Olympia, Madame X, and Mme Matisse

Maxime du Camp, a prominent member of Parisian society, was quoted in 1858:

“Everything advances, expands, and increases around us…Science pro

By painting and displaying Madame ,X Sargent had offended the public morality of Paris, which despite its forward culture was just as rigid about women as other parts of the world. The scandal ruined Sargent’s hopes of becoming an established painter in Paris. He moved back to England and continued his career there. Again the public was shocked by the portrayal of a woman in a way perhaps more current to our times than theirs. Madame X was too far ahead of society at that point. Therefore the painting was found scandalous and inappropriate. Fifty years later, Madame X probably would have been considered simply another portrait of a woman in a ball gown. Sargent, as an artist, did not see the way that he painted Mme Gautreau as provocative; he was simply captured by her aura and in trying to paint that same feeling he produced something that viewers felt was inappropriate.

“Olympia is shocking, arouses a sacred profane love…she is a scandal, and idol; public presence and power of a skeleton in society’s closet…The purity of a perfect line embraces the impure par excellence whose office demands candid quiet ignorance of shame. Bestial vestal consecrated to the nude absolute she bears dreams of all the primitive barbarism and animal practices of urban prostitution.”

“The other day…at the Louvre we came across Manet’s Olympia. Nobody was astonished by it anymore. It looks like something painted by Ingres! And, yet heaven knows I’ve broken many a lance for this painting, which I don’t entirely like, though assuredly it is by someone. It does not perhaps belong in the Louvre.”

The reaction to Mme Matisse was as negative as for Olympia and Madame X. Even defenders of Matisse were uncertain about his style. Critics were appalled, and spared no hostility in insulting Matisse’s work. Most called it barbaric, and were particularly offended that Matisse used traditional format for a painting that was filled with such wild colors, not to mention ideas. One newspaper, Le Matin, printed a quote saying, “A pot of paint has been thrown in the public’s face.”

Olympia offended its Victorian audience simply because it portrayed a woman in a way that was not deemed suitable for society. At a time of corsets and crinolines women were subjected to gigantic amounts of ridicule for any sort of modern behavior. Olympia defied this timid and submissive stereotype, and that brazen self-confidence is what shocked people simply because it was unheard of. The idea that a woman could take care of herself, and then not be ashamed for her actions was unthinkable to Olympia’s restricted audience. However, perhaps she was predicting what came later in history, with the suffrage movement and the final equality of women.

Approximately twenty years after Olympia was painted an expatriate artist painted a portrait of a socialite of Parisian society. John Singer Sargent’s views on style and subject matter were at their peak when he painted his notorious painting. Sargent set out to paint a portrait of a great beauty. He chose Mme Gautreau, one of Parisian society’s celebrities, who was also an American expatriate. Sargent had met Mme Gautreau when he was painting a portrait of Dr. Pozzi, one of Mme Gautreau’s many lovers. In 1883 she agreed to pose for Sargent.

Science was making huge strides, and its discoveries were affecting society in gigantic ways. Einstein’s theory of relativity changed people’s whole point of view of nature, because it meant that everything around them could not simply be explained by Newton’s mechanical universe, and that things as sacred as time and length were no longer set, but were now variables. Wassily Kandinsky, credited with being the first abstract painter, was inspired by the fact that there were bodies smaller than atoms, which caused him to rethink the whole problem of reality in painting. Mathematicians were also solving

Some topics in this essay:
Stripe Ironically, Manet’s Olympia, Wassily Kandinsky, World War, Le Matin, Werner Haftman, Olympia Somehow, Andre Derain, Europe France, Fauvists Cubists, modern art, 19th century, mme gautreau, suffrage movement, science math, art world, late 19th century, manet’s olympia, parisian society, green stripe, mme gautreau’s, science math technology, ecole des beaux-arts, manet’s sargent’s matisse’s, sargent’s matisse’s paintings,