Manet - Olympia
The questions asked by this painting when it was first displayed are still relevant today. A naked woman, propped up on a bed with a man holding flowers behind her. Is it the look in her eyes, the searching into our morals, our ideas about nakedness, intrigue. Is it the way in which she sits unmoving, unemotionally knowing that her body is beautiful, an object of desire and demand. Is it because there is no artistic ambiguity, she is so immediate, there is nothing to distract us from her nakedness, and our response to her nakedness. Or is it because she shows no desire for the male viewer. We may want her body, but she has no interest, she is beyond us, beyond any suggestion that anything we can do to her, we can in no way interest or satisfy her.
Is this, then, cutting to the heart of the matter, that there is nowhere for the male viewer's ego to be satisfied, it is squashed under her gaze. And this is unusual in our day and age where we are assaulted by pornography. At every corner there is a beautiful female with a look in her eye that suggests she wants, desires us, that we are the object of her desire. But this painting shows so clearly that there is more to pornography than the image of the human body, whether male or female. It is in the satisfying of the sexual urge of the viewer, the desire to possess, to take what is not ours to give, to receive from someone who appears so willing to give. And this is the power of pornography, of prostitution, the satisying of the ego, the sense that the ego is fulfilled through possession of someone beautiful who wants to give.
And yet they don't, that is the message behind this painting. The expression of desire is a lie, the impression that the viewer is all they want, is merely that, an impression. Behind that pornographic image is the hardness, the ireverance, the irrelevance shown in this painting. And so it disturbs, because she doesn't want or need, she is showing the reality of the person behind the pornography, and so the viewer's ego cannot be satisfied when confronted by such a look.
Jesus says not to commit adultery with someone in your imagination. Manet's woman illustrates this so well, and we turn away from her because she reveals too much about us the viewer.
