Constructing A Sociology For An Icon of Aesthetic Modernity - Olympia Revisited (Robert W. Witkin)

Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity: Olympia Revisited
Author(s): Robert W. Witkin

Source: Sociological Theory , Jul., 1997, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jul., 1997), pp. 101-125
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/201949
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Wiley and American Sociological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Sociological Theory
This content downloaded from

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic
Modernity: Olympia Revisited*
ROBERT W. WITKIN
University of Exete;r U.K.
I address the problem of constructing a sociology of the artwork through analyzing on

particular paitinti -Manet's Olympia. The painting is an acknowledged icon of mod
ernist art and has been variously located in discourses concerning modernity, gender,
and sexuality in the modern world. My purpose is to locate this painting and moderni
painting generally in the social formation. While the interpretation of a particular wor
of art plays a central part, here the ground of that interpretation lies in social theor
Modernist art, and Manet's work in particular; is seen as a response to the growin
disjunction between "instrumental" and "solidary " social relations--a disjunction fully
acknowledged in the development of classical social theory. This changing relationship
is reflected in the construction of discourses centered on value and motive. It is argu
that Manet's modernism instantiates a spiritual resistance to the corruption of value b
motive inherent in modernity and marked by a whole range of sociological discourses
comm7odification, alienation, rationality, disenchantment, and so forth. I identi,f a sp
cific cultural configuration at the heart of bourgeois ideology involving gender an
social class, and seek to show how Manet's painting subverts and deconstructs thi
configuration as a discourse of social formation. The semiotic possibilities made ava
able by a modernist "presentational code "-the cultivation of flatness, the suppression
of modelling and interaction, the use of dense allusive cultural reference, and the ada
tion of foreign and exotic pictorial techniques, etc.-are all seen as key to the decon
structive work that the painting accomplishes.
Sociologists of art have usually been reluctant to confront the challenge to socio
thought offered by art history. This reluctance has stemmed, in part, from a d
distance sociological inquiry from direct contact with art objects themselves. Unde
ably, the sociologist is nervous about straying onto territory occupied by art sp
with few methodological resources or justifications. Theodor Adorno could roam f
the territory of music specialists, but his cultural capital as a musician and compo
so considerable that few would seriously challenge his credentials for analyzing
work even when they did not agree with the analysis. Lacking such claims to sp
expertise, many sociologists opt for a sociology of art that does not require them
too far into the territory of the artwork. The sociology of art exemplified by H
Becker's (1982) Art Worlds has encouraged sociologists to pursue fruitful inquiri
the production and reception of art works in a way that circumvents critical ques
interpretation, style, and meaning in works of art, questions that arise more in the
of the grand version of continental European art history (see Witkin 1995, chap. 1
are positive reasons for this: art worlds really are legitimate territories for soci
inquiry. They provide a basis for making a genuine and distinctly sociological cont
*Address all correspondence to the author at Department of Sociology, University of Exeter, Amory
Rennes Drive, Exeter EX4 4RJ, England; email rwwitkin@exeter.ac.uk. An earlier version of this
given at the 1995 ASA meetings in Washington, DC. I am grateful to Judy Balfe for her constructive an
comments, both at the conference and in subsequent correspondence.
Sociological Theory 15:2 August 1997

? Americani Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20036

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
102 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
to the study of the arts and they have proved fertile ground for a va
studies that map an interface between the institutional and organization
tic production and the ideational, for example Diana Crane (1987), Paul
and Vera Zolberg (1996) If I join those seeking to theorize artworks fr
point of view, I do so in the belief that such a project is consistent with
to the aims of sociologists theorizing art worlds.
The correspondence between what occurs in paintings, or in artwor
what is happening in society has been central to what might be termed
art work (Witkin 1995). Arnold Hauser ( 1991 ) attempted (as did Wilhelm
before him) to reduce art to an opposition between formalized, geometri
naturalistic (in my terms "perceptual-realist") art. Hauser identified the
eties governed in accordance with aristocratic, hieratic, or authoritarian
latter with urban societies that have developed middle classes, commer
ture, and a heightened individualism. His thesis is epic in scale but too c
tionism to appeal to many art historians (Gombrich 1978). Hauser's app
with the more subtle methods of Michael Baxandall (1988) in tracing t
between social practices in fifteenth-century Italy-preaching, gauging,
contracts-and developments in painting. Equally restrained in its theo
Alpers (1983) work on the "art of describing" in Dutch painting, an ar
linked to definite developments in intellectual practices, scientific disco
and which she contrasts with the "narrative tradition" of Renaissance It
taken up by Martin Jay (1988), in his thoughtful paper "Scopic Regimes
that discusses the semiotic implications of both the visual models suggested by Alpers
together with a third model, that of the (baroque) imagery that he labels (following Chris-
tine Buci-Glucksmann) (1986) "la folie de voir" and which he sees as a "scopic regime"
particularly (but not exclusively) in evidence in modernity.
Inevitably, a (semiotic) sociology of the artwork must be judged by its success in con-
necting what goes on in artworks to social formation generally. In his essay, "Image, Dis-
course, Power," Norman Bryson (1983) asks how it is possible to connect two sets of facts
those, for example, indicating innovations in the iconography of poverty in English and French
painting of the late eighteenth century-a move from the depiction of outdoor labor to th
interiority of the laborer's dwelling and the leisure spaces of hearth and tavern-and thos
facts that indicate contemporaneous structural changes in the economy of labor and in th
family. Bryson insists that the coincidence between representational practices and social struc
ture cannot be simply a case of the one causing the other; the representation of poverty h
to be seen as an evolving structure modifying according to laws operative within its own au
tonomous provenance. "The problem is one of understanding the articulation of a technic
process against the history of social formation, of charting one material evolution in the spher
of practice against its reflection and refraction in a further domain of practice" (1983:134
For Bryson, the acts of transgression against visual convention may not be caused by changes
at the level of social formation but they are ultimately accountable to such changes. He ar
gues that a painting such as Manet's Olympia belongs among those images that have bee
constructed "in severance from the social body" (1983:148). The fate of all such images i
bound up with their connection or lack of connection to social formation. Unless they artic
ulate their local acts of transgression with the major movements and activities within the so-
cial formation they are ineffective ("insignificant"):
Instrumentally, an Olympia at the Salon of 1865 may be of little concern to the

nocturnal economy of Les Halles; but the essential point is that its juxtaposition of

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
OLYMPIA REVISITED 103
Odalisque and Prostitute .. . (and) all these collisions of discursive top

the social formation: not as echoes or duplicates of a prior event in
that is then expressed, limpidly, without distortion on the surface o
as the free play of signifiers colliding in the atopia ofjouissance ... b
work, the effortful and unprecedented pulling together of discurs
from their separate locations and into this painting, this image. (B
In this paper I address the problem of constructing a sociology of th

analyzing that particular painting-Manet's Olympia.' The painting
icon of modernist art and it has given rise to a great many interpre
responses from the time of its first exhibition in 1865-where it scand
members of the public-to the present day. My concern is not simply t
reading of the work but to consider the "place" of this painting and o
generally in the social formation. I identify a specific cultural configur
bourgeois ideology involving gender and social class, and I seek to
painting subverts and deconstructs this configuration as a discourse of
Linda Nochlin (1991) observes in her essay on Manet's "Masked
Manet's antinarrative strategies, his rejection of traditional storytelling
witty and ironic reference to the underlying assumptions controlling
bourgeois society; it is these underlying assumptions that are central t
I am less concerned to analyze Manet's painting in terms of what it
attitudes towards women or about social class as I am to use the painting
instrumentalizing of "value" in modern society-that is, the progressi
"discourse of values" to a "discourse of motives"-and its implications
tion of the theme of the "sacral bourgeois feminine" at the heart of
(Sievers 1986). While the interpretation of a particular work of art p
here the ground of that interpretation lies in social theory. It is thus an i
project to identify at a theoretical level the aspects of social relations
that can be said to "drive" the aesthetic strategies of "avant-garde" a
those artists having access to such an analysis or ever conceiving of th
terms. I hope that my approach will be seen to bring the interpretatio
closer to general sociological analysis. My interpretation of Olympia
by a theory about what are held to be semiotically "necessary" conne
the one hand, social structure and social relations in a given society an
specific "aesthetic strategies" deployed by artists in the construction of
arguing that the classical discourse of sociologists about the structure
modern society corresponds to and can be used to interpret the structu
tions in works of modern art.
VALUE-STRUCTURES AND MOTIVE-STRUCTURES
The contrast between "instrumental" and "solidary" social relations constitu

dichotomy in sociological theory. The changing relationship between solid
mental relations and the growing predominance of the latter has been seen
of the transition from "early" to "mature" or even "late" capitalist society.
ing relationship as reflected in the construction of discourses centered on v
These, in turn, I argue, configure the aesthetic strategies of an artist lik
I am particularly indebted to the following sources: Hamilton 1969, Sandblad 1954, Reff
Hanson 1979, and Bataille 1955.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
comprising the modernist presentational code-that are the semiotic corr

