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Olympia By Manet Analysis

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Olympia By Manet
Article “Venus to Olympia: An Art Timeline” by Heather Goldstein and “Olympia” by Jonathan Jones both commentates on the contextual meaning of Manet’s Impressionist painting “Olympia”.

Heather Goldstein’s “Venus to Olympia: An art timeline” provides a take on Manet’s “Olympia” through a cultural frame. She introduces Manet as the “Father of Modernism” who enjoyed to “stir things up in the art world” as his artwork often lead to many controversial issues during that time. She then recounts how “Titian’s Venus of Urbino [has] inspired one of his most famous paintings, Olympia”. The final composition however, have caused “quite a stir” amongst the 19th century viewers, “when it was presented at the 1865 Salon”.

Goldstein further explores Manet’s techniques as …show more content…

Jones describes the techniques Manet adopted, which is juxtaposing light colours from dark colours and eliminating the half tones in his artworks. He then changes his focus to Olympia’s gaze, critically commenting that “ her big black pupils are uneven in size, this asymmetry is enhanced by the decoration in her hair and the turn of her head.” And that her gaze is “the hardest to take in”. Similarly to Goldstein’s analysis on the artwork, Jones provides a comparison between Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” to the recontextualized “Olympia” in saying that Manet replaces details that "the loyal sleeping dog in the Titian painting becomes Olympia’s startled cat; Venus’s braids become Olympia’s tied hair”. He then critically states that “everything in Titian is soft, everything in Olympia’s world is hard and

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