Olympia (1865) is an oil painting by Édouard Manet.  It depicts a courtesan, with her servant and cat, as she waits for a client.  After he was challenged to display a nude painting at the Annual Salon, Manet created Olympia.  The painting features a young woman who many people in Paris knew, and the style was as realistic as a photograph.  Because it was not a traditional nude, that is, not a figure from mythology and not a stylized image, the critics and the public were scandalized.  Victorine Meurent, a well-known model and painter, appeared as Olympia.  Olympia hangs now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) was a French painter.  A pioneer in modernism, he made art based on contemporary life, and he used a natural style that inspired the later Impressionist painters.  His Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass), showing a picnic with unclothed women and clothed men, also sparked an uproar.  His Un bar aux Folies Bergère (A Bar at the Folies Bergère) possibly portrayed another sex worker.  Lacking nudity, it was less sensational.  Though Manet was greatly controversial at the start of his career, in time, he was lionized.

Olympia was a breakthrough piece of sexual art.  This true-to-life portrait of a woman opened the way for artists to use the life around them to create erotic paintings.

S. Gray

January 2025