changes in the construction of discourse. Finally, I consider the content of th
treatment of both gender and class in the painting, and seek to disclose
nature of its project in relation to bourgeois ideology. My claim is that M
instantiates a spiritual resistance to the corruption of value by motive in
nity and marked by a whole range of sociological discourses-commo
ation, rationality, disenchantment, and so forth. Commodification, dise
the corruption of value are made visible in Olympia by reproducing the
relations of the painting but in such a way as to mark the "absence" of t
spiritual center. At a semiotic level, my treatment of the work of art re
respects, with the aesthetic approach of TheodorAdorno in analyzing mus
kin forthcoming).
The distinction between instrumental and solidary relations is at the ve
sical sociological theories. From Weber, Marx, Durkheim, and Simmel thr
Habermas, and Parsons, sociology has charted the forms in which the ins
ture of social life and the concomitant emphasis on calculation and ratiocin
progressively predominant in the modern world. Weber pointed to the gr
of rational-technical forms, Simmel to the cognitive rationality of the li
olis, Durkheim to the rational and systematic consciousness of industrial
solidarity) as opposed to the power of moral passions and sentiments in t
of traditional societies (mechanical solidarity); Tonnies's analysis of the
opposition to the gemeinschafft, and Marx's depiction of the dominatio
values" over "use values" are also expressions of this same polarity.
The studies of small groups carried out by Robert Bales (1950) in the 1950s exemplify
this dichotomy. Bales identified two systems of functional relations in the group, the instru-
mental system and the socio-emotional system (the latter corresponds to what I am callin
the solidary system). Groups developed an instrumental division of labor to solve tasks in
the environment but they also had an internal environment (Homans 1950) made up of th
interpersonal relations among the members of the group who must work together and
relate to one another. The socio-emotional structure of the group was a response to the
demands of this interpersonal environment. Other sociologists, as well as social psychol-
ogists, working in the area of small group studies developed that same recognition of a
fundamental disjunction between the instrumental and the sensuous that had been the
heritage of classical sociological theory-for example, Helen Hill Jennings (1950) differ
entiation between soci-groups (instrumental) and psyche-groups (socio-emotional). Par
sons (Parsons and Bales 1955) took the distinction into the study of the family
constructed his well-known functional model of the division of labor in the family based
upon the instrumental leadership of the father/husband and the socio-emotional leadersh
of the wife/mother. It is a dichotomy eloquently explored by Juirgen Habermas (1992)
his analysis of modernity as the transformation of the public sphere, in which he count
poses the rational economic world of the bourgeois "man of affairs" with the "free co
munity of love" that constitutes (ideal-typically) his family life, a dichotomy in which
is divided between his status as "bourgeois" and as "homme."
Instrumental actions and relations are means-end oriented; they are actions and rela-
tions in pursuit of goals or objectives, be they individual or collective goals. Instrumental
relations can thus be described as "motivated." Solidary relations, by contrast, are those
that are intrinsically "valued" or sustained for their own sake. In this sense, the instrumen-
tal structure of social relations-functional interdependence determined by goal or
objective-belongs to a discourse of motives and the solidary structure of social relation
socio-emotional integrity-belongs to a discourse of values. Realizing an integrity, a sen
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
suous coherence and continuity at the level of action, is central to a discourse of values.
Values such as "freedom," "truth," or "honor" ultimately refer to qualities of social being.
Although it may well be the case in a so-called "traditional" or "simple" society that a
fully integral relationship may exist between motive and value structures-a weapon or a
pot may belong in different discourses, may be, for example, both an object of practical
utility and at the same time an aesthetically or religiously significant object-in so-called
individuated bourgeois societies, motive and value structures are more or less discrete and
the relations between them problematical. This disjunction manifests itself in all the major
social divisions in such societies, most noticeably, for example, in those of class and
gender. In Weber's distinction between class and status, class is described in terms of a
shared relationship to the market and as involving potential association for instrumental
purposes; status, on the other hand, refers to solidary structures, to genuine "communities"
whose members identify with one another on the basis of a shared mode of being or way
of life.
In pre-modern and early capitalist societies, a close identity was maintained between
class and status (instrumental and solidary) relations. Traditionally, however, that identity
was acknowledged to exist primarily for those at the top of the hierarchy, that is, for higher
social classes who could imagine that their instrumental relations were permeated with
value (the so-called higher motives), that they were "significant." Such significance was
deemed to be a "worthy" subject matter for art. The instrumental relations of the lower
social orders were not seen as permeated by value in this sense, were not therefore signif-
icant or worthy as subject matter for works of art. Hierarchy has often been associated
with a claim by higher social groups to manifest or embody value, and for such groups to
attribute to lower social groups a tendency to be governed by "calculation" and "motive."
The characteristic preference for the everyday and prosaic life in modernist works of art is
an inversion that tacitly acknowledges this claim.
In modern societies, the world of work and organizations has predominantly been seen
as instrumental and motive-driven while the domestic sphere, centered on interpersonal
and family relations, has been viewed as solidary and value-governed. The dichotomy
was, traditionally, a gendered one, with the man, as homo economicus, at the center of an
instrumental order-a motive-structure-and the woman at the center of the socio-
emotional order-a value-structure. At an ideological level, the disjoined parts are put
together as two halves of a reality that somehow adds up. In political life, for example, the
pursuit of selfish or egoistic interests as homo economicus can be thought of as tran-
scended through the dialectical mediation of those interests by the altruism of the family
and of family life. This is essentially the linkage that Hegel uses as a basis of his political
philosophy in the The Philosophy of Right (Avineri 1972) where he establishes an oppo-
sition between the egoistic interests of civil society and the altruism of the family, an
opposition that he sees as synthesized and transcended in the modern state. In his Trans-
formation of the Public Sphere, Habermas (1992) offers his own version of this linkage
between the domestic sphere-the free community of love in which the woman is a
centerpiece-and the political economy dominated by men:
To the autonomy of property owners in the market corresponded the self-presentation

of human beings in the family. The latter's intimacy, apparently set free from the
constraints of society, was the seal on the truth of a private autonomy exercised in
competition. Thus it was the private autonomy denying its economic origins (i.e., an
autonomy outside the domain of the only one practiced by the market participant
who believed himself autonomous) that provided the bourgeois family with its con-

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
sciousness of itself. It seemed to be established voluntarily and by f

and to be maintained without coercion; it seemed to rest on the lasting
love on the part of two spouses; it seemed to permit that non-instrum
ment of all faculties that marks the cultivated personality. The thre
voluntariness, community of love, and cultivation were conjoined in a
humanity that was supposed to inhere in humankind as such and truly
its absoluteness: the emancipation (still resonating with talk of "pure"
humanity) of an inner realm, following its own laws, free from extrin
any sort. (1992:46)
This situation gives rise to a cultural configuration that is at the very

ideology concerning both the domestic sphere and the economy. While th
ingly disjoined and homo economicus has his center in an instrumenta
course of motives, he is nevertheless linked to the discourse of values in
relationship to the "body" of the woman in marriage. In classical (early)
literature, the bourgeois feminine was identified as the sacral heart of th
and the guarantee, for homo economicus, of a transcendental home in a f
love. In her paper, "The Magdalen in Modern Times," Lynn Nead (1
ambiguous configuration in her account of pre-Raphaelite painting. Refe
Elgar Hicks painting of a married couple, The Sinews of Old England, Ne
the definition of class and gender are central to this representation of E
and future. Class and conflict and difference are eliminated and an im
shared values centered on the home is offered. The body of the woman thus became a
potent symbol of the indissoluble nature of the ties between the two spheres of instrumen-
tal and solidary relations. The classical female nude, in painting and sculpture, represented
an important realization of this symbolic power. If the Hicks painting of 1857 is one in
which the bourgeois ideological configuration of class and gender is intact, Manet's paint-
ing of 1864-65 is one that is profoundly subversive of that same configuration.
If this key relationship to value through the body of woman-the mystery of the sacral
bourgeois feminine-was in some sense an ideological guarantee of wholeness for the
higher class male, the hierarchical ordering of social class itself added a further dimension
The instrumental dominion of homo economicus is secured to the extent that his discourse
of values predominates and classes below identify themselves with it. In classical sociol-
ogy, the point is affirmed in the Marxist claims concerning the dominance of the ideas o
the ruling classes and the formation of what Marx termed "false consciousness." In clas-
sical and archaic literature, the good servant or slave is distinguished by having no though
that are not his master's and it is this complete subsumption or assimilation that guarant
him a transcendental home in the value discourse represented by the "master." Tradition-
ally, in the literature of classical Greece or Rome or even that of Shakespeare, the lowly
individual who does have thoughts of his own is often a comic character, a clown or
buffoon or someone who has only "base motives." It is this which is associated with the
separation of styles in which a formalized and special speech is reserved for the high-bor
characters (e.g., verse for the nobles in Shakespeare) and everyday prose is put into the
mouths of the low-born (Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals").
If we return to gender relations as the centerpiece of this cultural configuration, the
contradictory nature of this ideological construction becomes apparent, as does the ambig
uous position of woman in classical bourgeois ideology. The woman appears both above
and below the man. On the one hand she is a goddess whose body and "favor" provide
access for the man to a transcendental home in the world of values and solidary relations;
on the other, she is a servant of the man with no thoughts of her own that he has not put

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
there. The goddess that makes him whole-like the supine figure of the
promises the impossible, the reconciliation of value and motive, of the
the solidary, of communitas and egoism. Such a reconciliation is a f
society in which the discourse of motives has become predominant and
really sought is the instrumentalization of values, something that is tant
guishing the discourse of values altogether. The crisis that occurred in pa
the time Manet painted Olympia-a crisis insightfully discussed by T. J
The Painting of Modern Life-can be seen as reflecting the inauthentic re
cultural configuration to the bourgeois society developing in the middle
century. Manet's Olympia proffers a radical deconstruction of that cultu
as an acknowledgement of its illusory character and as a disclosure of its
instrumentalization of value. In and through the act of disclosure, how
distances itself in the best tradition of "romantic irony"; such disclosure
and of itself, a moment of spiritual resistance.
The instrumentalization of value is ideologically reinforced and form
logical analysis itself. Although the recognition of the alienation and sub
sensuous domain was central to the sociologist's understanding of mode
understanding that bore the imprint of that same rational and instrume
Sociological understanding was, so to speak, a consequence of that d
instrumental reason recognizing itself and recognizing the sensuous dom
other. In that same moment of recognition, however, sociology, as instru
appropriated the sensuous domain, instrumentalizing it by assigning to a
rational tasks within the division of labor and making "affective instrum
ing socio-emotional needs) complementary and subordinate to its "effecti
ity" (solving tasks in the object world). The sensuous life was thus reduce
means-end rationality that characterizes the instrumental life, with the con
the satisfaction of personal needs constituting the ends. By contrast, t
cance of cultural modernism was its resistance to the instrumentalization of the sensuous
life and of solidary relations and its resolute pursuit of a discourse of values.
PRESENTATIONAL CODES
Manet's paintings, and those of Cezanne, mark an important transition

sentational codes, the "perceptual-realist code" that had predominated t
opment of capitalist societies in Europe from the fifteenth to the mid
centuries and which gave us pictures in which the world as it was pi
optical values of ordinary perception, and the "modernist code" that
development of modern art since that time and in which picturing de
erably from ordinary perception. As semiotic systems, works of art can f
as modes of "knowing"-can reflect, realize or reproduce-only insofar
relations correspond, at a structural level, to those of the society in whic
this formal identity is, I hold, key to their functional importance as a
is quite distinct from the issue of the relationship of the specific content
social reality (Witkin 1995).
Perceptual-realist art was ideally suited to depicting the drama of so
to representing the material world mediated by it-from the perspecti
(Witkin 1995). The dialectic of inner feeling or spirit and outer expr
realized by an art that simulated the volumetric world of real appearan
we are confronted by a different presentational code, one that compr
ence as constitutive of the subject, as constituting an intrasubjective r

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
subjective order. Fidelity to the intrasubjective demands aesthetic strateg

and subvert perceptual-realism in art. Memories, perceptions, and expe
stitute the subject are drawn from a variety of contexts and can only b
same experiential frame through abandoning perceptual-realism, which
the logic of an objective situation. An avant-garde modernism cultivated
ings and juxtaposed views of object or figures that could not "realistic
same visual plane, either because a picture comprised different views o
as in a still-life by Cezanne, or because it comprised juxtapositions of dif
could not belong to the same situation or experiential frame, as in a Cub
Manet's Olympia, because figures or objects incorporate in their very c
signs of different and mutually exclusive "beings." It is the subject's im
experiences obtained in a variety of social contexts and situations that co
subjective order and that mediate his or her impressions in any one situa
mediation visible is the deconstructive work of paintings like Olympia
Modernism in art was a response to a social world in which the intrap
of the subject had become problematical. Simmel (Wolff 1950), Wir
early ethnographers of the modern metropolis had pointed to the person
dered by a vast extension of the range and variety of social contacts, re
riences through which the lives of individuals were constructed. At the same time there
was a corresponding reduction in the density of the individual's social networks. When the
"others" with whom the subject is in relationship are all connected to one another-a
density that might be approached in a simple society or in an isolated rural community
then this connectedness binds the elements of intrasubjective experience. In the metro
lis, where this connectedness is diminished and where social relations are more
"fragmentary," order among the elements of intrasubjective experience is p
is this problematic to which modernism in art and in culture is a response.
OLYMPIA'S MODERNISM
The tension between the poles of experience-the intrasubjective and

supplied the gravitational pull of art and literature in the nineteenth c
away from an object-centered realism, quintessentially represented by
to a subject-centered "naturalism" typified by the writings of Flaub
those of Manet's close friend and defender in the 1860s, Zola. Manet's modernism is best
seen in terms of this tension. It incorporates the vestiges of an object-centered real
overlaying it with a subject-centered modernism. On the one hand, we can read Olymp
describing an objective scene in which there is a prostitute in the act of preparing hers
to receive a client. On the other hand, we experience a pull away from any such functiona
logic, with the flattening of forms and of background, the frontal hieratic presentation o
figures (a presentation that suppresses interactions), together with the deconstructive
taposition of contradictory signs of social being in the same figure. Manet drew, skillf
on three important cultural resources to develop his modernist presentational code: his
European artistic heritage, contemporary Parisian culture with its "advanced" ideas, and
the artistic culture of Japan. All three play their part in the realization of Olympia as a
modernist work.
Manet's painting depicts a woman, lying on a couch, attended by a black maid carryi
a bouquet of flowers, and with a black cat, with raised tail and arched back, at the foo
the couch. That she is a prostitute is overwhelmingly assumed in accounts of the painti
The cool directness with which she stares out at the viewer, the careful arrangement of
nudity, the "flexed" hand over her genitals and so forth, have insured for the paintin

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
certain notoriety (Clark 1990). Olympia has been variously located in

ing modernity, gender, and sexuality in the modern world. John Berg
of Olympia to mark its difference from the typical nude of Western art
Renaissance. He draws attention to the self-possession of Olympia, co
the classical European nude, which he sees as passive, supine, a captiv
male gaze.
./' ' ' 1- -11, ^ *11 * 11' 1 - - ^^^^ ^.... ...........:..

"""ii^ 1 1 ^ I I aj. ; ; .; 0 e A t . 0 0fX ;_:
Manet
L'Olympia
Mus6e d'Orsay
? Photo R.M.N.
The painting instantiates aesthetic strategies that have in subsequent works

mark modernism's departure from the traditions of Renaissance perceptual-r
suppression of modelling, the suppression of chiaroscuro and half-tones, the fl
the figure and the emphasis on its contour line, the flattening of the backgr
corresponding reduction in definition of the surfaces of the body, the horizont
side frontal (almost hieratic) presentation of figures. We can consider two aspec
There is considerable attenuation of the impression of depth and of an interior
we can visually enter; there is a corresponding emphasis on the surface of the p
and on the foregrounded figures-the nude figure on the couch, her upper body
severe, ivory skin against the luxuriant fold and flounces of sheets and pillows
of the black servant looming above her. (b) Olympia herself is painted in a way
isolates her as a figure and flattens her. She is harshly outlined, an effect that, tog
the flattening of the background, makes her appear a little like a cut-out or po
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
superimposed upon the background. Contrastively, within that outline, cu

are weakly defined and strongly lit, reminiscent of the effects of bright lig
The harshness of the line is echoed in the pale appearance of the brightly
the whites and grey tones of pillows and sheets.
FLATNESS AS A SIGN OR METAPHOR FOR MODERN LIFE
There is a theoretical decision to be made concerning the cultivation of the

flatness that became so characteristic of modernist art. Why did so many a
necessary to produce this effect almost as though it was a badge of modern
(1973), who has developed his own sociological approach to art history, cla
cultivation of flatness in paintings was in pursuit of certain metaphorica
moder life and modern cultural artifacts: "If the fact of flatness was
tractable for art-in the way it was for Manet and Cezanne, for example-t
been because it was made to stand for something" (1990:13). In this wa
sidesteps the semiotic problem by finding that flatness is somehow an attr
nity or modern life outside paintings and that flatness in paintings is sim
metaphor for this world beyond painting. Clark is, of course, aware of all
history" of theorizing on modernism that claims an aesthetic, indeed a se
tive for modernist concerns such as "flatness" in a picture. He acknowledges
sance realist traditions were marked by a concern with plasticity and with dep
in a picture, so many modernist paintings, including Olympia, cultivate th
ness. Clark asks how a matter of procedure or effect could possibly stand i
answer is key to his ability to evade the modernist challenge of Olympia: "
the avant-garde, conceived as a set of contexts for art in the years between
1918, might best be redescribed in terms of its ability to give flatness suc
compatible values-values which necessarily derived from elsewhere than art
sis added).
Clark treats this flatness, therefore, as a content, as something the artist paints that draws
its significance from outside art. For example, flatness might be seen as an analog of the "pop-
ular" emphasizing, in a picture, what was plain, workmanlike, and emphatic; or it could sig-
nify modernity itself by conjuring up the two-dimensionality of posters or photographs; or
it could come to stand for the evenness of the process of seeing itself-as might be said of
Cezanne. In all his examples, Clark sees characteristic modernist pictorial techniques as "met-
aphorical" and outwardly oriented. All of the modernist "technical effects" within the work
can then be treated in this way. The ambiguities and syntactical instabilities of a modernist
art can be used to provide metaphorical resemblances to the complex interstitial world of "mar-
ginal" social classes, the petit bourgeoisie, the inhabitants of the leisure spaces of Haus-
mann' s boulevards and parks. However, because these modernist techniques are not seen as
aesthetically or semiotically necessary, in the sense of realizing a mode of seeing that con-
figures (aesthetically) both agency and identity in the subject, which determines what kind
of "saying" is possible and, by implication what kind of social process is being modelled, the
challenge of modernism can be evaded at an interpretive level.
FLATNESS AS A SEMIOTIC IMPERATIVE IN EARLY MODERNIST PAINTING
There is, however, a different type of explanation-one that Clark's work (in
does not entertain: flatness in painting can be seen as answering to a "semiotic
2 "Whether the simplified tonal structure of Olympia ... imitates similar effects in contempora
taken in strong sunlight or brilliant artificial light is less certain" (Reff 1976:79).

