Strauss & co - 5 March 2018, Cape Town

242 Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1865) is a key example in this regard. Olympia clearly references Titian’s reclining Venus of Urbino (1534), but subverts its tropes of languid, unthreatening sensuality by presenting a noticeably modern subject in an aggressively modern style. Where Titian’s Venus , demure and serene, possesses all the trappings of the ideals of femininity of her time, Manet’s Olympia was immediately recognizable to a contemporary audience as a working-class prostitute, trading her flesh like any other commodity in the gaslit world of the Parisian demi-monde . The painting’s broad, quick brushstrokes, shallow depth and lack of mid-tones overturned all academic conventions and drew attention to the expressive potential of modernist technique, insisting on a shift from the perceptual to the conceptual as being the necessary condition of modern art. Increasingly, as traditional Western values of sensuality and beauty were no longer seen to be equal to the task of expressing modernity, European artists also began looking to Asia and Africa for a new language of form, and these technical disruptions became infused with an interest in the exotic and ‘primitive’ Although produced late in her career, Stern’s Reclining Nude is quintessentially at this intersection: while the reference to Olympia is difficult to ignore, the painting’s spirited colour, vigorous brushstrokes, and unabashed exoticism of the figure’s caramel-coloured skin, boldly outlined in green, and her pitch-black hair cascading from a headscarf, recall the many female nudes in her own repertoire. In effect, the painting is at once a powerful reassertion of her lifelong commitment to the inspiration of the early masters of modernism, while at the same time a celebration of ‘primitive’ female sexuality, complicated and intensified by the ‘wild, inward’force of her own femininity. Federico Freschi 1. Helene Smuts. (2007) At Home with Irma Stern: A Guidebook to the Irma Stern Museum , Cape Town: Irma Stern Museum. Page 16. 2. Paul Cullen. (ed.) (2003) Irma Stern: Expressions of a Journey , Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery. Page 98. 3. Gill Perry. (1999) Gender and Art , New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Page 7. 4. Jean Sorabella. (2008),“The Nude in Western Art and Its Beginnings in Antiquity.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History , New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, http://www.metmuseum.org/ toah/hd/nuan/hd_nuan.htm (Accessed 5 February 2018).