Silent Witness

Looking again at Manet's Olympia.

- JERRY SALTZ

IT IS A CLICHÉ: the work of art that scandalizes audiences upon its debut, only to get its due once the shock of the new fades away. Édouard Manet's 1863 masterpiece Olympia, the star of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's gigantic new show "Manet/Degas," in some respects fits this description. It was attacked when it was first exhibited at a salon in Paris in 1865, described as "ugly and repulsive" and "rancid." Its subject, a nude courtesan who looks right at the viewer while a Black maid looks at her, was called a "female gorilla." The painting was rehung near the ceiling to hide it from appalled critics, and it never sold during Manet's lifetime. However, the difference between Olympia and other great works of art that initially faced comparable revulsion is that Olympia shocks still.

Manet was only 33 when Olympia received its rude welcome, but he had already established himself as a rule-breaker and a provocateur with the exhibition two years earlier of The Luncheon on the Grass, which featured two rakish men in modern dress and two women, one of them nude, in an Edenic landscape. Olympia was similarly perverse. While audiences were likely used to paintings of nudes-the courtesan's languid pose appears to be based on Titian's Venus of Urbino, which was painted in the 1530s it was another thing to suggest that this slender jezebel was a Venus herself. Manet's painting was seen as an offense, an affront, a joke. (Manet wrote to Baudelaire looking for comfort. The poet told him to take it on the chin: "Do you think you are the first man put in this predicament?") Viewers had come expecting handsome renderings of light and shadow done with little to no brushwork showing.