The 19th Century’s Most Scandalous Painting Comes to New York
“Olympia,” the brothel scene that birthed modern art, crosses the Atlantic for the first time in the Met exhibition “Manet Degas.”
By Jason Farago
Sept. 9, 2023
“A colossal ineptitude,” one enraged critic called it. “Her face is stupid,” another wrote. The papers declared it “shapeless,” “putrefied,” “incomprehensible.” They said it “recalls the horror of the morgue.”
And when the Parisian crowds rolled into the Salon of 1865, they too went berserk in front of Édouard Manet’s painting of a courtesan, her maid and her high-strung black cat. Spectators were sobbing, shouting, getting into scuffles; the Salon had to hire armed guards. The picture was so stark that visitors kept trying to puncture the canvas with their umbrellas. “Never,” reported one of Paris’s better literary reviews, “has a painting excited so much laughter, mockery, and catcalls as this ‘Olympia.’”
“Olympia” now belongs to the Musée d’Orsay, where she still faces down crowds — calmer ones, though just as thronging — with her indelible blank stare. (The painting has often been called “she,” as if “Olympia” only pictured one person; we’ll get to the pronoun
problem in a minute.) Manet’s bored prostitute in her unmade bed, stripped of all the Venusian grandeur in which male artists once dressed the female nude, has become the very image of modernity, even if her fame still trails that Italian woman across the river at the Louvre.
She’s left the capital only three times in her life. In 2013, for her 150th birthday, “Olympia” went to Venice and got to hang next to Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” one of Manet’s main inspirations. In 2016, the picture was shipped off to Moscow and St. Petersburg as part of an inglorious Franco-Russian diplomacy effort. (“We’re less proud of that one now,” said Christophe Leribault, the Orsay’s director.)
And on Sept. 24, “Olympia” arrives in New York, as the focal point of “Manet/Degas,” the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s momentous fall exhibition of two city boys and the modern capital they painted. ( … )