Taking a closer look …

…The Black Model in Western Art History - Artsy. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

 Olympia is, according to art history survey classes, textbooks, and museum wall labels, the painting that takes the first real step away from the academic romanticism of the early 19th century, placing the female muse in the contemporary realm of the demi-monde—the class of women who inhabited the French underworld of brothels and debauchery—and imbuing her with agency. Murrell sees something different. “There are two women in that painting, one white and one black,” she said. “Manet presented both of them to us with almost equally strong pictorial values.” To Murrell’s eye, the maid figure, while loaded with “all the issues of race and class of that period,” also gets a modernist update. In contrast with the white servant in Titian’s earlier touchstone Venus of Urbino (1538), Manet’s maid is brought forward, closer to the center of the painting. She is not the “exotic, bare-breasted Other that was the standard mode of portraying black women,” Murrell said. “She is clad in everyday attire rather than the meticulously rendered, lavish silks, and turbans, and jewelry of the imaginary Orient.”