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
governing the construction of aesthetic discourse in modern society. In

and critics alike commented on the flatness of Manet's treatment of
himself, likened her to a playing card: "It's flat, it's not modelled, it's
stepping out of her bath."3 And yet, for all that, Olympia's appearance
fied with the "contemporary" and attributed to a "natural" vision. Emil
with the quotidien familiarity of the figure, its true-to-now sincerity. He
risy of "outrage" bourgeois patrons, describing the object of their det
has the serious fault of closely resembling young women of your acq
isn't that so?"4 In his defense of Manet and all modernist art and liter
himself practiced, he argued that the gap between the painter and his
the latter still expected a work of art to tell a story, to communicate
had nothing to do with this; according to Zola, Manet attended to tone
tints of nude flesh. His work recorded his truthful observations of the visu
the essential business of painting: "Tell them aloud then, cher maitre,
you is merely a pretext for analysis. You needed a nude woman, and
the first to come along; you needed clear and luminous tones and you
quet; you needed black tones and you placed in a corner, a negress and
that mean, you hardly know, and neither do I" (Reff 1976:22).
Writing things as they are or painting things as they are was a business
carding the ideological baggage with which forms in painting had been
Simplicity and sincerity were said to be the objective. The problem with
and it is an argument that has been stated in a multitude of different way
as well as critics since the time of Zola-is that while it rightly points to t
direct impressions things make upon a "temperament," it often fails t
knowledging the fact that the subjectivity that registers such impress
oughly conditioned for this purpose by sociocultural experience o
Furthermore, to realize such a natural impression in pictorial form requir
of semiotic strategies that answer to the "demand characteristics" of th
cultural experiences that have conditioned the artist's way of seeing in th
words, for an artist to perceive a figure "naturally" s/he must see into th
tion of the figure and make this knowledge constitutive of the work its
To paint sincerely and naturalistically with the aim of truthfully reg
values present, without seeking to use them to signify ideas, is no nat
act. On the contrary, it is a highly sophisticated act. To see the world
equivalent to what might be called "ordinary seeing." That would be to
of us see people and objects simply as they are, and there is little
support that. We classify, categorize, stereotype, and lattice every per
The kind of truth aimed at by artists who wish to depict the "unvarn
a thing demands a process of deconstruction in which the diverse soc
that enter into the intrasubjective construction of impressions of figu
as (mutually exclusive) "counter-forms," yielding a glimpse of somet
thing quotidien, contemporary, and "natural." Naturalness in modern
cence" or "naivete," but the product of cultural sophistication and artifi
metropolitan taste, not a "primitive" one.
What this amounts to saying is that the development of modernist a
density of cultural allusion rather than its absence. The simple reality
3 Reported by A. Wolffin, Le Figaro, 1 May 1883; cited in Reff (1976:30).

4 Emile Zola in L'Evenementt, May 1866; cited in Reff (1976:21). See also Hamilt
fuller account of Zola's defense.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
Manet's picture of Olympia-as a clearly recognizable type of mo

was not simple at all but a complex cultural construction. If she
because she was seen in her being constructed-in her self-composing.
of course, that modern viewers can see her in that way today. So m
deconstruction has gone on since 1865 that what was shocking or pu
contemporaries may be less so for us. It may even be that we don't p
as being as flat as it appeared to Courbet and his contemporaries. We
conventions deployed in such modernist works and may find it easier
form.
We might note here that the sociology of Goffman also aims at analysis that liberates
the "natural" condition of social subjects, that probes their social construction, their self-
composing. At the heart of all this constructive work we catch a glimpse of his earnest
performers, working so hard to make it all happen. What we glimpse is that evanescent
being, that fugitive being, already in the process of passing beyond one of its appearances,
to which Baudelaire (1964) alludes in The Painter of Modern Life.
In the Renaissance perceptual-realist traditions, art aimed at an identity of inner (sub-
jective) being and outer (objective) form. The ideal, expressed by Leon Battista Alberti
(1966), was that the gestures and movements of depicted bodies would express or convey
emotions; the dialectic of "inner" and "outer" thus became central to painting. Moreover,
subjectivity, extending beyond the immediate situation, comprehended the historical or
biographical development of the individual as well as the historical evolution of the social
totality that emerged from the interactions among individuals. Thus, the ideal of subject-
object identity is but an expression of a social process, of social relations in which there is
an identity between part and whole, between the individual subject and society. The social
totality is, therefore, presupposed in the actions of individuals, and their interactions with
others construct that totality as the project of an historical narrative or drama. Such a
process corresponds to the ideal of a bourgeois class in its "heroic" entrepreneurial phase
(see Witkin 1995, chap. 5; Hauser 1991).
A part-whole/inner-outer identity can best be constructed in and through a simulation
of the volumetric world of natural perception, not because we experience a need to be
amazed by likeness to that world but because the bodies and objects of natural perception
are possessed of mass and interiority and it is this which fits them semiotically for the
symbolic construction of the dialectics of inner/outer and, therefore, for the construction
of part-whole identity (see Witkin 1995, chap. 3). In a Vermeer painting of a woman
pouring milk or weighing gold or reading a letter, the attention and flow of thought that
animates the figure presupposes a unitary and integral subjectivity that is one with the
objects it animates. The more that such an identity between subject and object obtains,
albeit ideal-typically, the more does it demand the construction of depth and interiority in
depicted forms.
MODERNIST SOCIAL-BEING AS "MULTIPLE"
What then is different about the world of the modernist painters? The ans
the growing disparity between whole and part, between society and the
constitute it. Without this identity, the sensuous being of the subject, m
junct networks of the modern metropolis, is fragmented among a varie
contexts that are no longer continuous, that no longer add up. Each of t
furnishes the subject with a self, a "being"; the subject now becomes a "h
for a multiplicity of Goffmanian facet-beings. In the contemplative attitud
subject does not doubt itself, is not fragmented, does not deconstruct it
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
cannot be said of Manet's vision. The very contemporaneity of Olympia

a complex social coding, with the perception of a problematic "social-bei
In a class society we can think of class-being as shared among all classes
stance or material from which different and mutually exclusive forms of
constructed. Actually, some such idea is often part of taken-for-granted
eryday life. People think of their feelings and moods as varying across si
cumstances; however, most think of their disparate feelings as expressi
subjectivity, the same temperament or sensibility, that is, as constitutive of
no different when it is a "we" that is being constituted. The notion of shared
mode of being conveys the idea that differences among constitutive being
forms of this shared (value) substance, that they are all constitutive of th
The personal vision of the artist, in the depiction of Olympia, embrac
experience of class, prostitution, gender, and so forth. I would argue that it
to portray the absolutely contemporary and particular that Manet reache
level of abstraction, for a vision of social-being, of class- and gender-bein
be comprehensive for such a particularization, for such a contemporaneit
Class-being, manifest in a particular image of a (proletarian) "whore," is
incorporating the signs of the class-being of the sacral bourgeois feminine
tion of that image (the point will be elaborated below). In Olympia, the cl
proletarian and of the haute-bourgeois, the gender-being of the bourgeo
that of the courtesan/whore, the health of the one and the sickness of the other are all
deliberately confounded in the body of the central figure. The objective of such an art is
not the identity of subject and object but the pictorial realization of their nonidentity.
The subject is negatively present in the work, as a self-distancing, an ironizing, a decon-
structive process. Each of these "facet-beings"-haute-bourgeois woman, lower class-
whore, and so on-is in a relationship of nonidentity with the figure it constructs, a
nonidentity captured in their juxtaposition as "counter-forms." It is the nonidentity of any
of these facet-beings that now becomes key to an authentic vision. Olympia's contempo-
raneity is glimpsed in the negative dialectics played out in her construction. Thus the sense
of authenticity in modernist art is the antithesis of that in the Renaissance traditions that
preceded it; Manet's Olympia discloses the nonidentity of subject and object through jux-
taposing, as counterforms, mutually deconstructive realizations of her social-being as a
subject. This self-distancing of the subject from any and all of the subject-object identities
it constitutes is irony. In the concept of romantic irony as theorized in the late eighteenth
century by the Schlegel brothers, the distancing process was one in which an author did not
identify with his or her characters, in which s/he saw into their construction and thereby
deconstructed them. In modernism, however, irony is taken a step further; it registers the
self-distancing of the characters themselves, their mutually deconstructive relations within
the text-literary or visual. To borrow Adorno's phrase, modernist art pursues a "negative
dialectics." It therefore has no use for an aesthetic that pursues, at a semiotic level, the
identity between subject and object (Witkin 1997).
The depiction of social-being as "material" out of which diverse and disjunctive forms
of social-being are constituted is best facilitated in painting by the cultivation of flatness,
by the reduction of focus to the aesthetic surface and to the aesthetic materials of construc-
tion. This liberates the signifying process and permits a semiotic complexification of the
image (paradoxically, as the very ground of its simplicity and contemporaneity) that was
not possible for a perceptual-realist art. Flatness in a painting brings to an end the dialec-
tics of inner and outer. It confines the focus to the aesthetic surface, to a field of sensuous
events that can more easily represent the (unitary) sensuous material, the sensuous consti-
tution or sensibility of the subject-which is also the social-being of the subject. Within
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
the unitary flatness of the design of a composition, mutually exclusiv

and through each other, can appear, semiotically, as forms of the sam
material.
JAPANESE TECHNIQUE
An important resource for Manet in developing his formal composition of Olympia wa

