السبت، 17 ديسمبر 2016

Reasons Why The Oil Painting Olympia By Manet Is Revolutionary

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.

Venus was a favorite subject especially when portraying nudes. Another notable thing with traditional art is how they are so incredibly life like. Pieces made during this time barely showed brush strokes even when painting using oil, which is a very thick medium. Manet was that one artist that defied all things traditional 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.

Instead of Venus, her being a symbol of greatness and purity, he used Olympia. The setting was in France 1865. Around the time, the name Olympia was common among prostitutes and to support that claim, you can see a black choker around her neck which was a sign that would tell people what a woman did for a living.

Now you may think this chick was your run off the mill girl, but as you can see she had a servant. This entails that the subject was of a higher position in the job that she holds. The servant also holds a bouquet which seemingly comes from a patron. What shocked people during the era when this work was released was how vulgar the piece was.

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.

The piece is a cross between abstraction and tradition which encouraged modern art. There was lesser pressure to perfection. This is evident on the asymmetry of features you can see on the subject. The detail is essentially on the hands and the feet which seems peculiar, instead of focusing on the bosom and the womb.

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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