![]() The critics called it indecent and grotesque. Unlike other such nudes, Manet portrayed his model as more than an object to be considered, but a subject who is also considering us. ![]() As a servant brings her flowers, Meurent gazes not at the bouquet but rather looks intently towards us. ![]() Consider the patron reactions at the 1865 Paris Salon where he displayed “Odalisque,” an image of Meurent as courtesan reclining on a bed, overflowing with pale sheets and pillows surrounding her equally pale body. In the late 19th century it was the encounter with such content in Manet’s paintings that often unsettled his contemporaries. Alias Olympia maps out a search for that “literal content” of Meurent who became more compelling for Lipton as she learned to ask different questions about art amidst the social changes of the late 1960s and 1970s. That initial encounter with Meurent faded into an image both familiar and anonymous. “One never paid attention to a painting’s literal content,” Lipton writes. ![]() ![]() The time was the 1950s, and no one would have noticed her because the acceptable questions one could ask about art weren’t directed to the women who posed naked for male painters. ![]()
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