Nils Sandblad (1954) has so persuasively argued, the Japanese woodcuts of Hokusai, Kun
Utamaro, and others, examples of which were being found in Paris by the middle of
1850s. Manet's portrait of Zola, who defended him against his critics in the 1860s, inclu
within it, a depiction of two pictures, one of a Japanese woodcut by Kuniaki and one of
own Olympia.5 But what was the function of these "foreign" forms in constructing
contemporaneity of Manet's vision? The Japanese woodcuts appear to have served Ma
in a similar manner to that in which other non-European artistic cultures served the m
ernists who came after him. The influence of African carvings and masks on twenti
century artists, such as Picasso or Matisse, for example, has been extensively document
(see, e.g., Goldwater [1938] 1986). In neither case did this interest center on the cultu
that produced this art or even on the precise meanings that these techniques had within
for those cultures from which the masks came. Rather, it centered on the formal techn
used by these foreign artists and the possibilities those techniques afforded for solv
aesthetic problems and realizing semiotic objectives in a European art that was thoroug
modern. Sandblad (1954) points to certain characteristic features of Japanese art
flatness of figures enclosed in a strong and continuous contour line and superimpose
a flat background.6 He points, too, to the tendency to concentrate all the energies an
movements of the figure within its contours, with the figure standing more or less d
joined against its stationary background. He shows how Manet made use of such aesth
strategies in earlier paintings and how they are deployed in Olympia, where the con
line of Olympia, herself, is strongly drawn, where half-tones and tonal variations h
been minimized, where the body appears-rather like figures in the woodcuts-t
superimposed upon a flat tapestry of a background. Interactions between the figures h
been suppressed (as is essential if one moves from the intersubjective to the intrasub
tive); the frontal arrangement of the figures-the black maid is presenting a bouquet
flowers but Olympia is not receiving them-appears to be addressed to some unseen p
ence before them-the client, perhaps-while the cat, arching its back and with raised ta
is responding to this presence, as is Olympia herself, equally tense, stiffly posed, form
and with that flexed hand.
The concentration of movement and energy within the contour line of a form, the flat-
tening of forms and backgrounds so that objects are juxtaposed against each other and
against their background, serves to develop the sense of the "intensive" relations of form
as sensuous material. It is aesthetic material that facilitates, in modernist works, the semi
otic configuration of the being of the subject. This then, I argue, is the semiotic imperativ
of flatness in the context of modernist painting. All the complex allusive power of the
painting, its semiotic possibilities for establishing "reversals," "displacements," and "ambi-
guities," depends crucially upon the artist emphasizing the painted surface as "signifier"
and in loosening, so far as is possible, the strict relationship between the organization o
this surface and the logic of realistic representation. By suppressing modelling in figures
and by flattening the background and superimposing figures on it rather than placing them
5 Manet has actually altered the direction of gaze in both the depictions in order to turn them toward Zola.
6 Sandblad 1954:82; see also his discussion of another of Manet's paintings, La Chanteuse des Rues.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
in it, the depiction suppresses the functional and extensive relations am

functional relations, things are grasped by the mind in their substan
their unity as aesthetic material, as "stuff," as "substance." The suppre
relations frees each of the constructive aesthetic elements-line, light
texture, and so forth-from the obligation to describe objects, leaving
role in constructing aesthetic substance. Each form of that aesthetic m
tured in its most "present" and "contemporary" aspect; we grasp it in
is, in its "emerging from" and "self-distancing from" its counterform
About the meaning of modernist developments in Manet's painting
Manet's composition was no longer "realist" in the sense in which tha
stood to apply to Courbet-notwithstanding the fact that Manet was cer
categorized as a realist painter. He no longer sought to depict even
terms of what might be called the logic of situation. As Sandblad com
another of Manet's paintings, La Musique aux Tuileries: "For a momen
painter of reality. He does not attempt to paint the event nor even t
modulate the actual colours with the existent shades; he replaces reali
sign-language (1954:63-64: emphasis added). Aesthetic qualities, the qu
color, texture, light, and line cease to be self-effacing. They become th
interest. The artist dwells on the brush strokes, the marquetry of pain
substance. Art withdraws from three-dimensional, roundly modelled f
moving through a continuous space, from the construction of idea, th
timents and feelings, and from historical and narrative construction. A
literature and positions itself closer to music. Semiotically, flat pigmen
identified in modern art (but not archaic art) with the intrasubjective
just as the three-dimensional continuous space of a realist art was ide
sociohistorical world of objects, figures, and events through which in
MANET'S PARODIC REFERENCES
At one level Olympia is a nude in the grand tradition of European paintin

encing the sixteenth-century Renaissance masterpiece, Titian's Venus of U
ity, however, she is a thoroughly contemporary figure and the parodic de
the Titian is actually constitutive of her modernity. Manet's practice in m
ings, of referencing Renaissance masterpieces such as Titian or Velasquez
itself, exclusive to modernism. It has been common among artists in all
appropriate models from a tradition. There is a sense in which art must
reference art. Titian's Venus of Urbino was itself a version of Giorgione
some thirty year earlier. Moreover, Titian, like Manet, introduced signifi
tions of the original by placing the reclining goddess in the interior of a g
of-as in the Giorgione-a landscape; by opening her eyes, which in the G
closed; and by placing a small dog at her feet in place of a Cupid in the
(later painted out), and so forth.
However, the transformations wrought by Manet in respect of the Titian
ent order in the way they accomplish their effects-a modernist order. T
changing of the little sleeping dog at the foot of the Titian's Venus into t
the foot of Olympia's couch. In place of the maidservants, one of whom
what is probably a marriage chest, in the background of the Titian, Man
7 This is not the only source of parodic reference. Another obvious one is Goya's Maja.
pursue that source here. However, to do so would not affect my argument; it would only am

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
maidservant, now black, looming over Olympia in the foreground

senting her with an open bouquet of flowers wrapped in (news)pa
Venus, modestly and limply draped over her genitals, is transfo
hand of Olympia, harsh and flexed against her thigh. These mor
reversals are related to other formal changes that are most readil
devices referred to above. Titian's interior, unlike Manet's, is bo
Venus is placed in the foreground but the viewer can see beyond h
room with windows opening to the outside. His Venus is as soft
modelled as Manet's is harshly outlined, monochromatic, and flat
tonality, and form in the depiction of Titian's Venus is warm, wh
and severity pervades Manet's Olympia who, by comparison with
more naked-starkly naked.8 All of these reversals are quite delib
Manet's dependence upon traditional models drawn from the R
dependence much commented on and much misunderstood, is on
argue is a defining characteristic of modernist (as distinct from
lectical relationship to tradition. What was new here was the actua
of such "references." These are perhaps best referred to as "cult
elements in constituting the work that do not work through the o
they came from but through what they accomplish, as juxtaposed ele
the work. Thus the sense of "L'auguste jeune fille"-a line from a
Manet used as a caption for Olympia at her first exhibition-can be read in the whole
drape of the body and its presentation in the Titian. Manet's Olympia appropriates this
sense of the patrician in the pose of Titian's Venus. However, this effect is not achieved in
Manet's painting by our recognizing that Olympia is modelled on a Titian painting. When
the painting was first shown, only very few critics made such a connection (Clark 1990),
notwithstanding the fact that many of them were knowledgeable about artworks. The paint-
ing does not announce a parallel between the two works or rely on our knowledge of
cultural artifacts. All that it requires of us is a cultural familiarity with and perceptual
recognition of a certain situation together with a significant bodily attitude, a postural
meaning that is exemplified by the Titian but which can be read in the context of European
culture even by those who are entirely unfamiliar with the model.
The appropriation of this same patrician (or haute bourgeois) quality had been made
consciously or unconsciously by others, in the making of contemporary lithographs, por-
nographic images of nudes, and so forth. In short, our reading requires the kind of cultural
familiarity that is part of the taken-for-granted knowing in everyday life, the same cultural
familiarity that allows us to recognize commonplace objects and situations. The very moder-
nity of Manet's woman is grasped as a tense appropriation and deconstruction of that
situation, of that significant bodily attitude and that postural meaning. If Titian's master-
piece had not engendered a thousand contemporary echoes in Parisian culture of the 1860s,
would Manet have found a use for it in painting Olympia? He may even have been picking
up, as a challenge, an assertion made some years earlier by his close friend Baudelaire: "If
a painstaking, scrupulous but feebly imaginative artist has to paint a courtesan of today
and takes his "inspiration".... from a courtesan by Titian or Raphael, it is only too likely
that he will produce a work which is false, ambiguous and obscure." (1964:14).
I read this as having been responded to as a challenge by Manet because, in that essay,
it is clear that what is "false," in Baudelaire's lexicon, is a slavish adherence to tradition
Baudelaire had commented on the charming indecency of thinness: "Thinness is more bare, more indecent
than fatness" (Baudelaire, Charles, 1952, Vol. 2:58).
9 This line is from a long poem by his friend, Zacharie Astruc; Manet inscribed the first stanza on the frame o
the picture.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
and a refusal of modernity. Manet's painting appropriates the tradition

the contemporary, the glimpse of an evanescent modernity. He demons
modern, at least in his day, proves to be inseparable from the "ambi
Thus, tradition, ambiguity, and obscurity are brought together in the c
pia to liberate a modernity; Manet thereby demonstrates that Olympia
"feebly imaginative artist" and that the implication that such a cocktai
is false. Some art games can be truly multilayered.
THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNISM-T. J. CLARK'S READING OF OLYMPIA
The "game" of prostitution was well understood in Manet's day. The class background
those drawn into the "profession" was more or less obvious as were the conditions, esta
lishments, and venues in which prostitutes plied their trade. For a sophisticated Parisia
the 1860s, the prostitute and the courtesan had their allotted place in the endless circu
tion of sights, meanings, and money values that made up the modern metropolis. Wh
would it mean "to make all this visible"-how would one do so? The problem is that of t
fundamental categories into which social life is poured, categories such as social class,
marriage, gender, the family, and so forth. At the level of functional and means-end r
tions, such categories are "hard-edged" in the sense of having more or less clear boun
aries in respect to their functional relations and differentiation from other categories.
making all this visible were truly the goal of painting, then there would be a basis f
agreeing with many Marxist aestheticians who have advanced the claims of realist sty
of art over modernisms (Lukacs 1963).
The growing autonomy of subjectivity, of art, and of culture creation, its disembedding
(as culture creation) from the sphere of instrumental relations, widens the compass of cu
tural resources available to the subject through which the fundamental tensions of the sen
suous life seek resolution. Of course, class, gender, domination, power, and exploitation ar
involved in the process of culture creation and in the invasive appropriations through whic
the socially dominant seek to resolve the tensions and reinforce the spiritual claims of a re
deeming sphere of purely personal relations in their own lives. An art that discloses all thi
that makes this process of culture construction-of categorial invasiveness and appropriation
visible, together with the contradictory forms of social-being involved in it, would have t
be a polysemic, syntactically unstable art of paradox and irony-a modernism.
I would argue that Manet's Olympia offended the bourgeois critics of his day because o
its modernist vision. It is equally possible, however, to see the offense to bourgeois sen
sibilities as having been caused despite and not because of the painting's modernism. Th
is a view that would seem ideally suited to a Marxist reading of the painting. The reasonin
is as follows: For many Marxist aestheticians (Lukacs 1963), a Marxist account of social
relations and social life, of the drama of class conflict and exploitation, is one for which
"realist" sensibility appears to be both integral and necessary. The grand historical narra-
tive in classical Marxism is one in which concrete and absolutely particular individuals
contributing, through their interactional relations with others, to the historical develop-
ment of a society are, at the same time, absolutely typical of that society-in-the-making
The organic interconnectedness of individuals in the making of a society, their historicity
appears to demand for its depiction a realist art, since the latter is suited to depicting bot
the interaction of individuals and the organic drama of part-whole identity (Witkin 1995
From this point of view, modernism, which undermines historical construction and sub
verts and fragments objects and individuals, is seen as being unsuited to the task of truth
fully depicting reality. It is accused of succumbing to the pathology of capitalism, of
indulging alienation. It has been especially true of what one might term "official Marxism
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
that modernism's discriminative structure and project has been criticized

