Edouard Manet Paints a Whore

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1865

In 1865, Edouard Manet exhibited this wicked parody of a famous painting by Titian, the Venus of Urbino. Both paintings show women on display in a bed who boldly look right out at us. The painting by Titian is deliberately ambiguous. She could well be one of the high price whores ("courtesan" is the nice word) for which 16th century Venice was famous. She certainly makes herself available and displays the goods. But, she could also be the goddess Venus gracing the marriage bed. In the background is a scene of a young woman with a maid going through what appears to be a trouseau. The scene is set in a palatial Venetian bedchamber in the evening about twilight, the most evocative time of the day.
There is no such ambiguity in Manet's painting. The woman who posed for this painting was not a whore, but Manet's reliable ready-for-anything model Victorine Meurent. In this painting, she unambiguously plays the whore. We are put in the uncomfortable position of being her next customer. We view her from slightly below as her maid presents her with a large expensive bouquet, presumably from us. She looks at us with that coldly down-to-business gaze that reminds us that we are nothing more to her than her next client. Instead of a palatial bedchamber at twilight, we are in a small room in a brothel with the glaring light of mid day lighting her up and creating a series of sharp contrasts between brilliant white and black. The most wickedly clever of those contrasts is between her own white flesh, and the dark skin of her chamber maid.

Manet is the darling of Marxist art historians. They see him as confronting us as ruthlessly as possible with the true material conditions of our existence. And indeed, he does that, and quite brutally.  According to Manet, the modern world is in fact quite simple, it's about money and nothing else.  Money is the measure of all things these days, not Man, not God, not anything else.  And that goes for truly all things.  Even sex, that most intimate and complicated of matters, is ultimately just another business transaction.   The complicated part of modernity is the effect that simple reality has on people.

And yet, Manet probably would not have been much use to either the movement or academic Marxists.  He was in Paris for the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871.  Where was he during all that revolutionary turmoil, on the barricades, or arguing with the other ideologues of the Commune?  No, he was in hiding.  He was glad and relieved when the soldiers of the Third Republic finally entered Paris and began massacring the Communards.  I'm afraid that Manet was too much of a nihilist to be useful for any revolution.  His outlook on the urban reality of modern life was very clear-eyed and unsentimental, and very detached.  It is an aristocratic view of the world, neither fully in it or of it, but observing it coldly, a role that the historians call the flaneur.  

That was what so shocked viewers in 1865, not that they were looking at a whore (late 19th century art, a golden age of misogyny, was filled with whores), but that they are looking at her so candidly and that she is looking back at us so coldly.  Manet brilliantly and brutally strips the poetic mystery surrounding what boils down to a biological need and a business transaction.