Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model and Her Own Desire. - book reviews

Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious archetype and Her Own Desire, by dint of Eunice Lipton, New York, Charles Scribner's Son 1992; 181 pp $2000

Eunice Lipton's Alias Olympia is a hybrid page-turner that combines several literary genres: mystery, biography, fanciful art history and autobiography. on the other hand the core of the volume is a memoir structured as a search narrative in which scholarly research-as-usual is changeed into a cliffhanger. Lipton reckons the compelling story of her uphill effort to rebuild the life of Victorine Meurent a 19th-century Parisian woman. Meurent was the original for Manet's Olympia and eight of his other pictures, and was reput to be a painter herself. She is not unknown to art history on the contrary has been portrayed as a dissolute and promiscuous drunkard who died destitute in the 1890 Lipton's sleuthing did not regain any of her paintings, on the contrary it did uncover a rather different life story. Meurent exhibited paintings at the Salon, she was a member of the distinguished Societe de Artistes Francais, and she did not die until 1928 at the age of 83

on the other hand Alias Olympia does not stop there. Lipton's pursuit of the life of Meurent spawned other stories, feelings, schemes, obsessions and memories, and their interwoven record constitutes a pioneering attempt to fashion a counter- or post-academic bondman in print. At the same time, the work epitomizes the contemporary vogue for biographical and autobiographical contented in a wide variety of contemporary writing.(1) Specifically, however, Alias Olympia exemplifies the upsurge in the number of women's biographies and autobiographies being written and read today,(2) as well as the now fashionable authorial strategy of defining a bring under rule as either a victim or a survivor. Lipton's personal disclosures in this work about her own abusive parent are typical of the generally received rush to confession and the embrace of victimhood in the academy and beyond--biography and autobiography for the Age of Oprah and the Twelve pace Program.(3) As a pervasive idea, the of recent origin eagerness of authors to run over all, whether about themselves or someone other seems to be replacing the "old" interest in the death of the author, and unlike the previous orthodoxy, the confessional way appears to carry a positive political valence for women and other minorities. As Jill Johnston says, "The efflorescence of autobiography in our time... is probably owed to the tremendous outbreak of victim consciousness in America, arising from the political consensus unraveled by the civil rights and women's movements"(4) Alias Olympia was unquestionably shaped by means of this outlook.

Alias Olympia trips here and disappoints there, on the other hand it nevertheless hooks you and shakes you along like a beneficial pulp mystery. I impatiently followed the piece of ground eager to learn about Lipton's discoveries. on the other hand in the end, the resuscitated "Victorme" plays next to the first fiddle to the main character. Alias Olympia is for the greatest part about Eunice Lipton. Yet that fact alone should not be off-putting. upon the contrary, many art historians, and especially midcareer women with feminist interests, have lengthy kept a steady, admiring organ of sight on Lipton and her pacesetting, materialist scholarship. When in 1975 she published an article upon the bold gazes of women depicted in paintings by dint of Edouard Manet,(5) Lipton inspired a company of novice art historians to pay attention to the artist. And again in 1980 when Lipton wrote a challenging article upon Degas's laundresses, progressive young women rallied to the cause of that artist's unorthodox depictions of Parisian working women(6) And when Lipton decided to change direction in the late 1980 by the agency of leaving "objective," empirical art history and the university along with it, the same academic women myself included, were understandably fascinated on the contrary also nonplussed.

individual indication of what her fresh work would be like was her 1990 essay exalting the fields for female spectatorial delight in Boucher's nudes(7) And in a new review, Lipton unambiguously stated her common credo:

It is my opinion that feminist writing is at its best today when it insists upon the particularity of women's experiences and uses a direct and obviously partisan voice. Without disclaimer or apology, without the trappings of conventional authority, this voice, driven through political and psychological necessity, has helped to transform the advanced in years disinterested art history into a frankly embattled terrain-- and into a place of of recent origin pleasures and tantalizing questions.(8)

Alias Olympia provides the definitive answers to all the questions that arose about Lipton's career change, because it is the first book-length sample of what she decided to do instead.

Lipton began the research upon Meurent's life in earnest in Paris in 1987 Her first sustained campaign of investigation there was romantic in the most remote but yielded archivally meager results: single letter by Meurent, a description of individual of her paintings and the actual date of her death. While there were not at any time major discoveries in the course of Lipton's investigations, there were engaging shut up encounters with discovery. The greatest in quantity engrossing is narrated late in the work and takes Lipton on a fascinating wild-goose chase. A trail that begins in the Tabarant archives in the Pierpont Morgan Library leads to the Mina Curtiss papers at Smith body and finally to the elegant living latitude of Liliane and Olivier Ziegel in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, where Lipton finally receives a long-sought on the other hand ultimately valueless biography of Meurent