When Édouard Manet exhibited Olympia at the 1865 Paris Salon, the critics called it vulgar, immoral, and technically incompetent. They were wrong on all three counts — but their discomfort revealed something true: the nude had always been about power, and Manet had just handed it to the wrong person.
The painting has hung in the Musée d’Orsay for decades now, serene and unapologetic, a rectangle of creamy paint that somehow still unsettles. Understanding why it caused a scandal in 1865 — and why it matters so much to how we talk about nude art today — requires understanding what the nude was supposed to be, and exactly how Manet broke it.
The Acceptable Nude: What Came Before
To grasp the shock of Olympia, you have to understand what French academic painting had spent centuries building: a set of conventions that made the naked female body safe to look at. The formula was elegant in its hypocrisy. Take a real woman. Render her nude. Then give her a mythological alibi.
Call her Venus, Diana, or a nymph surprised at her bath. Soften her gaze so she doesn’t look back. Smooth her skin into marble. Place her in a timeless, context-free landscape. If she’s asleep, so much the better — then she can’t object. The viewer could enjoy the painting while telling himself he was appreciating classical tradition, not leering at a woman.
This is why Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) was considered tasteful while Manet’s Olympia (1863) was considered obscene — even though both paintings show essentially the same composition: a reclining nude woman on white drapery, gazing at the viewer. The pose is nearly identical. The scandal was not the nudity. It was what Manet changed.
What Manet Actually Did
Where Titian’s Venus is soft, classical, and dreamily available, Manet’s Olympia is specific, present, and completely in charge. She’s not Venus. She’s Victorine Meurent, a Parisian model and artist in her own right, and she is looking at you.
Not gazing — looking. Her gaze is direct, level, and utterly without deference. One hand rests at her side but deflects rather than invites. She has a name — Olympia was a well-known euphemism for a courtesan — which means Manet stripped away the mythological alibi entirely. He told the viewer: this is a real woman, she knows you’re here, and she is unmoved by your presence.
The orchid in her hair, the black ribbon at her throat, the maid presenting flowers from an unseen admirer — every detail reinforces the same point. Olympia is not a goddess submitting to the male gaze. She is a professional woman conducting a transaction, and she holds all the cards.
Critics at the time compared her to a “yellow-bellied odalisque,” a “female gorilla,” a “sphinx.” The language of the reviews was nakedly misogynist, and that’s precisely the point: they were reacting not to nudity but to autonomy. The nude was acceptable when it was passive. The moment the woman in the painting looked back — really looked back — it became obscene.
The Long History of Who Gets to Be Naked
The Olympia scandal sits at the intersection of two questions that have governed the nude in art for centuries: whose body gets to be depicted, and on whose terms?
For most of Western art history, the nude was female, mythological, and passive. Male nudes tended toward the heroic — Michelangelo’s David, the Dying Gaul — their nakedness a symbol of strength rather than availability. The female nude, by contrast, existed almost entirely for the male viewer’s consumption, framed in whatever literary context made that consumption feel elevated.
Manet didn’t invent this problem, but he made it impossible to ignore. By stripping away the mythological fig leaf and presenting a fully conscious, fully present woman, he forced viewers to confront what they’d been doing all along. The discomfort this caused is a near-perfect measure of how deeply those conventions had been internalized — so deeply that when a painter deviated from them, it felt like obscenity.
The question Manet raised in 1865 has never really been resolved. It just keeps recurring in new forms: in arguments over which bodies deserve fine art treatment, in debates over who gets to make nude art and who gets to judge it, in the ongoing battles between art institutions and social media platforms over what counts as acceptable nudity. The algorithms that flag a Rubens but allow a Calvin Klein ad are running the same logic the Salon critics ran in 1865 — just faster and at scale.
The Scandal’s Legacy
Whatever the critics thought in 1865, history has been unambiguous: Olympia is one of the most important paintings in the Western canon. It announced Impressionism before Impressionism had a name. It broke the fourth wall of the nude. It told painters that the purpose of a figure in a painting was not to perform availability but to exist — fully, specifically, and on its own terms.
Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse all cited it as transformative. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is in many ways a radicalized response to Olympia — five women who don’t just look back but demand reckoning. The line from Manet to the feminist art criticism of the 1970s and 80s, to the Guerrilla Girls’ famous 1989 poster asking “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?”, is direct and unbroken.
And there’s something fitting about that legacy. A painting that was reviled in its time for giving too much agency to the woman depicted became the founding document for an entire tradition of thinking about agency, representation, and power in art. The thing that scandalized the critics turned out to be exactly the thing that mattered.
Why This Still Matters
Nude art is always a negotiation with power. It always raises the same fundamental questions: Who is being depicted? By whom? For whom? With what kind of gaze, and from which direction?
These aren’t abstract philosophical questions — they’re practical ones, and the answers change depending on who’s in the room. They’re the questions NALA’s shows are designed to sit with: spaces where the nude human form is treated with seriousness and curiosity rather than prurience or shame, where the person depicted is a collaborator in the work rather than a passive object of it.
Manet understood this in 1863. He put it on canvas. He showed it to Paris, and Paris recoiled — which tells you everything you need to know about how rarely the question gets asked honestly, and how much it matters when it does.
If you believe the nude deserves that kind of serious, respectful engagement — in the gallery, in the studio, in the spaces between art and life — we’d love to have you involved. NALA is building something in Los Angeles with exactly that tradition at its center. Get involved →