Olympia, or Where Im Going Next
Olympia is coming to America. Today, September 23. For the very first time.
I have been traveling to France as often as possible over the past thirty years. Upon my arrival in Paris, I have had a first day ritual—a visit to the Musée d’Orsay where I would wend my way through a warren of small first floor galleries until I came to the painting by Édouard Manet. I’d greet Olympia and say “I’m here.” There seemed to be no other or better way to begin any sojourn in Paris.
Olympia has not always lived at the former train station turned museum on Paris’s Left Bank, but she has had relatively few other addresses either long-term (other Paris museums) or temporary. In 2013 she was transported to Venice, Italy and three years later to Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia. This is her first transatlantic trip and is rumored to be her last.
“Do we lend ‘Olympia’ to the Met or not?” said [Christophe] Leribault, who was named Orsay director in the fall of 2021. “And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t so certain. For us, it means going without the most famous painting in the museum.” —Source: New York Times
Volumes have been written about her, including the initial reactions to the painting when first presented for public viewing:
And when the Parisian crowds rolled into the Salon of 1865, they too went berserk in front of Édouard Manet’s painting of a courtesan, her maid and her high-strung black cat. Spectators were sobbing, shouting, getting into scuffles; the Salon had to hire armed guards. The picture was so stark that visitors kept trying to puncture the canvas with their umbrellas. “Never,” reported one of Paris’s better literary reviews, “has a painting excited so much laughter, mockery, and catcalls as this ‘Olympia.’”
According to a recent article in the New York Times (and my own personal experience), modern day crowds at the Orsay are less tetchy, more admiring. Not that controversy is entirely absent. Critics and commentators continue to have much to say about her, including whether the singular pronoun “her” in reference to the painting is even appropriate when there are two women, usually identified as “a courtesan and her maid” in the frame, each occupying almost the same amount of space. And then there is always that cat . . .
Olympia is the superstar, referred also as “the kill shot” of the many paintings that comprise the sure-to-be-blockbuster exhibition, Manet/Degas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It opens September 24 and runs through January 7, 2024.
I plan to make my way through the crowd, stand in front of the painting, gaze back into that oh-so-familiar face, and say simply “You’re here. Welcome to America.”
(Photos via WikiMedia, public domain)
Fun facts: The model for Olympia (and other of Manet’s paintings), Victorine Meurent, apparently did make it to New York City. Again, from the NYT: “Last month, the anthropologist James Fairhead presented the astounding discovery of a newspaper interview from 1869 with a redheaded French dancer appearing onstage in New York. An enterprising producer had brought her from Paris to perform the cancan at a Broadway variety — and her name was Victorine Meurent.” Meurent was also an artist. Her self portrait was acquired in 2021 by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.
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