Thursday, 15 December 2016

Why The Oil Painting Olympia Is One Remarkable Piece

By Timothy Moore


Art remains to be great way for humankind to record events and give different generations and civilizations a picture of what their culture and era was like. Visual representation has been a method that humans have been using throughout millennia. A notable thing is the different techniques that they use despite current technology.

Nudes with both men and women are a favorite subject with themes revolving around religion. A goddess in particular that has graced so many notable works is Venus. Traditional Renaissance works make a point that brush strokes are not evident and the anatomical representation as accurate as possible. These conventions were challenged by Manet with his oil painting Olympia.

The thing with late Renaissance art was that it was very heavily rooted to technique and how well it was able to portray anatomy and physics of the objects in the painting. This piece by Manet was essentially a parody of Venus of Urbino, notable for its subject, the goddess Venus laying on a chair like bed in the nude. Nudes then were not at all seen as lewd, but this artwork by Manet was an exception.

The woman on the canvas was not Venus, but a parodied symbolism named Olympia. Based on what she was wearing, slippers and a black choker, this tells you that she is a courtesan. The most ironic thing you can use to portray a goddess would be a prostitute. Maybe even then people thought the concept was offensive and sacrilegious.

The shock value was immense initially. Now, we see it as the start of the modern art movement. Technically, the artist intended to make the brush strokes evident as opposed to what most critics were used to. He probably did not want to sedate the public with the beauty of his work, but rather, snap them back to the reality of what already surrounds then.

The question now remains to be the difference between traditional nudes of Venus versus what Manet made. The goddess was always painted with divine perfection barely showing any flaw and you never really see any of them looking directly at you. Now, with Manet and his prostitute, the discomfort comes from the naked woman looking directly at the viewer.

The rawness and honesty was not welcomed by the its viewers, although its revolutionary nature made the piece an obra maestra. The painter wanted to make sure that there is little visual depth to really emphasize to its viewers that this was artwork and not something you use to blur the lines between what is real and imagination.

Essentially art was always made to rattle the comforts of its viewers and comfort those that live within the insanity of their reality. This work in particular is a great first step towards more modern styles and a come back towards abstract art. You could not call it purely traditional since the subject and its background do not have the shadowing that was common to works that were made during the era.

Olympia was met with mockery but anything that significantly shook the world is always met with the same manner. To this day the piece is an icon and is a reminder to all artists that use any medium that one can send a powerful message with only relaying an idea or an interpretation of an already existing one. In this case, art was able to achieve the first movements or artistic revolution against how convoluted aesthetic was during the late renaissance.




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