Beginnings
Paul Cézanne
A Modern Olympia
1873–74
Oil on canvas, 46.2 × 55.5 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
A man in a dark suit looks at a nude on a bed as a Black servant pulls back her sheet. Cézanne's answer to Manet's Olympia baffled viewers in 1874.
- Cézanne lays on hot reds and pinks in quick, heavy strokes, with no polished finish. Many Impressionist painters used brighter, stronger color than the Salon favored.
- Painted at Auvers-sur-Oise in the house of Dr. Paul Gachet, who lent it to the show.
- Cézanne adds a clothed visitor who faces the woman from the viewer's side.
- A review in L'Artiste in May 1874 went so far as to call the painter mad.
- Gachet's son Paul gave it to the French national museums in 1951.
Cézanne's title points straight to Manet's Olympia, painted a decade earlier. Here the theme becomes a scene about looking.
Themes
Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain