In Manet’s Olympia, two women are featured in this piece, one unclothed white woman, lying on the bed sheet, showing her body and her black servant in white, standing behind her almost out of visibility, holding a tribute of flower. The composition of these two figures implicates racial class issues as only one female in the painting has the right to her own body. Since the black person is her maid, the white woman, Victorine Meurent, also has the control of the other woman in this painting. The white woman’s pale white skin along with the white bed sheets is contrast sharply with the black skin of the servant in the dark background, which indicates black people is in a lower social status and can be only seen been difference obscured against
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Laura is looking at Olympia, and her gaze also brings back our attention to Olympia as the only center in the painting, which creates a motion while viewing the painting.
Just like other paintings in that era, people of color are only shown in a space with whiteness. The black people are always in a white story, not in a story of their own. In Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, the young black male servant is standing on the side of the painting, indicates he’s marginalized status in the white story. Racial issues have been a global topic debated for centuries, and the class disparity is an extremely complicated set of constructs. T.J.Clark wrote a friend’s disbelief in the preface of his book The Painting of Modern Life (1999 edition): “For God’s Sake! You’ve written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her!” Olympia caused so many attentions and debated by numerous scholars, however, the discussions of racial issues between the two figures rarely happen. During eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, black people are dominated
Laura is looking at Olympia, and her gaze also brings back our attention to Olympia as the only center in the painting, which creates a motion while viewing the painting.
Just like other paintings in that era, people of color are only shown in a space with whiteness. The black people are always in a white story, not in a story of their own. In Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, the young black male servant is standing on the side of the painting, indicates he’s marginalized status in the white story. Racial issues have been a global topic debated for centuries, and the class disparity is an extremely complicated set of constructs. T.J.Clark wrote a friend’s disbelief in the preface of his book The Painting of Modern Life (1999 edition): “For God’s Sake! You’ve written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her!” Olympia caused so many attentions and debated by numerous scholars, however, the discussions of racial issues between the two figures rarely happen. During eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, black people are dominated