the slender, “stylish” Olympia (Manet’s favorite model, Quiz Meran, posed for the picture) seems no less attractive than Titian’s feminine Venus with her rounded forms. But Manet’s contemporaries saw Olympia as an overly thin, even angular person with non-aristocratic features. In our opinion, her body against the background of blue and white pillows radiates living warmth, but if we compare Olympia with the unnaturally pink languid Venus, painted by the successful academician Alexandre Cabanel in the same 1863, we will better understand the public’s reproaches: Olympia’s natural skin color seems yellow and the body flat.

Manet, who became interested in Japanese art earlier than other French artists, abandoned the careful rendering of volume and the elaboration of color nuances. The lack of expression of volume in Manet’s painting is compensated, as in Japanese prints, by the dominance of line and contour, but to the artist’s contemporaries the painting seemed unfinished, carelessly, even ineptly painted. A couple of years after the Olympia scandal, Parisians, who became acquainted with Japanese art at the World Exhibition (1867), were captivated and fascinated by it, but in 1865 many, including the artist’s colleagues, did not accept Manet’s innovations. Thus, Gustave Courbet compared Olympia to “the queen of spades from a deck of cards that has just come out of the bath.” “The tone of the body is dirty, and there is no modeling,” echoed the poet Théophile Gautier.

Manet solves the most complex coloristic problems in this picture. One of them is the rendering of shades of black, which Manet, unlike the Impressionists, often and willingly used, following the example of his favorite artist, Diego Velazquez. A bouquet in the hands of a black woman, disintegrating into separate strokes, gave art critics reason to say that Manet made a “revolution of the colorful spot,” established the value of painting as such, regardless of the subject, and thereby opened new way artists of subsequent decades.

“See the eternal in the ordinary”

Giorgione, Titian, Raphael, Goya, Velazquez, aesthetics Japanese prints and... the Parisians of 1860. In his works, Manet strictly followed the principle that he himself formulated: “Our duty is to extract from our era everything that it can offer us, without forgetting what was discovered and found before us.” This vision of modernity through the prism of the past was inspired by Charles Baudelaire, who was not only famous poet, but also an influential art critic. A true master, according to Baudelaire, must “feel the poetic and historical meaning of modernity and be able to see the eternal in the ordinary.”

Manet did not want to belittle the classics or mock them, but to raise modernity and contemporaries to high standards, to show that Parisian dandies and their friends are the same ingenuous children of nature as Giorgione’s characters, and the Parisian priestess of love, proud of her beauty and power over hearts, as beautiful as the Venus of Urbino. “We are not used to seeing such a simple and sincere interpretation of reality,” wrote Emile Zola, one of the few defenders of the author of Olympia.

In the seventies, long-awaited success came to Manet: the famous art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought about thirty works by the artist. But Manet considered Olympia his best painting and did not want to sell it. After Manet's death in 1883, the painting was put up for auction, but there was no buyer for it. In 1889, she was included in the exhibition “One Hundred Years French art", organized at the World Exhibition to commemorate the centenary of the Great french revolution. The image of the Parisian Venus won the heart of a certain American philanthropist, and he wanted to buy the painting. But the artist’s friends could not allow Manet’s masterpiece to leave France. On the initiative of Claude Monet, they collected 20 thousand francs by public subscription, bought “Olympia” from the artist’s widow and donated it to the state. The painting was included in the painting collection of the Luxembourg Palace, and in 1907, through the efforts of the then Chairman of the Council of Ministers of France, Georges Clemenceau, was transferred to the Louvre. For forty years, Olympia lived under the same roof with its prototype, the Venus of Urbino. In 1947, the painting moved to the Museum of Impressionism, and in 1986 it became the pride and decoration of the new Orsay Museum in Paris.

1863 Oil on canvas. 130.5x190 cm.
Orsay Museum. Paris.

As soon as Olympia has time to wake up from sleep,
A black messenger with an armful of spring before her;
That is the messenger of a slave who cannot be forgotten,
The night of love turns into flowering days.

Zachary Astruc

For us, “Olympia” is as classic as the paintings of the old masters, so it is not easy for a modern art lover to understand why a scandal erupted around this painting, first shown to the public at the exhibition of the Paris Salon of 1865, the likes of which Paris had never seen. It got to the point that they had to assign armed guards to Manet’s work, and then completely hang it from the ceiling so that the canes and umbrellas of indignant visitors could not reach the canvas and damage it.

Newspapers unanimously accused the artist of immorality, vulgarity and cynicism, but critics especially criticized the painting itself and the young woman depicted in it: “This brunette is disgustingly ugly, her face is stupid, her skin is like a corpse,” “This is a female gorilla made by made of rubber and depicted completely naked, /…/, I advise young women expecting a child, as well as girls, to avoid such impressions.” “The Batignolles Washerwoman” (Manet’s workshop was located in the Batignolles quarter), “Venus with a Cat”, “a sign for a booth in which a bearded woman is shown”,"yellow-bellied odalisque"... While some critics were sophisticated in their wit, others wrote that“art that has fallen so low is not even worthy of condemnation.”

