The analysis of this painting provides many points of arrival and approaches. Let us return, in thought, to Courbet’s work The Creation of the World. A work that makes the hidden explicit, yet with simplicity and truth. It shows a shift of meaning and dignity, a crasis of reality in the direction of the rocky landscape of nature seen from peasant life and for peasant life. It shifts the point of view and the theme, but it also shifts the audience it addresses, without moving it.
Manet’s Olympia, instead, addressed an intellectual world, from which it took repressed lasciviousness and moved it inside us, into an infinite and hidden imaginary. Desire is, in a certain sense, always partly pornographic. The field is only apparently the same; the differences are not so subtle. Let us begin from this: the work exhibits. What is exhibited is thrown in the faces of the French bourgeoisie in both cases. Vulgarized (from the volgo) and made distant (from or within its reception) in Courbet’s work. Colored with knowing hypocrisy in the case of Manet.
Courbet’s work today rather shows or preserves a kind of poetry; at the time it must have sounded like a curse word spoken at court, a belch at lunch. It opened the door to the low, the vulgar, the forbidden lower belly because it is inherent. Manet’s refined offense is instead the same as that of Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, but it is brought to a level, if possible even higher and more direct, sharper. It was as if one were saying to Parisians, puffed up with archaic nudes: this is what you “really” are. This is what we are. It makes this clear in contrast with what we would like to be. We would like to be aristocratic courtiers, yet we are base.
Sexuality in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon takes a step forward from this abyss, and with this step, it disappears. Sexuality disappears and there is only magma, that underlying instinctual depth already present in Manet’s work. Since it is a step forward of something that had already been brought to the border with nothingness, what happens is what happens after the limit. One falls. The datum has been absorbed and now it is only painting, and with painting one speaks.
Like Olympia, the Demoiselles d’Avignon look us in the eyes; they are for sale, they present themselves almost like in a shop window. But now everything bursts into the foreground, interpenetrates and merges. She is now five she’s, and all are on offer, yet they have no background and not even a definition, because they are now the whole. They are freed from the tightness of representation. They are the meaning of their presence.
There is more. They are shifting as human figures. Is the mask in front or behind? Certainly not only in front of or behind the little women, but also in front of and behind the viewer. Primitivism appears in its most subconscious form—a term not yet possible—thus we will say archaic, hidden, concealed in the meanders of the very history of humankind.
Looking at them, we imagine the sound of beating drums, a framing that obsessively alternates zooming from the wide shot to the close-up, with a syncopated rhythm, almost as if an unknown ritual of masks and naked women were overwhelming us. It speaks of them, it speaks of us. Our sensuality, desire, are now desire tout court, magma, spit of the mind, a spider’s web.
The sign is synthetic, but not a synthesis of representation; rather, it is synthetic of discourse. It perhaps suggests a primitive humanity. Perhaps more than synthesis I should say syntax. A grammar of signs and points of view that suggests vision. An eye that understands the operational character. An eye that, to quote Socrates, simply remembers what it has not lived: a maieutics of the hidden.
