As you’re looking at the painting, the woman in the frame is returning your gaze, staring right back at you. Not even slightly sideways – her eyelids aren’t half-closed in a languid gaze; it’s a straightforward look, and even though you have seen – and will see – many more paintings during that day, it will stick with you for the rest of your visit to the Musée d’Orsay. You’ve just met Olympia, painted by impressionist painter Edouard Manet in 1863.
When you look at a painting what do you see?
Let’s consider this question as mainly analytical.
When you look at a painting, what do you think?
This one becomes political.
The gaze, le regard
No representation is objective and neutral
Just as words have a transformative power (a naked woman and a nude are two different things), so does the act of looking, and the act of depicting.
So how does your role as a viewer transform an artistic experience? Are you feeling what the painter was expecting you to? Were you meant to be shocked? Impressed? Moved? Or are you resisting some intention the painter might have had when he painted on the canvas?
In the 1970s, art critic John Berger took an interest in the term “gaze” in the context of artistic performance. No representation, he argued, is ever purely objective and neutral.
Before him, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had been the first to coin the notion of ‘gaze’, le regard, understood as a transformative experience; when a viewer gazes upon someone, the ‘viewed’ goes from subject to object, thus creating a power imbalance.
“Behind every glance, there’s a judgement” John Berger says in his documentary BBC series entitled Ways of Seeing (1972).
From early representations of the Genesis to the impressionist movement, from European oil painting to advertisement, he decided to dig deep into a fascinating issue: how do male artists choose to represent women? More importantly, how do their views of (and on) women, anchored in a precise point in history and society, influence their art?
A couple of years later, his intuition and questioning were used by feminist critical thinker Laura Mulvey, who applied it to cinema as an art form.
The male gaze was born. In feminist theory, the expression described “the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.”
What does this all mean? As I wander through Orsay, a museum that was once a government building, then a railway station, before being burnt almost to the ground, to finally become the temple of an iconic artistic movement known as “Impressionism”, I kept questionning what I see.
why impressionism emerged?
Impressionism emerged in the 1860s partly as a reaction to academism; its most famous representatives are painters Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Paul Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley, amongst many.
Heavily criticized at first, their works were repeatedly rejected by the formalists of the Academy, which exhibited painters in an annual Salon. Thus, some of those experimental painters started a “Salon des refusés” (a rejected’s Salon) in 1863, where paintings that differed from academic norms and standards would have their chance to be exhibited.
From their status of outcasts and the first (unofficial) Impressionist Salon which took place exactly 50 years ago in 1974, Impressionists have made their way to fame and recognition, and found a magnificent home at The Musée d’Orsay.
But what is this impression at the heart of it all? What did this new artistic movement, bravely stepping aside from academism, try to convey at the time?
The motif is something secondary, what I wish to reproduce is what’s happening between the motif and I.
Claude Monet
the predominance of subjectivity
An impressionist icon, Monet can perhaps help us better understand what linked all those painters together: the predominance of subjectivity, with the use of bold techniques, colors, or choice of subjects.
Although he never officially attended their Salon, Édouard Manet was one of the major figures of Impressionism, and an interesting transition figure from earlier Realism.
In 1863, Manet caused an uproar with a striking depiction of female nudity in his now world-famous Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass). In the painting, a naked woman is having a picnic with fully-dressed men. The seemingly casualness of the scene is balanced by the contrast between her pale naked skin and the men’s dark attire.
Rejected by the 1863 Salon’s jury, the painting was shunned before being making its way into the "Salon des refusés".
Art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton, upon seeing the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, concluded: “the nude, when painted by vulgar men, is inevitably indecent."
Source : The Fine Art Quarterly Review, Chapman & Hall, 1863.
This harsh comment (understandably influenced by 19th century morals) touches on an important issue: does the hand that holds the brush matter? And does the context in which nudity is shown affect the viewer? Or to be more precise, when does nudity, albeit a constant in painting since it ever existed, become sexually connoted?
Picture of Pastoral Concert by Titian - the inspiration for Manet's Luncheon on the grass composition.
Let’s come back to the naked woman mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
Back to Manet's Olympia
Painted by Edouard Manet in 1963 and exhibited in the 1965 Salon, Olympia caused a scandal. The painting, as some put it, supposedly depicted "venal love", one woman straightforwardly selling her body for money. The painting, like many others of the period, alludes to the widespread prostitution occurring in Paris in the 19th century (a practice that was almost state-regulated at the time).
Victorine Meurent was the model, who later became a painter too (albeit not a very famous one). She posed for Manet for many other paintings and for other painters.