ical to the task of depicting class and class conflict (Lukacs 1963).
While T. J. Clark (1990) makes no such large theoretical claims for rea
nevertheless exemplify just such a critical approach to modernist artwork
that, notwithstanding certain caveats in its stated intentions (Clark 1973)
distinction between the artist's project and that of the (Marxist) sociolog
sociologist's understanding of modern society as a class society and of cl
ploitative provides the interpretive frame for analyzing and evaluating th
pia as a work of art. The perceptiveness and skill of the artist is judged t
reflects and realizes, even illustrates, the insights and understandings of
this case, the Marxist sociologist-and it is judged to be inferior if it doe
end, such critiques frequently conclude by castigating modernist art for no
of a realist project-modernism is all wrong because it is not realism
quence, for not reinforcing a Marxist construction of social relations.'0
Not surprisingly, therefore, Clark, himself, is ambivalent with respect to
ers of modern life, "Manet and his followers." In Clark's view, the real
society is not equivalent or reducible to the kind of spectacle represen
Parisian boulevards and grand magasins-the quintessential spaces of fin
tainment and bourgeois leisure celebrated in the art of the Impressionist
boundaries become blurred and in which social categories are continuou
cally transformed and recycled. This is the world of the petit bourgeoisie
shopkeepers, those who in some sense inhabit the margins between the tw
capitalist and proletariat: "It is not enough to say that they [Manet and h
bourgeois artists; it needs stressing, rather, that their practise as painter
modern-depended upon their being bound more closely than ever before
and economic habits of the bourgeoisie they belonged to" (Clark 1995:260).
Clark's overall judgment of the "painters of modern life" is that they did not succeed in
meeting the demands of a true understanding of modern life and especially of class, because
they inhabited the interstices and declassified leisure spaces of a petit-bourgeois world.
Certain of their paintings that did succeed in depicting social class (and these Clark treats
as exceptions) are works that, in his account, succeed despite and not because of their
modernism. Olympia is seen as one such exception: "If I have spent a great deal of my time
rehearsing exceptions to the general rule, it has not been in order to suggest that the rule
does not apply, or that the exceptions were more than partial . . . and if certain bourgeois
artists now wish to exceed the modernist frame of reference, this will involve them in
discovering what remains of modernism" (1995:260).
Certain exceptional modernist works succeed, for Clark, because somehow a realist
project can be glimpsed through their complex and obfuscating orders of meaning. Olym-
pia is a modernist work-Clark does not deny her that-but it succeeds, nevertheless, in
conveying something of the reality of class and exploitation in the "game" of prostitution
Olympia succeeds, in Clark's critique, despite and not because of her modernism. But by
success, here, Clark means that despite its difficulties Olympia depicts social class and
exploitation.
In the final analysis, Clark's reading of the hostility of Manet's contemporaries amounts
to claiming that they were offended by the violation of bourgeois ideology. The debased
and exploitative reality that the game of prostitution was designed to conceal is made
visible in the painting, and both sexuality and social class are present and constitutive o
the body of Olympia. We are entitled to ask, however, if this depiction of class is more
"0 For a discussion of this, see Lunn 1985.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
apparent than real, an artifact of Clark's own project that leads him into a reading that aims
at snatching a realist project from the jaws of Manet's modernism. Modernism appears to
many Marxist critics to have withdrawn from all the hard classifications that constitute the
social realities of which these theorists are certain. At the heart of modern society we
confront the hard truths of social classes and relations of exploitation, the great engines of
capitalism, and so forth. The challenge that confronts the artist is, in this view, to realize a
truthful depiction of these "hard-edged" truths. Modernism, it is argued, has led art into
subjectivism and formalism, into the vagueries of a shifting and unstable set of paradoxes:
"It [modernist art] prefers the unfinished, the syntactically unstable, the semantically mal-
formed. It produces and savours discrepancy in what it shows and how it shows it, since
the highest wisdom is knowing that things and pictures do not add up" (Clark 1995:12).
AN ALTERNATIVE READING OF THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF OLYMPIA
Clark applauds the depiction of class in the painting; but if the paint
depicting class it is probably not class in the hard-edged sense in whic
that is, class as a determined location within the social body; it is much
painting depicts the constitutive dynamics of class, that is, class as c
itive "rational" and "historical" construction of the world is the grou
version of Marxist criticism and the critical consciousness of bourgeoi
time, to whom Olympia appeared genuinely incomprehensible. In the p
class relations, the prostitute exemplifies exploitative relations at the
and gender. However, the negative dialectics of modernist art, in its
constitutive dynamics of experience, discovers the juxtaposition of m
social categories, with all the accompanying sense of invasion and pos
the dream rather than waking reality is the model.
In the dream, objects, relations, and events that could not belong to
time or space in real life are often confounded. " Objects can be strange
and something else altogether. The distinction of here and now, ther
forth, vanishes and what makes no objective sense is somehow fraugh
import. Freud (1973) labelled this division between two types of consciousness-
sensuous id consciousness and realistic ego consciousness-as primary process and sec-
ondary process, respectively. There are precursors of such a principle. Hegel (1977) begins
his Phenomenology by positing for consciousness an original state of sensuous certainty
that is marked by a complete undifferentiation. More recently, and acknowledging Freud,
Ulric Neisser (1967, chap. 11), in his book Cognitive Psychology, had recourse in his
account of the cognitive processing of information to this same distinction between an
undifferentiating awareness that knows no distinction between this and that or now and
then and a differentiating awareness. Among writers on the arts, Anton Ehrenzweig (1967)
made this distinction central in his analysis of the creative process. He claims that the
duality reaches into the very process of reception, arguing that superior listening, in the
case of complex polyphonic music, for example, is listening with an undifferentiating
mind, as opposed to listening with a mind that taps out the dominant rhythm or melody
line.
Dedifferentiation as a process is ironogenic. Its quintessential form is that of the para-
dox. Rend Magritte was a master of this aspect of the modernist subversive project (Gablik
1970). Through ludic reversals and transformations, the undifferentiating subject discloses
itself as a distancing, a deconstructing of the forms of experience. Deconstruction presup-
" For a discussion of this, see Ehrenzweig 1967.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
poses a move to a higher level of abstraction, one which can take as

foundational forms of experience themselves. The relentless ironogen
a modernist art must have been lprifoundly unsettling to Manet's c
whom those foundational formis w\ ere the ground on which they stood
the possibility of working from the basic contradictions of social r
establish a new harmony, a new reconciliation of subject and ob
bourgeois no less than that of the (traditional) Marxist. Those same
ries were slowly dissolved in the acid of an ironizing vision: upper-c
class whore, man/woman, health/sickness, the respectable/disreput
exploited; nothing was free or secure from the disconcerting habit of tu
or simply becoming something else.
In Manet's Olympia, the ludic dance of dedifferentiation and deco
out with truly subversive effect. The central symbol is the naked bo
woman or is it a man? It is a woman. However, not all of the early cri
point, as the body can be read as incorporating some signs of gender
kind of a woman was she? Critics seemed to be in little doubt that
"operating at the lower end of the market." There are signs of this, t
presentation, and situation, the slippers, the ribbon, the head, and so f
pia also incorporates signs of the haute bourgeois as well as sign
courtesan-in the patrician drape of the body, for example. And both
courtesan are assimilated to the grand icon of the bourgeois feminine
Titian nude, the Venus of Urbino.
Where exactly can we locate the body of Olympia in the social aren
that is being played out here'? Is Manet simply poking fun at the g
renaissance nude? Or is there a more direct and motivated connection for all these ambi-
guities and contradictions? The choice of the Titian nude is careful and deliberate. Th
image of the ideal of the bourgeois feminine, which Titian's painting presents, is ass
lated by Manet to the image of the self-presentation of the courtesan/whore. But w
These images are not just juxtaposed, they "possess" one another. It is almost as thou
warp and weave, Manet is claiming that the two images are made of the same stuff.
assuming the pose of Titian's Venus, Olympia discloses an origin for the game of pro
tution; it is a game with its origin in the tensions of the bourgeois marriage bed at the hea
of the bourgeois conjugal family. The little sleeping dog (a symbol of marital fidelity
the foot of Titian's Venus, is transformed into the black cat with arched back (a symb
sexuality) at the feet of Olympia. The servant discretely moving about in the backgrou
of the Venus is transformed into the black maid brought forward onto the picture plane a
looming above Olympia, presenting the open bouquet of flowers (another sexual imag
The defined curves and womanly fleshiness of Titian's Venus, the strong legs, and so fo
give way to the thin and wan appearance, indistinct curves, and pale ivory hue of the f
of Olympia. In this way the upper-class icon of the grand nude comes to assimilate c
acteristics that are the opposite to what is normally associated with it. Class, health, m
tery, and beauty, all are turned inside out and reversed in the painting.
Let us consider more closely the double possession that takes place here. There is t
possession of the sacral image of the bourgeois feminine by the courtesan and, within t
the possession of the classless courtesan by the working-class whore. The game of pr
titution is that of cultivating the role of the classless courtesan that the bourgeois clie
demands. The courtesan must resemble in certain respects the ideal of femininity that
the heart of respectable bourgeois society. She must seek to be beautiful in the sense
which that society cultivates the ideal of beauty. Indeed, her allure is in part related to
extent to which she can simulate the manners and constraints of bourgeois life, constra
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
which, by virtue of the very nature of her profession, she violates.

