“It is not hard to see why viewers at the 1865 Salon, where Olympia was first exhibited, resisted so strenuously her thin-lipped invitation. . . .

It is as though Manet, having accepted his friend Baudelaire?s challenge to be a painter of modern, urban life in all its transitory aspects, had decided to throw the challenge right back at the onlooker. Modern life in the industrial era implied fragmentation, dislocation, uncertainty, risk, it was full of ironic and inharmonious details?like the black cat arching its back at the end of Olympia?s bed.”

—Calvin Tomkins, the essay Manet and De Kooning, February 6, 1984. From Post- to Neo-: The Art World of the 1980s, 1988.