Tuesday, January 22, 2013


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.

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