Anecdotally, Gauguin was greatly influenced by Manet’s Olympia (1863). In his painting Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), he has similarly depicted a female nude, although with multiple features being reversed or different from Manet’s painting. It is therefore interesting to compare and contrast these two paintings and discuss how their distinct formal qualities have contributed to the different themes or subjects being depicted in relation to their relative historical contexts. And as we will see, both paintings have been central to the genre of the nude in modern art, though in different ways.
Historically, Manet’s Olympia was an extremely controversial work due to its profanation of the idealized nude, the ideal form of beauty from the academic tradition. The nude was classically viewed as a noble genre, as the human body was viewed as the mimic or embodiment of the ideal form of the divine in ancient Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, in Manet’s Olympia, his subject was a modern woman, a prostitute, without any idealized beauty involved. Although her pose is similar to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), her body was materialized, objectified, and commodified. Her confrontational gaze toward the viewer has also intensified this feeling. Therefore, it has been viewed as a turning point toward modernism and has greatly influenced later western art development (Eisenman 2020).
On the other hand, Gauguin has been a central figure in the rise of Primitivism and the Synthetist style. His aim was to recreate the “primitive experience,” which simply means to step out of the Western culture and modern European society, as they view other non-Western societies to be the more “primitive.” This can be interpreted as “modern” in another way – the modernity out of the rejection of modernity itself. In his artworks, the visionary and the spiritual were emphasized and expressed, and there was a break with the naturalistic and empirical style of painting, which can be seen in his use of color and lines. Therefore, in his life, Gauguin has travelled to and stayed in Tahiti for a long time. And a Tahitian girl he has married with has become the subject of his Spirit of the Dead Watching.
If we look at the colors used in these two works, we can see how Gauguin has gone creative and experimental with his colors. The pink, purple, and blue in the background are in no way naturalistic. Unlike the impressionist style of returning to the visual, he has instead ignored the empirical and favored the visionary. The colors were used in a way that assisted with his expression of the emotions involved in the scene, such as the fear and terror expressed when the girl was confronting the ghost in her imagination, or maybe in his dream, as the interpretation of the painting is also ambivalent. But in Manet’s work, the colors utilized are still realistic, aiming to represent what he has seen in the studio. This is a clear distinction in terms of the styles of the two paintings.
In terms of the modeling and perspective, both works have a flattened style of painting, without much chiaroscuro techniques. Comparing to the academic way of modeling, Manet’s Olympia does not have much shadowing, except on her hands and feet. If we focus on her chest, we can see minimal shadows applied to model the figure. In the background, we can also observe that no extended horizons were depicted as often appeared in the history paintings. And this trend has intensified in Gauguin’s work, as he mainly outlined the figure with black lines and filled them with flat paint of colors. From the floor, to the bed, to the wall, we can see no clear perspective. Here, Gauguin has probably borrowed styles from other non-European cultures. If we focus on the ghost-like figure in the background, we can see a return to some archaic styles of art potentially, with extremely flatted lines and blocks of colors. And the facial features are clearly unrealistic. But in Olympia, both the black maid on her side and the other objects are still relatively naturalistic and following the Western way of painting. This is also one of the major differences in terms of style.
And if we return to the bodily position of the two subjects, we can see how Gauguin has invented a new kind of avant-garde where he kind of referenced back to Olympia but again dereferenced and flipped the position of the subject upside-down, left-to-right, depicting a girl lying on her stomach. This posture was probably borrowed from a Western sculpture work, which has bridged between these two different forms of artworks. He has also changed the role played by the second figure in the scene, from a maid to a visionary, imaginary existence. Combining with the historical contexts, we can see how Gauguin was looking for a more monumental and powerful body instead of the conventional Western, decadent bodies, as demonstrated in Olympia.
To summarize, although both being paintings about the female nude, Manet and Gauguin have chosen to depict different subjects in different cultures, and in vastly distinctive styles. Both paintings have opposed the traditional noble conception of the nude and instead focused on the bodies, the cultures, and the emotions, contributing to a modern version of the nude.
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