Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, Louvre;
Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d’Orsay;
Picasso, Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1906, Museum of Modern Art.
Ingres’
harem slave and Manet’s whore both created sensations when the artists first
exhibited them. The cold sexuality
of both women and the artists’ frank appraisal of their social roles
scandalized the viewers. The shock
that these paintings caused is no longer possible. Not only have we already seen reproductions in books, we
can’t look at these portraits (if I can use that word) without thinking about
the nudes that came after. in the first half of the 19th c. few people
had seen frank pictures of naked women; paintings and statues of nudes were
usually idealized creatures who never walked the earth. Now we see naked, sexual women in
movies, in photos, in porno, and practically naked women lie on beaches, appear
on billboards, and everywhere else.
Few visitors to art museums would be shocked by a picture or statue of a
naked, sexual woman.
I’ve read that the d’Orsay could hang Olympia on a wall visible from a
distance to cause a strong visual impact, but has hung it to lessen the effect. Some among the staff and visitors must
still be shockable.
Ingres’
“grande horizontale” takes up the whole frame, her left toes just extending
beyond the frame, her left arm almost touching it. Ingres uses warmer tones than Manet does, and her body is
quite sensuous. She strokes her
thighs – and what else! – with a fan of peacock feathers, but judging from her
face, right now the stroking gives her no pleasure. Her glance is suspicious, not at all welcoming. In either
case she’s not particularly pleased or interested in the painter and anyone
with him.
For
the point of view of creature comforts, she leads a good life. She has a string of pearls, her
headdress is lovely, the bedclothes and drape are soft and luscious, the
peacock feathers allow her to dust or pleasure herself whenever she
wishes. And the downward swoop of
the drape, her arm, and her body focus our interest on what we can’t see. A hookah pipe on the right edge of the
picture suggests social activity beyond the obvious.
And
what goes on in the head of Igres’ odalisque all day as she waits for the
sultan to appear? Does she plot
for a promotion, perhaps to a more official concubine – it’s been known to
happen? Does she remember her home
in Serbia or Egypt where she lived with a large family until one day she was
taken away? She suspects her
parents sold her, or used her to settle a debt. They were always whispering about how her beauty and charm
could save the family, if the right man could be found, she was always an
object of value in someone else’s game.
What
does she do when the beauticians in the harem are not preparing her for sex? Do the slaves weave or embroider? No doubt she worries what will happen
to her once her skin sags and wrinkles appear. Like all those women and men whose well-being depend upon the
beauty or strength of their bodies, she fears what will happen when the rose
fades.
In
both Ingres and Manet’s pictures, the scene is set in an improbable room,
neither a harem or a bordello. The
curtains, half open, suggest that beyond the curtains is an audience and we are
looking over the whore to the audience.
In any event, the two women pose in a formal setting where something is
being revealed, not a workplace.
At
the time Ingres' picture was criticized for its unrealistic proportions: she was famously
described as having three extra vertebrae. However, we may assume Ingres knew what he was doing; he
painted her that way because he wanted her that way. Her long back suggests the gap between her head and her sex: the former her own thoughts, fears and dreams: the latter, property of the
sultan. Two hundred years later
the possible inaccurate proportions don’t alarm or interest us. I suspect the chatter about vertebrae
was to remove the necessity of thinking about using women as sex objects and
articles of commerce.
Manet’s
portrait of the whore was a scandal from the moment the Paris Salon of 1864
opened. Olympia is a true to life
courtesan, she firmly covers her sex – you want it, you pay. She ignores the flowers the maid holds; if she likes them, they’ll go in the vase to set the scene for the next
transaction; if she doesn’t like the flowers the maid will toss them. The maid is black, I’d bet black maids
were more common in the demi-monde than elsewhere. The black cat is associated with prostitution. Manet rubs in the facts of life.
Olympia,
as her name suggests, is in charge: she plays with men’s lusts and weaknesses
as her cat plays with the mice.
Both prosper. She’s got her
own establishment, maid, jewels and expensive drapes and linens. The harsh studio lighting sucks any
sensuality out of the picture.
Naked
women are not otherworldly, gifts of the divine; they are sex objects for male
lust and purchase. Manet and
Olympia challenge the male viewer:
if you honor your wife and daughter, why do you pay money to have sex
with other women?
Manet
forced the male viewer to confront the truth of his nightly pleasures, and,
perhaps, even more offensive, he taunted the bourgeois wife with knowledge of
what her husband did when he was out at night. No wonder there was a scandal. Manet could have painted a streetwalker; maybe he did; Degas
and Lautrec certainly did. By
painting a successful whore, one out of a thousand, he painted a whore his
audience was intimate with.
Olympia
suggests the great whore of Proust’s A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Odette began as a whore, moved on to accepting only certain men as
lovers (among them the narrator’s great-uncle), marries his future friend Swann
and is the mother of the narrator’s first girl friend, Gilberte (and
lover? I never figured that
out. If you know for sure, let
me know). I’m pretty certain that
such an advancement is in Olympia’s mind:
this woman did not come to Paris from the provinces to be a street
walker.
Thirty
years later Monet organized a national subscription to buy the picture for the
nation. The scandal was repressed
or forgotten; men still paid their mistresses; wives made the best of it.
Forty
years later Picasso caused a similar scandal when he unveiled the Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Picasso
painted the Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1906; it is a large picture and created quite
a stir. His generation of viewers
had accepted Ingres and Manet’s whores but could not accept these 5
whores. Why?
Picasso
has abandoned all pretense of realism.
He dissolves the women into blocks of color and flesh. Two wear masks. No doubt the post-Cezanne abstraction
and Cubist nudes upset viewers. Picasso announced his abandonment of a
pretense to realism with a large, aggressively drawn and colored picture of
whores. Of whores!! There is nothing sexy or desirable
about these women; is there nothing sexy about going to a whore?
On
the other hand, had Picasso painted the girls in the style of Ingres or even
Monet, the shock might have been less.
But the Picasso thrust two ideas in the viewers’ eyes: 5 whores in a brothel and the collapse
of realism.
The
pose of the girl on the right is a bit shocking, crude, pornographic. To my knowledge only Courbet had
painted a franker look at a woman’s parts.
A
second reason for shock may be the scene; we are clearly in a whorehouse, not a
harem of a very rich and powerful man, not in the boudoir of a successful
courtesan whom only the haute bourgeois can patronize, but in the parlor of a
whorehouse open to all comers:
Butlers, deliverymen, chimney sweeps, soldiers, politicians, bankers. D’Avignon
refers not the French city, but to a street in Barcelona’s red-light district,
a street Picasso had frequented. So
there is a class aspect to this painting:
here, before the naked body of whores, the young Spaniard affirms all men are equal in
their lusts.
It’s
also notable that Picasso painted his whores standing, vertical; Ingres and
Manet painted their grande odalisques lying down, horizontal, which is, after all, their professional posture. Five vertical prostitutes appear more threatening than a lone, horizontal one.
The
girls are offering their bodies for sale, or, rather, the madam is offering
them; this is a moment of selection and commerce, not an idle moment during the
day or an uncertain moment when perhaps someone is entering the room.
These
women have no identity: these
whores are nameless, not heroes, but part of the anonymous mass of modern life. Two wear masks, and that the masks are
African somehow confuses us even more.
No comments:
Post a Comment