bourgeois seek to dress the courtesan in the ideal of sexual restraint an
he identifies with the respectable woman? To understand this aspect
necessary to consider the contradictory nature of the bourgeois femin
As Habermas (1992) has observed, in The Transformation of the
intimacy of bourgeois family life, the sphere of the domestic interior,
heart of an increasingly calculative and market-centred world. The bou
ket thinks of himself as homme in the home. The woman, as idealize
bourgeois feminine, is the spiritual center of this ideology. Habermas
ing fissure between the sensuous life and the instrumental life within
tween the public and the private spheres that emerged from the midd
century. The bourgeois public sphere was made up of private ind
rational and critical debate with one another about public affairs.
from a specific subjectivity that "had its home, literally, in the spher
conjugal family (ibid:43)." The sphere of intimate relations within the
set it apart from the constraints of the rational-technical order, makin
love and permitting the free development of all the noninstrumental
personality.
These claims on behalf of a free and sensuous humanity have to be seen as ideological,
as Habermas notes. The conjugal family's self-image collided with its true function, which
was to play its precisely defined role in the reproduction of capital. The private autonomy
of the patriarchal head of the family in the economic realm was complemented by the
dependence of his wife and children upon him in the domestic sphere. However, as Haber-
mas notes, these ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person that grew out of the
experiences of the conjugal family's private sphere were more than merely ideological. As
an objective element in the structure of an institution, the subjective validity of these ideas
was essential to the society's ability to reproduce itself.
In the terms I have developed here, the construction of the bourgeois feminine redeemed
the bourgeois discourse of motives through linking it to a discourse of values. Access to
that discourse of values was through the body of the woman. The woman/goddess of the
classic nude was one of its important symbolic representations. From about the middle of
the eighteenth century to the last quarter of the nineteenth century it might still be possible
to maintain that both bourgeois and homme could be reconciled; that as homme, with some
kind of secure footing in the sphere of "purely human relations," buttressed by the insti-
tution of the family and of domestic life generally, the bourgeois homo economicus could
redeem himself. Bourgeois society could console itself by a device aimed at recovering for
it its own lost sensibility. The bourgeois feminine and the discourse of values which it
instantiated, provided (ideal-typically) both consolation and redemption. It could be argued,
as does Herbert Marcuse (1977), that this same function of consolation and redemption
defined the relationship of bourgeois society to art, music, and theatre in the nineteenth
century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the myth of the free sensu-
ous subject at the heart of the private sphere of bourgeois life was becoming increasingly
hard to sustain. The more thoroughgoing the development of economic life and the market,
the more did the demands of the instrumental life begin to permeate every corner of the
institutions of modern society. It became hard to find a creative and free center from within
that order from which to promise redemption. For most people, no doubt, the illusion of
the opposition between a sphere of purely human relations in the family, a sphere of
freedom within the bourgeois domestic stronghold, and the world of instrumental relations
continued to be the dominant ideology. In reality, however, the intimate sphere of bour-
geois domestic life and family relations was the very womb of bourgeois values. The
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
bourgeois world could not be transformed or transfigured by such relat

its critique but its quintessential realization.
The economic power of the male-market power-is an individuate
ticipates in a discourse of motives, of motivation and desire. The intim
bourgeois feminine as a cultural form is integral to family and comm
with a discourse of values rather than a discourse of motives. The sacr
bourgeois marriage relation both eroticizes the bourgeois feminine as
desire and drains her of sexuality at the same time. This is the formula,
Renaissance paintings of the nude to which Clark refers, the nude as
body (to the male) but having no sexual motives, no marks of sexualit
sacralization of the bourgeois feminine places it beyond the reach of t
arouses. It insists on the separation of value from motive. Value re
motive.
There is a tension here for which the game of prostitution is one kind of resolution.
classless courtesan simulates the sacralized power of the bourgeois feminine only to fa
itate its desacralization, its displacement from a discourse of values and of love to a
course of motives and desire, that is, to bring its erotic potential into the world of exch
values and market transactions. The game of prostitution draws its reality from the v
marriage relation of which it is held to be the antithesis. The game has its origin in
tension generated there. The respectable and the disreputable possess one another, th
marriage bed of the goddess and the couch of the whore are one.
Finally, the courtesan's simulation of the sacralized erotic of the bourgeois feminine
demands the concealment of class. Manet's deliberate confounding of the signs of the
lower-class whore and the classless courtesan in the body of Olympia discovers this con-
cealment. The suffering and injuries of class-the signs of sickness, tiredness, and
depravity-are there in the proffered body of Olympia. The bourgeois feminine conjures
the disreputable out of the respectable, bodily sickness out of bodily health, the lower-
class whore out of the upper-class woman, the desacralizing game of prostitution out of
sacralizing bourgeois marriage bond.
Olympia distances herself in the very process by which she arranges her nudity. A
Clark himself notes, the observer has some difficulty in establishing a point of view fr
which to relate to the painting. Olympia is in command, here. There is an element of ro
play demanded of the observer. As she arranges herself for the encounter, we are pos
tioned in the place that the prospective client would occupy. Her stare is cool and frank
makes no pretense to identify with the game to be played out with the "india rubber" bo
the pliable and "informe" body, ready to assume whatever shape or condition that is requi
of it. The body is offered, its spiritual centre is withdrawn-inviolate-from the use that
to be made of the body. That withdrawal is an act of self-possession; not so the body of
client who is engaged in a more or less futile attempt to resolve the contradictions of a
politics of intimacy, of a sacralizing and desacralizing of woman that has its origin in th
bourgeois marriage bed. This last reversal, which brings the working-class whore into t
commanding position, which assimilates the construction of the bourgeois feminine to t
self-possession of Olympia in the game of prostitution, raises the ironogenic structure
the work to a new level. The powerless, in self-possession, possesses, constructs, and act
The powerful is possessed, constructed, and acted upon.
There is something about these last reversals that suggests a Christian theme. Ther
were only two paintings exhibited by Manet at that exhibition. The other painting, actua
exhibited together with Olympia, was Christ Insulted by the Soldiers. Was there a conne
tion between the two? Is the whore, receiving the tribute of flowers wrapped in (new
paper, some kind of echo of the insulted Christ who identified with whores and sinners?
159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
it even possible that there might be echoes here of a Magdalene? Man

also modelled on a Titian painting-Christ Crowned with Thorns. I
was a well-known history of painters, Blanc's Histoire des Peintre
(Reff 1970). There can be little doubt that Manet himself must have
story is told about Titian. The great Venetian painter is said to have ta
ings to his patron, Emperor Charles V; one was the Christ Crowned wit
was a Venus. In this story, Titian is said to have been motivated by th
patron an image provoking spiritual reflection softened by another one
beauty as consolation. Manet's deliberate use of both the Christ Crown
the Venus as models for Olympia and for his scourged Christ, togethe
the paintings in his submission of them to the salon, suggest that he w
demonstrating his skills in painting both the male and female nude.
How the painting is read is clearly determined by what sense is m
strategies deployed in its construction. If no new semiotic strategies a
to the artist then everything he does-the flatness of figures, the lack
forth-will be seen as error and as transgression, as a stepping down fr
in a tradition. The slap in the face that Olympia represented at her fir
have had a great deal to do with the failure of many critics to credit th
taking place at a semiotic level. They measured Olympia against conv
ideals and found her wanting. If the viewer could actually meet the
and engage with the picture in the way it demanded, would s/he any
finding a secure home in the mythic worlds of bourgeois spirituality?
could not meet this challenge-and the critics at the first exhibition of Olympia, in all
probability could not-the image of Olympia would arouse a sense of outrage of the kind
one experiences when confronted by contamination, profanity, obscenity, sacrilege, and by
all those feelings that are aroused in the presence of impiety and impurity. Such feelings
presuppose that the mythic home is still secure, that the challenge of the work has not been
met by those receiving it.
In my reading of Olympia, I have argued that modernism reflects a decisive shift in
aesthetic discourse from a concern with object relations and the drama of social interaction
to a concern with the intrapersonal construction of subjectivity, with social-being. I ha
argued that the ambiguous situation of nineteenth-century bourgeois economic man, wh
link to a discourse of values was through the sacralized body of the bourgeois feminine
gave rise to an irresolvable contradiction at the level of cultural construction. Sacraliza
lent an erotic charge to the cultural construction of the bourgeois feminine that was direct
proportional to the degree to which, as the embodiment of value, she resisted possess
by motive. The courtesan simulated the sacral bourgeois feminine, only to desacralize it
bringing its erotic potential into the realm of exchange values.
In 1864, the year before Manet exhibited Olympia, a lithograph was published that h
the title What Difference is There? It was by August Andrieux, and in it one can find s
remarkable echoes of Manet's Olympia (see Reff 1976: lithograph appears p. 116). It
shows a fully dressed courtesan, half reclining, with a cool gaze, a flower in her hair,
jewels at her wrist and throat. Whereas Olympia is naked and behind her stands a black
maid presenting her with a bouquet of flowers from an admirer, the Andrieux courtesan
clothed and behind her, similarly positioned and angled, stands the black-coated admirer
himself. The Andrieux lithograph reveals the cultural complexity of Olympia as an image
The Titian is a major reference but there are contemporary models, too-lithographs such
as this one, contemporary odalisques, daguerreotype pictures of nudes, and a style of
pornography associated with the theatre (Reff 1976)-all no doubt bearing some distant
kinship to the Titian. Particularly interesting, from the point of view of the argument I hav

