Olympia allowed to leave Paris
Baku, February 27 (AZERTAC). President Hollande gives special dispensation for Manet`s work to travel to Venice.
Edouard Manet`s Olympia, 1863, is one of the most important paintings of the 19th century and has not left Paris since it was given to the French state in 1890.
But in a move that will surprise art historians, conservators and cultural commentators, the French president, François Hollande, has given special dispensation for the closely guarded work to go abroad.
The influential painting, depicting a courtesan sprawled across a bed, will shortly leave the Musée d`Orsay and travel to Italy, to be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Doge`s Palace in Venice.
Guy Cogeval, the director of the Musée d`Orsay, says Olympia is “such an important painting that my predecessors, since 1900, decided it would be better never to move it”. In Venice, ironically, it will sit alongside Titian`s painting The Venus of Urbino, 1538, which is on loan from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and cannot leave Italy under government rules.
The 70-piece exhibition, entitled “Manet: Return to Venice” (25 April-4 August), includes around 42 works by Manet drawn from the Musée d`Orsay—an unprecedented loan. Among them will be Lola de Valence, 1862, and a portrait, Emile Zola, 1868.
Other paintings will be loaned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Art historians often cite the influence of Spanish artists, especially Velázquez, on Manet`s style. This exhibition, which has been co-organised by the Musée d`Orsay and the Venetian museums body, Fondazione Musei Civici, aims to show that Italian artists such as Vittore Carpaccio, Antonello da Messina and Lorenzo Lotto had just as much impact on the French painter. “We want to show how Italian cultural models influenced Manet,” Cogeval says.
He adds that the Musée d`Orsay will receive substantial fees for the Manet loans, in line with its strategy of raising income by organising worldwide tours of works from its collections.
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