![]() A black servant brings flowers from an admirer. Manet's Olympia (painted in 1863) depicts a woman contemporaries assumed was a prostitute, naked except for slippers, bracelet, pink decoration in her hair and a bootlace around her neck instead of the pearl necklaces in the Venetian paintings Manet travesties. Twenty years earlier, in 1865, Edouard Manet exhibited an altogether more serious breach of decorum. You only have to examine the history of scandal in 19th-century French art to see there's something fishy about the myth of Madame X. No, it was the dress that caused distress. It wasn't the morbid paleness of the New Orleans-born high society personage Madame Pierre Gautreau, born Judith Avegno, or her abstracted surroundings, or even the impressionistic way in which Sargent, a friend of Monet, rejects the crispness of academic naturalism. We like to think of the great avant-garde moments as epochal historic crises, but in this case it wasn't anything about the style, or the flash of naked shoulders, that upset a public used to "modern nudes". Sargent is a great, strange artist, and Madame X a delicious painting. Looking at her, I find it genuinely hard to see what the fuss was about. It's a cliche to look back at a work of art that once shocked people and is now part of the pantheon - say, Monet's Impression: Sunrise (1874) - and be delighted by the reversals of taste. Its whiff of naughtiness generated demand for his portraits with a fashionable British and American public. Displayed in the huge jury-selected exhibition, the Salon, in 1884, it horrified Parisians so much that the ignominy drove Sargent across the Channel to take refuge in Britain. Madame X scandalised Paris, the city that had seen it all. Whistler had merely offended the Victorians. To this day Madame X inspires novels - Gioia Diliberto's I Am Madame X - and provocative theories, such as a recent claim that Madame Gautreau's profile is actually based on that of a beautiful young man. Like the row stirred up in London by Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold, this painting won a place among the incendiary legends of the avant garde, long, long before America (as a French book complains) stole the Idea of Modern Art. ![]() Today it is owned by the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which is loaning it to the National Gallery's exhibition Americans in Paris 1860-1900. ![]() Sargent's painting is a monument of American art.
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