The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously sponsored by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

Ugly, repulsive, offensive, ludicrous, childish, dreadful, putrified, laughable, a corpse, “a female gorilla.” That’s a sampling of the famous torrent of insults that greeted Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) when it was first exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1865. Almost two centuries later, the idea of Olympia’s ugliness seems an episode from a remote, benighted past. When Olympia traveled to New York for the Manet/Degas exhibition, it was the centerpiece of the thronged show. As visitors turned a corner and saw the painting ahead of us, there was an audible hush. Crowding in to admire the calm stare, the bright, majestic nudity, and the simplicity of Manet’s composition, we couldn’t help wondering, what was it that so vexed those first Parisian viewers?

Generations of art historians have offered answers to that question by turning to the writings of the time. No fewer than seventy French critics bridled at the painting’s subject—so plainly a contemporary prostitute—as well as its style or appearance. To many of them, the image looked not just indecent and unattractive, but visually wrong, even incoherent, “a hubbub of disparate colours and impossible forms,” as Felix Deriege put it.¹ Another baffled critic, Théophile Gautier, offered a sense of how nineteenth-century eyes may have seen Manet’s principal figure—or would, if we could believe his description:

The color of the flesh is dirty, the modeling non-existent. The shadows are indicated by more or less large smears of blacking [i.e. shoe polish] … We would still forgive the ugliness, were it only truthful … The least beautiful woman has bones, muscles, skin, and some sort of color. Here there is nothing….²

Nothing? Of course, different audiences see paintings differently. But the gulf between Gautier’s dirty, smeared woman, and the bright, authoritative image we know? That disparity is so extreme that even the most thorough scholarly discussions leave a nagging feeling that something, some extra factor, is still missing. A clue to what that might be comes from the philosopher Michel Foucault, who noted in 1971 that the scene is lit not by the usual “soft and discreet lateral light” of conventional European paintings but by a “perpendicular light” that illuminates Olympia’s bedchamber from the front. To verify Foucault’s point, look at the very center of the canvas, where Olympia’s left hand rests like a pale fig leaf at the intersection of her legs. Her fingers, projecting forward as they rest on her right thigh, seem to be illuminated by a flashlight: the front surface of each digit is bright, the top planes dim. Olympia’s whole body is lit that way—evidently by a bright artificial light that shines directly at her, so that the few indications of shade retreat to the contours of her body. This bright light must originate, Foucault notes, from “the space in front of the canvas, in other words … [from] precisely where we are.” That is to say, the light arrives from the viewer’s position, as if we were holding a light source in our hands.

So far, Foucault’s point seems straightforward. What he calls “perpendicular light” is what set designers and photographers call “flat light” or “frontal lighting,” a directed light (camera flash being the most familiar example) that shines straight at the subject, rather than illuminating it from above or either side. There’s no question about it: Olympia is front-lit. Because the light strikes Olympia horizontally, or even angles slightly upwards, it cannot be daylight. Electric light—a recently developed technology—is what is represented here.

Foucault then shifts into a more subjective register. Because the spectator and the light source are in the same position, he suggests, there is an implied equivalence. In some sense, the spectators are the light source. “It is our gaze,” Foucault proposes, “which, in opening itself upon the nudity of Olympia, illuminates her … Our gaze upon the Olympia is a lantern.” This notion may seem far-fetched, even fantastical, but a similar conception, Plato’s theory of projective vision, or “visual fire,” was widely believed for centuries. Frontal light makes Plato’s conception appear to be true: seeing equals illumination. And this, says Foucault, carries with it a kind of culpability.

It is we who render her nude, and we do so because, in looking at her, we illuminate her … That is why we are—and every viewer finds this—necessarily implicated in this nudity….³

Of course, Olympia’s stare already implicates us. I take Foucault to be suggesting that there is something more at work, a subtler, preconscious sense, almost like proprioception, that our own physical presence is linked to hers. In the Manet/Degas exhibition at the Met in 2023, I spent long minutes trying to decide how far I could follow Foucault. As I did so, surrounded by so many other works by Manet, I realized that this light effect was not exclusive to Olympia. We seem to cast a similar light on the Dead Christ (1864), on The Fifer (1866), on Lady with a Parrot (1866), The Dead Toreador (1864), The Balcony (1869), and the Portrait of Zola (1868). Nearly everywhere in early Manet, you find subjects lit by harsh, bright frontal light. Again and again, “our gaze is a lantern.”