How is she depicted – other than her obvious nakedness – and why does it matter?
Picture: Manet -The Railway - 1873 | Model : Victorine Meurent | Orsay Exhibit Inventing Impressioninsm.
"a female monkey"
Her pose seems nonchalant, her gaze neutral. But when you look closely, the detail of her unshaved armpit, quite shocking in a painting at the time, seems to reveal what her left hand is hiding in a rather suggestive play, which becomes ultimately quite explicit.
This unusual hairiness earned Victorine the name guenon - “a female monkey” in the circle of art critics.
The Black Cat
And what about the presence of the cat, which, in a rather crude way, could well allude to the female sex?
Indeed, only the cat seems to respond to our voyeuristic presence, with its tail erect, its hair bristling. One can’t ignore another possible reference to witches (a black cat, a red-haired model, associated with the image of an evil woman).
Modern nudes Vs Academy nudes
Olympia wasn’t the first female nude to be painted. Why was it considered so shocking? Mainly because it was a "modern" nude, in which the body was itself the subject of a portrait.
Partly also because, until the end of the 19th century and the arrival of the Romantic movement in painting (Delacroix, Courbet), women were excluded from nude representations. Then, the female nude supplemented the male nude, traditionally represented as the ideal of beauty.
In the end, it wasn’t so much the model's nudity that was shocking, it's the fact that she had been undressed.
Their nudity is a form of dress.
In the paintings John Berger examined for his study on the concept of gaze, nudity is often seen as a disguise imposed on women.
“Their nudity”, he argues “is a form of dress.”
Interestingly, nudity thus becomes a uniform, a costume that categorizes you – one, as opposed to all others, you can’t take off.
Then there's the fact that Olympia is so young - the model was barely 18. This depiction of child-woman we know to be a prostitute is indeed disturbing.
What about that oher woman?
Let’s now take a look at the servant: she’s the second woman in the picture, but she is fully clothed, in a striking play of contrasting colors. Her black skin is clothed in white, while Olympia's white skin is simply contrasted, "dressed", with a thin black ribbon around her neck. The servant’s model's name is Laure.
Interestingly, she was herself the subject of a study and rehabilitation by an African-American curator, Denise Murrell, who sought to understand who she was beyond her mere role as a servant, herself gazing at Olympia.
One could argue this is another manifestation of the male gaze and its sexualization or lack thereof; she’s not meant to be offered to the viewer as an object of desire, and therefore is almost exaggeratingly covered with clothes.
Titian - Danae
From a formal point of view, the painting also caused a scandal by borrowing from and transgressing various referencese. Titian's Danae (see Capodimonte in the Louvre Exhibit) and his Venus of Urbino (Uffizi Collection) were considered as an artistic blasphemy.
The Danae used to be covered behind curtains.
Titian - Venus of Urbino
With its almost raw, unmixed flat tones of color, it denoted an assertive anti-academism. The paint, which we can almost see, no longer blended into the image, but was reaffirmed in its materiality. White and black colors were brutally juxtaposed, without ever mixing.
The nudity
Here, Olympia becomes the epitome of a woman being available.
She’s doubly exposed; as a prostitute- see her pearl black ruban necklace, the roses from the client, her shoes- and thus perhaps shamed.
“women are there to feed an appetite, not to have one of their own” as John Berger argues, but she’s also exposed to the viewer’s gaze.
In Olympia’s unabashed gaze, thrown back at whoever’s looking, some viewers might choose to see self-determination, some might experience of form of intimacy with the subject painted, others might be simply shocked and perhaps wish to look away.
This is one of the differences, and what makes Olympia interesting, with numerous paintings where the naked woman represented does not look back, and is purely there to be seen, not to see.
Perhaps with her tranquil, undisturbed look, young Olympia may appear less uncomfortable, laying here naked, than the viewer.
A word of conclusion
Questions and answers with Flore
In your viewer’s experience...
are you following, encouraging, perhaps even contradicting the male gaze?
And if you’re a woman seeing this painting of Olympia, how does it affect you in particular?
Send your thoughts to Flore Gurrey
You can interact with the author by email here and send her your thoughts about the topic of Male Gaze, Women in Orsay, directly here. Better yet, you can book a private tour in Orsay with one of Flore's guides.
Private tour in Orsay Museum - 2 hours
Male gaze tour
All these questions arise, more or less consciously, every time we look at a painting... but perhaps being given an analytical tool – and the name of a concept – you will alter your gaze next time you walk into the Musée d’Orsay.