Olympia

[the reproduction that came with the piece in the New York Times]

I was reminded this morning by the piece at reference 1, to take another look at Olympia, a large painting which I once saw for real, in Paris, in a converted indoor tennis court. I believe it is now usually hung in a converted railway station.

[the reproduction offered by the Musée d'Orsay]

A picture which I had thought that I had noticed from time to time. But checking, over the years the blog archive includes eleven months in which the word 'olympia' is to be found, with the four that I checked all being about something quite different. While of the two months in which the words 'olympia' and 'manet' were both to be found, just one of them was the right thing, at reference 4 below. But I think that there are probably others.

[the reproduction that came with the Wikipedia entry at reference 2 below]

The next thought was about the quality of the reproduction. That offered by Wikipedia did the best job in bringing out the detail of the face of the maid and of the cat to the right, detail which is largely lost again by the time you get to the finished post, but the colours did not seem right at all. That offered by the museum was very small, while that offered by the New York Times seemed to have got the colours off best. At least closest to those of the reproduction which hangs above me as I type this - a good deal larger than the screen of the laptop, but at 60cm wide a good deal smaller than the original which is 190cm wide.

[Two portraits by Manet depict Laure and Victorine Meurent, both of whom also sat for his painting “Olympia.” Credit: from left, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston]

The New York Times also offered portraits by Manet of the two models concerned.

With pinacoteca being a fancy Italian word for an art gallery, from the Greek, this one a rather flashy looking place in Turin, for which see reference 7. He was money, that is to say Fiat, while she was royalty who did art. The sort of arrangement which was popular in this country in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I then wondered about how much one lost by the small size of all these reproductions. And then about trying to take a good look at the real thing in all the bustle of a busy museum.

And then I drifted off into the more exoteric question of how close my experience of this painting is to yours. At the level of patches of colour and leaving aside any changes of context or lighting, any defects of colour vision there might be, maybe the two experiences are going to be much the same. But going beyond that, the flickering of the eyes around the picture, the emotional response, perhaps the train of thought are all going to be much more personalised, with these things depending as much on you and what you bring to the painting as on the painting itself. But that is matter for another day.

Maybe I will get around to reading what the New York Times has got to say about it all.

PS: according to Wikipedia, the pose of the present painting is taken from Titian's 'Venus of Urbino', although I wonder today whether it is anything more than a coincidence, promoted by their not being that many poses available. But I am reminded of the dirty old man to be seen by viewing the picture from below and to the right.

References

Reference 1: The 19th Century’s Most Scandalous Painting Comes to New York: “Olympia,” the brothel scene that birthed modern art, crosses the Atlantic for the first time in the Met exhibition “Manet/Degas” - Jason Farago, New York Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet).

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Urbino.

Reference 4: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/series-1-episode-vii.html.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/10/pudding-news.html.

Reference 6: https://www.pinacoteca-agnelli.it/.