Edouard Manet. Breakfast on the grass. 1863

No attacks on the Impressionists (with whom Manet was friendly, but did not identify himself) are comparable to those that befell the author of Olympia. There is nothing strange in this: the impressionists, in search of new subjects and new expressiveness, moved away from the classical canons, Manet crossed another line - he conducted a lively, uninhibited dialogue with the classics.

The scandal surrounding Olympia was not the first in Manet’s biography. In the same year, 1863, as “Olympia,” the artist painted another significant painting, “Breakfast on the Grass.” Inspired by the painting from the Louvre, Giorgione’s “Rural Concert” (1510), Manet reinterpreted its plot in his own way. Like a Renaissance master, he presented naked ladies and dressedmen. But if Giorgione's musicians are dressed in Renaissance costumes, Manet's heroes are dressed in the latest Parisian fashion.

Giorgione. Country concert. 1510

The location and poses of the characters Mane borrowed from the engraving artist XVI century Marcantonio Raimondi "The Judgment of Paris", made from a drawing by Raphael. Manet's painting (originally called "Bathing") was exhibited in the famous "Salon of the Rejected" in 1863, where works rejected by the official jury were shown, and extremely shocked the public.

It was customary to depict naked women only in paintings with mythological and historical subjects, so Manet’s canvas, in which the action was transferred to modern times, was considered almost non-pornographic. It is not surprising that after this the artist had difficulty deciding to exhibit “Olympia” at the next Salon in 1865: after all, in this painting he “encroached” on another masterpiece of classical art - the painting from the Louvre “Venus of Urbino” (1538), painted by Titian. During his youth, Manet, like other artists of his circle, copied a lot of classical paintings from the Louvre, including (1856) a painting by Titian. Subsequently working on Olympia, he gave a new meaning to a composition that was well known to him with amazing freedom and courage.

Marcantonio Raimondi.
Judgment of Paris. First quarter 16th century

Let's compare the pictures. Titian's painting, which was supposed to decorate a large chest for a wedding trousseau, glorifies the joys and virtues of marriage. In both paintings, a naked woman lies with her right hand resting on pillows and her left hand covering her womb.

Venus coquettishly tilted her head to the side, Olympia looks directly at the viewer, and this gaze reminds us of another painting, “The Nude Swing” by Francisco Goya (1800). The background of both paintings is divided into two parts by a strict vertical line descending towards the woman’s womb.

Titian. Venus of Urbino. 1538

On the left are dense dark draperies, on the right are bright spots: Titian has two maids busy with a chest of clothes, Manet has a black maid holding a bouquet. This luxurious bouquet (most likely from a devotee) replaced the roses (symbol of the goddess of love) in the right hand of Titian’s Venus in Manet’s painting. A white dog is curled up at Venus’s feet, a symbol of marital fidelity and family comfort; on Olympia’s bed, a black cat flickers with green eyes, “coming” into the picture from the poems of Charles Baudelaire, Manet’s friend. Baudelaire saw in the cat a mysterious creature that takes on the traits of its owner or mistress, and wrote philosophical poems about cats and cats:

"House spirit or deity,
This prophetic idol judges everyone,
And it seems that our things -
The farm is his personal.”

Pearl earrings in the ears andmassive bracelet on Olympia's right handManet borrowed from Titian's painting, but he added several important details to his canvas. Olympia lies on an elegant shawl with tassels, on her feet are golden pantolets, in her hair is an exotic flower, on her neck is a velvet like a large pearl, which only emphasizes the defiant nudity of the woman. Viewers of the 1860s unmistakably determined from these attributes that Olympia was their contemporary, that the beauty who took the pose of the Venus of Urbino was nothing more than a successful Parisian courtesan.

Francisco Goya. Nude Maha. OK. 1800

The title of the painting aggravated its “indecency.” Let us recall that one of the heroines of the popular novel (1848) and drama of the same name (1852) by Alexandre Dumas the Younger “Lady of the Camellias” was called Olympia. In Paris in the mid-19th century, this name was for some time a common noun for “ladies of the demimonde.” It is not known exactly to what extent the name of the painting was inspired by the works of Dumas and who - the artist himself or one of his friends - had the idea to rename "Venus" to "Olympia", but this name stuck. A year after the creation of the painting, the poet Zachary Astruc sang Olympia in his poem “Daughter of the Island,” lines from which, which became the epigraph to this article, were placed in the catalog of the memorable exhibition.

Manet “offended” not only the morality, but also the aesthetic sense of the Parisians.To today’s viewer, the slender, “stylish” Olympia (Manet’s favorite model, Quiz Meran, posed for the picture) seems no less attractive than Titian’s feminine Venus with her rounded forms. But Manet’s contemporaries saw Olympia as an overly thin, even angular person with non-aristocratic features. In our opinion, her body against the background of blue and white pillows radiates living warmth, but if we compare Olympia with the unnaturally pink languid Venus, painted by the successful academician Alexandre Cabanel in the same 1863, we will better understand the public’s reproaches: Olympia’s natural skin color seems yellow and the body flat.

