Progression

Ever since Edouard Manet exhibited his picture Olympiain Salon des refuses in 1865 it has been baffling art historians and art critics. For what is this work - a work of genius or a work of poor craftsmanship? Manet’s contemporaries thought mostly the latter and the generations after mostly the former. In the 20^th century art historians have analyzed this painting over and over again and emphasized the painting-technique as one of the things that makes the painting a masterpiece, but only because that technique was a breach of tradition, a technique based on a tradition that up until then had not changed for the last 2-300 hundred years. When first exhibited, the painting caused a scandal that had a moral undertone, because the model who had been sitting for the painter was well known and she was staring right at you. There was nothing goddess-like about her. Everybody perceived her as a prostitute although the sources for the composition and the motif allegedly were Tizian’s and Giorgione’s paintings of Venus. To the above theories I have my own, which is related to the representation of the ideal body. The ideal body of a goddess was to Gorgione and Tizian and many others both before and after, a body with no individual characteristics. This can be seen in the way they represent the female breast as a half dome, where Manet represents Olympia’s breast as an average female breast influenced by gravity. This is in my opinion what really might have caused the scandal, because this was a painting of a naked woman and not a study of a nude. Painting has never really returned to the ideal representation of the female body, on the contrary, which Michael Kvium’s Kor is the perfect example of. In this painting he represents the female body in its worst. The breasts sag and even the voluminous bellies sag. This painting did not cause a scandal when first exhibited but might have released a sigh of relief in the female audience that do not see themselves like that, because nowadays women have means to shape their bodies into the ideal, by exercising or by inserting implants and if they do not do so, Manet’s Olympia have taught them that a naturally sloping breast and a slight curve just beneath the tummy belly is picturesque.