Olympia, once again. Remebering Manet Print

"Never and no one has ever seen anything more cynical than this Olympia! It is a female gorilla made of rubber and pictured completely naked on a bed. Her arm seems to be cramping obscenely..." - So wrote the Paris newspapers in the spring of 1965 about the "Olympia" presented at the Salon, and not only that: "Seriously, young women expecting a baby, and girls too, I would advise them to avoid such experiences." The indignation of the cultured Parisian public knew no bounds; visitors to the Salon shouted obscenities in the face of the red-haired, sneering beauty and tried to pierce her outrageously tender, distinguished flesh with umbrellas, sticks. Some endeavored to spit at her, so that the organizers of the exhibition had to send the public disturber to the farthest corner of the salon, to hang her inaccessible even to the most ardent critics, and even to assign her an armed guard. And also the creator of the painting, one of the fathers of the emerging Impressionism, Edouard Manet, had to suffer from the agitated art connoisseurs and was accused not only of blatant immorality and vulgarity, but also of the inability to even hold the brush as it should, the paint to apply properly also did not succeed, as well as the handling of shades and ... Edouard Manet would have cheated, in short... After the scandal, the artist had to lock up his "beautiful prostitute" in the basement of his studio, where the poor woman sat unmolested for a quarter of a century.... Away from high society... Away from shame... Today, a century and a half later, one can only dream of such scandals. Nowadays an artist has to work very hard to get such recognition: the representation of a naked beauty and a concubine is no longer enough to achieve glory. Here you need completely different qualities as an artist, and also a different audience. By the way, I am telling you this not only as a private person, but as a long-time employee of one of the largest European museums of contemporary art. In our museum, for example, we also show "nude paintings" that are dubious and intended to cause scandal and outrage in the public. For example, in one of our last exhibitions, the portrait of a naked woman was presented in the form of twelve bottles filled with multicolored turbid liquids, each of them labeled accordingly: "blood", "sweat", "pus", "urine", "tears", and so on. How it goes on in the process, you can decide for yourself, that is, if you like.... And if you don't like such a call, if you are really outraged by it, then all is well! The artist has done it! The organizers of the exhibition and K. S. herself will be only happy about it: their life task is done, they can continue to live and create as already usual! You don't like this whole idea so much?... Well... If it's any consolation: While contemporary art museums and galleries and their suppliers are scrambling for new scandals to impress the cultural public, many artists are trying to follow the path laid out by Edouard Manet after all. René Magritte painted his version of Olympia, Jean Dubuffet, Francis Newton Sousa, Gerhard Richter and Felix Valloton. Now I'm here too, just could not resist the temptation ...