Victorine-Louise Meurent & Laure
Manet’s Olympia is celebrated as the first modernist painting. However it was not just Manet’s artistic innovation, but the presence of two identifiable women; one of the streets, and one of a newly emerging black working-class community, that made Olympia one of the most earth-shattering works ever to be created.
Listen to ArtMuse’s episode on Victorine Meurent and Laure; the two superstars of Olympia.
Victorine was not just an artist’s model, she was also a musician and an established painter in her own right, who showed her work at the Salon a staggering number of six times.
Painted just 15 years after the abolition of territorial slavery, Laure represented a pioneering age of Paris, in which newly freed black members of society were becoming an integral part of the working class.
This Episode is produced by Kula Production Company.
Listen to ArtMuse’s episode on Victorine Meurent and Laure
REFERENCES
Andersen, Wayne Vesti. Manet: The Picnic & The Prostitute. Fabriart, 2005.
Lipton, Eunice. Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model & Her Own Desire. Cornell University Press, 1999.
Armbrust Seibert, Margaret Mary. A Biography of Victorine-Louise Meurent and Her Role in the Art of Edouard Manet. Ohio State University, 1986.
Murrell, Denise M. Seeing Laure: Race and Modernity from Manet’s Olympia to Matisse, Bearden and Beyond. Columbia University, 2014.
FURTHER REFERENCES
IMAGES
Edouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1863.
Titian, Venus of Urbino, oil on canvas, 1534.
A narrow street in the Latin quarter of Paris, taken in 1900.
Edouard Manet, Portrait of Victorine Meurent, oil on canvas, 1862.
Edouard Manet, The Street Singer, oil on canvas, 1862.
Edouard Manet, Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada, oil on canvas, 1862.
Edouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, oil on canvas, 1863.
Edouard Manet, A Young Lady in 1866, oil on canvas, 1866.
Edouard Manet, The Guitar Player, oil on canvas, 1863.
Alfred Stevens, The Parisian Sphinx, oil on canvas, 1870. Possibly Victorine.
Edgar Degas, Femme Sur une Terrasse, oil on canvas, 1866-68.
Edouard Manet, The Railway, oil on canvas, 1863.
Victorine Meurent, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1876.
Victorine Meurent, Palm Sunday, oil on canvas, 1880’s.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, At the Cafe La Mie, oil on canvas, 1891.
Edouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries Garden, oil on canvas, 1861-1862.
Edouard Manet, Portrait of Laure, oil on canvas, 1863.
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine, oil on canvas, 1800.Example of sexualized period portrait.
Jacques-Eugène Feyen, Le baiser enfantin, oil on canvas, 1865.
Romare Bearden, Black Venus, mixed media collage, 1968.
Mickalene Thomas, Din, une très belle négresse 1, rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel, 2012.
