Volume 32, Number 9 · May 30, 1985
The Impressionists on Trial
By Francoise Cachin, Translated by Mimi Kramer
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
by T. J. Clark
Knopf, 338 pp., $25.00
Why did Manet's Olympia cause a scandal at the 1865 Salon? Because the painting was a parody of high classical art? Because it was a picture of a prostitute in a realistic style? Because of the presence of a Baudelairean cat, or the odd eroticism of the tranquil nude? Because the canvas employed flat colors and a generous painterly touch in the age of the 'licked' surface? The Harvard art historian T. J. Clark has his own answer: Olympia caused an uproar because she was a proletarian nude and because her hand over her sex was really pointing out the absence of a phallus. According to Clark's The Painting of Modern Life, the key to Olympia's 'modernity' is still to be found in Marx and Freud.
Review, 3789 words
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