Olympia #4 is a piece of digital artwork by Edouard Manet which was uploaded on March 29th, 2013.
Olympia #4
Shocking was the word used to describe Edouard Manet's masterpiece when it was first unveiled in Paris in 1865... more
Title
Olympia #4
Artist
Edouard Manet
Medium
Digital Art - Digital Reproduction
Description
"Shocking" was the word used to describe Edouard Manet's masterpiece when it was first unveiled in Paris in 1865
When Edouard Manet's painting Olympia is hung in the Salon of Paris in 1865, it is met with jeers, laughter, criticism, and disdain. It is attacked by the public, the critics, the newspapers. Guards have to be stationed next to it to protect it, until it is moved to a spot high above a doorway, out of reach.
Olympia is a painting of a reclining nude woman, attended by a maid and a black cat, gazing mysteriously at the viewer. Why were visitors to the Paris gallery, already quite familiar with art featuring the naked body, so outraged by the painting that the gallery was forced to hire two policemen to protect the canvas? The objections to Olympia had more to do with the realism of the subject matter than the fact that the model was nude. While Olympia's pose had classic precedents, the subject of the painting represented a prostitute. In the painting, the maid offers the courtesan a bouquet of flowers, presumably a gift from a client, not the sort of scene previously depicted in the art of the era. Viewers weren't sure of Manet's motives. Was he trying to produce a serious work of art? Was Olympia an attempt to parody other paintings? Or, worst of all, was he mocking them?
After Manet's death, the painter Claude Monet organizes a fund to purchase Olympia and offers it to the French state. It now hangs in the Mus�e D'Orsay in Paris, where it is considered a priceless masterpiece of 19th French painting.
Uploaded
March 29th, 2013