Foucault didn’t mention Manet’s broad reliance on frontal lighting, nor does it come up in the scholarly literature.⁴ And yet, the conclusion is inescapable: The dramatic look of early Manet depends (in large part) on his continual reliance on one kind of lighting. It’s odd, even bizarre, that anything so formative could have been overlooked. The vast Manet literature brims with descriptions of his revolutionary style: its flat unmodulated facture, its suppression of middle tones, its beautiful “Spanish” blacks. Occasionally, frontal lighting gets a passing mention. Never is it seen for what it was: a consistent, defining element of Manet’s breakthrough paintings.

Why was frontal light invisible—or uninteresting—to scholars? One reason is simple: Manet himself never “authorized” the topic. A secretive artist, Manet left few records, and never said a word about his reliance on frontal light. But Manet’s silence is only half the explanation. Perhaps more important, frontal lighting just seems unremarkable. Familiar. Normal. All of us, scholars and non-scholars alike, are habituated to bright frontal light. We see it all around us: in the faces of fashion models and TV anchors, in images by Andy Warhol or Nan Goldin, or for that matter in any flash-lit photograph.

These images share a family resemblance. Foregrounds appear bleached and flat, with reduced detail. Shade slides off to the edges of forms. Cast shadows are mostly hidden. Backgrounds go dark. You could say, to put it too simply, that frontal lighting looks like early Manet. In fact, not all front-lit images share Manet’s dramatic tenebrism. What they do share is a beautifully simple spatial logic: nearness equals brightness. Whatever is far is correspondingly dark. Only rarely, for instance with the recent introduction of desktop ring lights, do we consciously notice this logic. In much of everyday life, frontal lighting has the invisibility of the normal.

But its normalness is only a few generations old. In the era before strong artificial lights became available, nearly all paintings were side-lit. From Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden (ca. 1424–27) onwards, the history of Western naturalism had been, with hardly any exceptions, a history of oblique lighting. Manet was the pioneer, the Gutenberg of frontal light. He seized its potential and made use of it in a way that no previous artist had. In other words, his art was a turning point, not just in painting, but in a broader and mostly uncharted history: the history of illumination.

It’s no accident that Olympia was painted in the 1860s, soon after the first powerful arc lamps were put to use by, among others, the photographer Nadar, Manet’s friend. It would be several decades before this kind of light (that is, electric light, as opposed to weaker, more diffuse gas lighting) took over French public spaces and then became available for private homes. Manet’s art was, among other things, an idiosyncratic preview of this general transformation, which some lighting scholars have paradoxically called nocturnalization, “the expansion of social and economic activity into the night.” ⁵

But does Manet’s frontal lighting matter? Does it really make any difference that a painted face or body is illuminated by electric light as opposed to daylight, or lit from one angle as opposed to another? The simplest test is to compare Olympia to its side-lit inspiration, Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538). In Titian’s painting, the long dark curving line of Venus’s right hip and leg cleave her away, like a furrow, from the sheets below. Her body is sharply distinct. In comparison, Olympia’s contours nearly vanish amid a heaped confusion of similarly pale forms—pillows, sheets, shawl, and flowers. Frontal light bleaches the whole array, erasing all but trivial shadows. The contrast makes it easier to imagine how early viewers might have “missed” Olympia, seeing only a wall of beige, pink, and white, interrupted by random darkenings. Théophile Gautier’s description, with its “smears” or “streaks” of shoe polish, seems less rhetorical, less malicious, more like a plaintive record of understandable confusion. 