Alexander Cabanel. Birth of Venus. 1865

Manet, who became interested in Japanese art earlier than other French artists, refused to carefully convey volume and work out color nuances. The lack of expression of volume in Manet’s painting is compensated, as in Japanese prints, by the dominance of line and contour, but to the artist’s contemporaries the painting seemed unfinished, carelessly, even ineptly painted. Just a couple of years after the Olympia scandal, Parisians, who became acquainted with Japanese art at the World Exhibition (1867), were captivated and fascinated by it, but in 1865 many, including the artist’s colleagues, did not accept Manet’s innovations. So Gustave Courbet compared Olympia to “the queen of spades from a deck of cards that has just come out of the bath.” “The tone of the body is dirty, and there is no modeling,” echoed the poet Théophile Gautier.

Manet solves the most complex coloristic problems in this picture. One of them is the rendering of shades of black, which Manet, unlike the Impressionists, often and willingly used, following the example of his favorite artist, Diego Velazquez. The bouquet in the hands of a black woman, disintegrating into individual strokes, gave art critics reason to say that Manet made a “revolution of the colorful spot,” established the value of painting as such, regardless of the subject, and thus opened a new path for artists of subsequent decades.

Edouard Manet. Portrait of Emile Zola. 1868
In the upper right corner there is a reproduction of “Olympia” and a Japanese engraving.

Giorgione, Titian, Raphael, Goya, Velazquez, the aesthetics of Japanese engraving and... Parisians of the 1860s. In his works, Manet strictly followed the principle that he himself formulated: “Our duty is to extract from our era everything that it can offer us, without forgetting what was discovered and found before us.” This vision of modernity through the prism of the past was inspired by Charles Baudelaire, who wasnot only a famous poet, but also an influential art critic. A true master, according to Baudelaire, must “feel the poetic and historical meaning of modernity and be able to see the eternal in the ordinary.”

Manet did not want to belittle the classics or mock them, but to raise modernity and contemporaries to high standards, to show that the Parisian dandies and their friends are the same ingenuous children of nature as Giorgione’s characters, and the Parisian priestess of love, proud of her beauty and power over hearts, as beautiful as the Venus of Urbino.« We are not used to seeing such a simple and sincere interpretation of reality,” wrote Emile Zola, one of the few defenders of the author of Olympia.

"Olympia" in the Orsay Museum.

In the 1870s, Manet achieved long-awaited success: the famous art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought about thirty works by the artist. But Manet considered Olympia his best painting and did not want to sell. After Manet's death (1883), the painting was put up for auction, but there was no buyer for it. In 1889, the painting was included in the exhibition"One Hundred Years of French Art", y built at the Universal Exhibition to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution. The image of the Parisian Venus won the heart of a certain American philanthropist, and he wanted to buy the painting. But the artist’s friends could not allow Manet’s masterpiece to leave France. On the initiative of Claude Monet, they collected 20 thousand francs by public subscription, bought “Olympia” from the artist’s widow and donated it to the state. The painting was included in the painting collection of the Luxembourg Palace, and in 1907, through the efforts of the then Chairman of the Council of Ministers of France, Georges Clemenceau, it was moved to the Louvre.

For forty years, Olympia lived under the same roof with its prototype, the Venus of Urbino. In 1947, the painting moved to the Museum of Impressionism, and in 1986, Olympia, whose fate began so unhappily, became the pride and decoration of the new Parisian Orsay Museum.

The story of one painting.

Olympia. Edouard Manet.

In life, unfortunately, many things have to be put off until later for one reason or another. And now it has arrived - that long-awaited, happy moment when the time is ripe for one of the most beautiful things. Delightful works of art that have excited and excited the imagination of many, many generations will reside on these pages. And next to them will settle a piece of the time of their birth that is gone forever in the flow of existence. But life goes on continuously, and our time gives us such an invaluable gift as an understanding of permanence and continuity, fullness and depth, unevenness and heterogeneity, multidimensionality and fractality, string and spirality of space-time... And a feeling of presence, somehow inexplicable by turning the spiral, in this very time, next to it, in it... Our time has accelerated, compressed, and become denser. And in order to penetrate deeper into the essence of what is happening in life, understand its laws and become the owner of an effective, bright and successful project“My Life”, you need to know the laws - the laws of manifesting, incarnating time, you need to learn how to do this. Learn to understand life. And use the most effective method- by immersion method. Why are these particular works of art so significant that there is still interest in them? What is connected with the most famous works art, what is the point? This series of posts will take us on the path to understanding the mysteries of life through painting.

An iridescent deep vibrant background, bright shining chiaroscuro of folds of fabric, an expressive, thoughtful look of a naked young girl... A masterpiece of impressionism - Olympia by Edouard Manet - is in front of you!