avant-garde art

At the time, Manet’s Olympia was extremely controversial and was rejected by the Salon establishment. Because the nude is wearing small items of clothing: the orchid in her hair, a bracelet, a ribbon around her neck, and mule slippers, these items accentuated her nakedness, comfortable courtesan lifestyle and sexuality. The orchid, upswept hair, black cat, and bouquet of flowers were all recognized symbols of sexuality at the time. This modern Venus' body is thin, counter to prevailing standards; the painting's lack of idealism rankled viewers who noticed it despite its placement, high on the wall of the Salon. A fully-dressed black servant is featured, exploiting the then-current theory that black people were hyper-sexed. That she is wearing the clothing of a servant to a courtesan here, furthers the sexual tension of the piece.

The flatness of Olympia is inspired by Japanese wood block art. Her flatness serves to make her more human and less voluptuous. Her body as well as her gaze is unabashedly confrontational. She defiantly looks out as her servant offers flowers from one of her male suitors. Although her hand rests on her leg, hiding her pubic area in a "frog" gesture-also another sex symbol, the reference to traditional female virtue is ironic; a notion of modesty is notoriously absent in this work.

Olympia immediately launched responses. Caricatures, sketches, and paintings, all addressed this nude. Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, Gustave Courbet, Paul Cézanne, and Claude Monet all appreciated the painting's significance.

Similarly, Mapplethorpe's sadomasochistic photos were controversial when they first came out. It can be argued that Mapplethrope’s photos had a similar effect on the art crowd that Manet's Le Deeuner sur l'herbe had with the Salon establishment. While rosy nudity was permissible in academic Salon paintings of Greek and Roman themes, the fiat, sallow flesh tones of Manet's nude female picnicker disturbed first viewers by a harsh contemporary realism and immediacy. There is no attempt to soften or idealize. This sexual flesh is frankly available and unromanticized. The casual air with which Manet juxtaposes brazen open-air nudity with the raffish workaday costume of the two young intellectuals, lost in discourse, is exactly the tone of many of Mapplethorpe's photos, where libertines pose in relaxed moods amid the bizarre discontinuities of their sexual underworld. The original shock of Manet's painting is surely reproduced, with the greater explicitness of our age, in Mapplethorpe's extraordinary photograph, Man in Polyester Suit, with its large black penis poking from an otherwise fully clothed torso. Finally, Manet goaded respectable sensibilities by the cool, appraising look on the face of his nude woman, who, like his self-possessed courtesan Olympia, meets our eyes without apology or embarrassment. She is practical, efficient, a bawdy woman of the world who knows her market value. She has, I submit, the same unsentimental sexual efficiency as Mapplethrope’s jaunty sadomasochists.

Mapplethrope’s distinction at the time was that he revived the idea of the avant-garde at a moment when it seemed buried forever. The avant-garde tradition was terminated in the Sixties by pop art, which closed the gap between high and low culture. The art world since then had, in my view, sunk into naked hucksterism and puerile mini-fads, a toy-train rat race of mediocrity and irrelevance. American creative energy was flowing instead into popular culture, which was sweeping the world.

- Camille Paglia