Frontal lighting mattered to Manet. We know it did because, after all, Manet could have adopted the same stylistic effects—the same simplifying, flattening touch—without frontal lighting. Indeed, he did so occasionally in the 1860s, especially for peripheral figures. But in general, during his breakthrough decade, Manet was remarkably—it seems passionately—loyal to frontal lighting. He went to the trouble of setting up such lighting in his studio, or of approximating its effects, in painting after painting. Why? Because of its sheer newness? Because of its connection to Nadar and the new medium of photography? Because he not only liked its flattening effects but also wanted them to appear naturalistically motivated? All these reasons are plausible, and there may have been one more. Perhaps Manet was attracted to the psychological complicity that frontal light could suggest—in other words, attracted precisely to Foucault’s “lantern gaze.” It’s notable that Manet’s front-lit figures often stare back out at the viewer, creating the striking sense of reciprocal awareness that we see first in the early Surprised Nymph (1860–61) and later in Dejeuner sur L’herbe (1863). That kind of “viewer-contracting stare” and frontal light were mutually reinforcing, twin hallmarks of Manet’s early style. Something about their shared confrontational quality (what Michael Fried describes as “facing-ness”) seems to have been an essential part of Manet’ deepest aesthetic. It hardly needs to be said that of all his paintings, Olympia showcases this combination—direct light and direct gaze—most flamboyantly.

What about Olympia’s attendant, Laure, Manet’s “other” model, who doesn’t stare back at the viewer. Does frontal light matter to Manet’s depiction of her? She is certainly subject to the same effects, her skin likewise simplified and flattened, translated to a single very dark tone. Just as Olympia is assimilated to the pallor of the foreground, frontal light allows Laure’s skin to nearly match the even darkness of the background. This subordinates her and makes her difficult to discern, as Denise Murrell has observed,⁶ but it also permits a peculiar reversal. In her person, the background darkness advances; “ground” literally becomes “figure.” The grace note is her slender dark little finger. Where it overlaps the white wrapping paper, finger and paper together create one of Manet’s most memorable details: a neat, yin-yang-like interdigitation. There’s a kind of delicate formalist wit here, and possibly a gesture, however miniature, toward racial equivalence. By contrast, consider the two Laure-inspired portraits that Manet’s friend Frederic Bazille painted a few years after Olympia. Both depict Black women with flowers. Both are sympathetic and dutiful, and conventionally side-lit. As a treatment of racial difference, Manet’s is more troubling, but also more playful and more radical. He was willing to emphasize dark Black skin, and give it a distinctive pictorial role. Of course, frontal lighting didn’t guarantee that Manet would use its potential in this way, but it offered him opportunities; it allowed him to riff on “lightness and darkness” in ways that conventional lighting could not.

Bazille could have taken up Manet’s lighting, but he didn’t. Like other Parisians, he seems to have resisted, or not even recognized, the novelty of strong frontal light. No contemporary mentioned it, ⁷ let alone said anything about a ”lantern gaze”—although, as Foucault pointed out, the vehemence of their outrage was pretty strong evidence that a subliminal complicity was in play. We can be sure, at least, of this: for eyes familiar only with daylight, candlelight, and gaslight, the look of direct electric light must have been strange. The very fact that viewers didn’t recognize its novelty may have intensified the strangeness. They had no way to account for it. Perhaps that’s part of the reason Manet preferred not to talk about his lighting. To name it might have trivialized it, dimmed the excitement of its unfamiliarity.

Over time though, that unfamiliarity would have faded, not only because Olympia itself became famous, but also because electric light and flash photography permeated life everywhere. Nocturnalization triumphed. A century later, in our hyper-illuminated environment, Manet’s early style cannot seem wrong. For us, the “lantern gaze” is a birthright. We experience the brash, thin, relatively shadowless “nearness-brightness” of perpendicular lighting every day. Blank, unmodeled skin and abrupt contours are simply one of the ways bodies often look. Hence the cliché about Olympia being “So Astoundingly Modern,” as one recent headline put it.⁸ Where once Parisians experienced Manet’s lighting as alien, a jarring foretaste of the future, for us, the spell Olympia casts is anachronistic. Amid the umber gravity of museum pictures, she offers a little jolt of unexpected familiarity, like seeing a relative’s face among a group of strangers. From a nineteenth-century frame, a proto-flash-lit woman looks out at us. Her lighting is our lighting. Unwittingly, we cannot help recognizing her—we have always recognized her—as a secret contemporary.