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
developed above, is the caption to the Andrieux lithograph which reads:

is there at first sight between a grand dame and a petite dame? They dr
the Bois [de Boulogne] at the same time; they receive the same gentlem
are equally elegant and each wears as much false hair as the other. Ver
(p. 116).
Olympia takes its place as one among a number of cultural resou
unmask the pretense and illusion involved in the politics of desire and
claims of a sphere of purely personal relations in modern society (Wit
bourgeois sought to redeem his humanity through his construction of
nine then it is surely this very possibility of redemption that is denied
The painting can be assimilated to a wider cultural project in which the
the bourgeois feminine, with all its implications for gender relations, p
tant symbolic means. That the work may be seen as contributing to such
entitle us to presume that the artist formulated his intentions in terms of
this is what he thought he was doing. To see clearly, in a sociocultural co
of all of us, not just artists. There is no reason to suppose, however, tha
for this depend upon an interest in or ability to formulate such a see
terms, let alone to explain it in those terms.
REFERENCES
Alberti, Leon Battista. 1966. On Painting, translated by J. R. Spencer. New Haven: Yale
Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Ch
Chicago Press.
Avineri, Shlomo. 1972. Hegel's Theory of the Modern State. London: Cambridge University Press.
Bales, Robert Freed. 1950. Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups. Cambridge,
Mass: Addison-Wesley Press.
Bataille, Georges. 1955. Manet, translated by Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons. New York: Skira Inc.
Publishers.
Baudelaire, Charles. 1952. Oevres Posthumes, edited by Jacques Crepet and Claude Pichois. Volume 2 (cite
Reff 1970).
Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by J
Mayne. London: Phaidon.
Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of
Pictorial Style. 2d ed. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. 1986. Lafolie du vior: de l'esthetique Baroque. Paris: Editions Galilee.
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bryson, Norman. 1983. "Image, Discourse, Power." Pp. 133-62 in Vision and Painting. London: Macmillan.
Clark, T. J. 1973. Image of the People: Gustav Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. London: Thames and Hudson.
. 1990. The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers. London: Thames and
Hudson.
Crane, Diana. 1987. The Transformation of the Avant-Garde. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
DiMaggio, Paul, ed. 1986. Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Ehrenzweig, Anton. 1967. The Hidden Order of Art. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Freud, Sigmund. 1973. The New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, edited by James Strachey. Harmon
worth: Penguin.
Gablik, Suzi. 1970. Magritte. London: Thames & Hudson.
Goldwater, Robert John. [1938]1986. Primitivism in Modern Art. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.
Gombrich, E. H. 1978. Meditations on a Hobby Horse, and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, 3d ed. Londo
New York: Phaidon.
Habermas, Jiirgen. 1992. The Structural Tranisformation of the Public Sphere: Au Inquiry into
Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Hamilton, George Heard. 1969. Manet and His Critics. New York: Norton and Co. Inc.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC
Hanson, Anne C. 1979. Manet and the Modern Tradition. New Haven: Yale University
Hauser, Arnold. 1991. The Social History of Art, 4 vols. London: Routledge.
Hegel. G.W.F. [1807] 1977. Phenomenology. Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford:
Homans, George Caspar. 1950. The Humanl Group. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Jay, Martin. 1988. "Scopic Regimes of Modernity." Pp. 3-23 in Vision anid Visualitv
Seattle, Wash.: Bay Press.
Jennings, Helen Hill. 1950, Leadership a nd Isolationl. New York: Longmans, Green.
Lukacs, Georg. 1963. The Meaning of Contelmporar- Realism, translated by John and
Merlin Press.
Lunn, Eugene. 1985. Marvism and Modernlism. London: Verso.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1977. The Aesthetic Dimensions: Toward ca Critique of Marvrist Aesthetics. London:
Nead, Lynn. 1987. "The Magdalen in Modern Times." Pp. 73-92 in Looking On: Images of Feminini
Visuall Arts and Media, edited by Rosemary Betterton. London: Pandora Press.
Neisser, Ulric. 1967. Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Nochlin, Linda. 1991. "Manet's Masked Ball at the Opera." Pp. 75-94 in The Politics of Visionl: E
Nineteenth-Century Art catid Society. London: Thames and Hudson.
Parsons, Talcott and Robert F. Bales. 1955. FLamily Socialization cllad Inlteractioti Process. Glencoe, Ill.: Free
Press.
Reft, Theodore. 1970. "Manet and Blanc's Histoires des pei/ltres." Blrlingtoli Magazine CXI1, N. 808 Pp
456-58.
.1976. Maiet, Ollympiia. London: Alan Lane, Penguin Books Ltd.

1976. Mcalet, Olympica. New York: Viking Press.
Sandblad, Nils G. 1954. Mianet: Tlhree Studies in Artistic Conlception, trans. Walter Nash. Lund: C
Sievers, Burkhardt. 1986. "Beyond the Surrogate of Motivation." Organizationl Studies 7:335-3
Wirth, Louis. 1938. "Urbanism as a Way of Life." Americcan Journlal of Sociology 44:1-24.
Witkin, Robert W. 1995. Art ciild Social Structure. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
. Forthcoming. Adornio on Music: A Sociological Perspective. London: Routledge.
Wolff, Kurt H. ed. 1950. "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in The Sociology of Georg Siierie
Free Press.
Worringer, Wilhelm. 1953. Abstra-ctioin and Empalthy: A Cointributiotl to the Psychology of Stlle, trans
Michael Bullock. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Zolberg, Vera. 1996. "Paying for Art-The Temptations of Privatization a l'Americaine." InlternlatioIa
ogy 11:395-408.

159.242.227.148 on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:05:09 UTC

Constructing A Sociology For An Icon of Aesthetic Modernity - Olympia Revisited (Robert W. Witkin)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Constructing A Sociology For An Icon of Aesthetic Modernity - Olympia Revisited (Robert W. Witkin)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Constructing a Sociology for an Icon of Aesthetic Modernity: Olympia Revisited

Author(s): Robert W. Witkin

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/201949

This content downloaded from

University of Exete;r U.K.

I address the problem of constructing a sociology of the artwork through analyzing on

Sociological Theory 15:2 August 1997

This content downloaded from

Instrumentally, an Olympia at the Salon of 1865 may be of little concern to the

This content downloaded from

Odalisque and Prostitute .. . (and) all these collisions of discursive top

In this paper I address the problem of constructing a sociology of th

VALUE-STRUCTURES AND MOTIVE-STRUCTURES

The contrast between "instrumental" and "solidary" social relations constitu

This content downloaded from

comprising the modernist presentational code-that are the semiotic corr

To the autonomy of property owners in the market corresponded the self-presentation

This content downloaded from

sciousness of itself. It seemed to be established voluntarily and by f

This situation gives rise to a cultural configuration that is at the very

This content downloaded from

Manet's paintings, and those of Cezanne, mark an important transition

This content downloaded from

subjective order. Fidelity to the intrasubjective demands aesthetic strateg

The tension between the poles of experience-the intrasubjective and

This content downloaded from

certain notoriety (Clark 1990). Olympia has been variously located in

./' ' ' 1- -11, ^ *11 * 11' 1 - - ^^^^ ^.... ...........:..

The painting instantiates aesthetic strategies that have in subsequent works

superimposed upon the background. Contrastively, within that outline, cu

FLATNESS AS A SIGN OR METAPHOR FOR MODERN LIFE

There is a theoretical decision to be made concerning the cultivation of the

FLATNESS AS A SEMIOTIC IMPERATIVE IN EARLY MODERNIST PAINTING

This content downloaded from

governing the construction of aesthetic discourse in modern society. In

3 Reported by A. Wolffin, Le Figaro, 1 May 1883; cited in Reff (1976:30).

This content downloaded from

Manet's picture of Olympia-as a clearly recognizable type of mo

MODERNIST SOCIAL-BEING AS "MULTIPLE"

cannot be said of Manet's vision. The very contemporaneity of Olympia

the unitary flatness of the design of a composition, mutually exclusiv

An important resource for Manet in developing his formal composition of Olympia wa

This content downloaded from

in it, the depiction suppresses the functional and extensive relations am

MANET'S PARODIC REFERENCES

At one level Olympia is a nude in the grand tradition of European paintin

This content downloaded from

maidservant, now black, looming over Olympia in the foreground

This content downloaded from

and a refusal of modernity. Manet's painting appropriates the tradition

THE CRITIQUE OF MODERNISM-T. J. CLARK'S READING OF OLYMPIA

that modernism's discriminative structure and project has been criticized

"0 For a discussion of this, see Lunn 1985.

This content downloaded from

AN ALTERNATIVE READING OF THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF OLYMPIA

" For a discussion of this, see Ehrenzweig 1967.

This content downloaded from

poses a move to a higher level of abstraction, one which can take as

which, by virtue of the very nature of her profession, she violates.

bourgeois world could not be transformed or transfigured by such relat

it even possible that there might be echoes here of a Magdalene? Man

This content downloaded from

./' ' ' 1- -11, ^ 11 11' 1 - - ^^^^ ^.... ...........:..