Olympia's Gaze

Olympia's Gaze, oil on masonite, 20" x 24", Steven Rhude

“The word scandal originates in the Greek skandalon, which means "trap, snare, stumbling block." The viewers of Olympia at the 1865 salon acted as if they were trapped by this provocative image, able to respond only with derisive hostility and contempt. Indeed, the

Bourgeois public took such offense at this apparent affront to its morality that the painting

had to be rehung high up out of its retaliatory reach. Not even professional critics, as Clark has demonstrated, were able to articulate any kind of coherent, intelligent response to Olympia in terms of form, content, technique, sources, or purpose.  They did little more than confirm the public's offended incomprehension. Like the Goncourts viewing La Paiva, the journalists seem to have relished their reduction of the prostitute to a dead and decomposing body, a painted corpse. Their rhetoric may be sensational and hyperbolic, but its emphasis on absence, negativity, lack, and decay reveals a deep seated anxiety that is at once expressed and controlled through this morbid imagery.”

- Charles Bernheimer, Manet's Olympia: The Figuration of Scandal