What Does She See in Her?
By Madeline Leung Coleman
The first time Jerry Saltz met Olympia in person, it must have been at the Musée d’Orsay. He barely remembers the encounter; as the art critic says, “It’s an easy painting to forget because you go, There it is. There’s the Manet whatever.” It’s hard to really see what you can so easily picture; reproduced ad infinitum, Olympia lives in the mind. There’s the unimpressed white courtesan, naked, wearing accessories and one shoe. There’s her Black maid, in her pale-pink puff sleeve, presenting the bouquet. And, of course, there’s the cat, back up, tail swishing. The bed’s half-tucked in. The pillows, Euro-size. Western art history is lousy with women posed as Venus or splayed out as the Oriental, harem-dwelling odalisque. The standard odalisque is coy, and not because she means to be; she’s soft, willing, unfocused, eyes so limpid they’re rolling back in her head. Olympia’s eyes … are not. “Her look is Fuck you. Come hither. Stay back. Who are you? What are you doing here? And: I want you even though I don’t care about you,” says Jerry. “She utterly dominates us, the image, her time. She is the shit.” In other words, he loves the painting.
He recently wrote about it because, for the first time, it’s coming to the Met as part of a new show pairing Manet’s work with that of his buddy Degas. Olympia’s import from Paris is being hailed as a Major Art Event, which would’ve made Manet laugh (or cry) since this painting in particular was considered a failure when he unveiled it at a salon in 1863. Why? Jerry says it wasn’t just Olympia’s posture, so unashamed that an early viewer called her a “gorilla.” It was also that Manet had rejected the deep perspective that more conventional painters had been laboring after; the image is weirdly flat with Olympia seeming to sit on the same plane as the maid behind her and, somehow, the drapes behind the maid. It was the fact that Manet had left it so brushy, that you could see it had been painted rather than beamed down intact. “Viewers at the time could not see this painting as a nude nor could they see this painting at all,” says Jerry. “They saw a very unfinished mess of no space. Here is the moment that space begins to finally shatter. And then we get to Cézanne and it’s all up for grabs.” ( … )