英語視頻暢談歐美人文風情69：馬奈名畫《奧林匹亞》

　　There's a long tradition of the female nude represented in the most erotic, sensuous way, clothed by mythology or clothed by sheer beauty.

　　有一種裸體女性以最情欲、訴諸美感的方式呈現、透過神話包裝或是透過純粹美感包裝的悠久傳統。

　　It's a tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans in sculptures, for example, of the goddess Venus modestly covering her body after her bath.

　　那是一種回溯到古希臘和羅馬雕像的傳統，舉例來說，女神維納斯在沐浴后稍微遮住她胴體的雕像。

　　And Manet in this painting that we're looking at here, the Musee d'Orsay, is clearly drawing on those traditions but doing something radically modern.

　　馬奈在這幅我們正在這觀賞的畫中，在巴黎奧賽博物館，正明確地利用這些傳統，但做一些完全現代的事情。

　　The immediate model for Manet was Titian's Venus of Urbino, except that he's stripping away the academic technique of the representation of space, of the term of the body, but he's also stripping away that veil of mythology.

　　馬奈直接的模范是提香的《烏爾比諾的維納斯》，只是他正除去那空間呈現、體態(tài)形式的學術派技巧，但他同樣也在除去那神話的面紗。

　　And here in the Musee d'Orsay, we can see traditional nudes as Venus painted in a traditional way. Clearly, the image is that Manet's Olympia is speaking, too.

　　這里在奧賽博物館，我們可以看到像維納斯的傳統裸女以傳統方式被繪出。顯然地，那畫面是馬奈的《奧林匹亞》也在發(fā)聲。

　　So by academic art, we're talking about the kind of art that was sanctioned by the official academy that was associated with the government of France.

　　所以就學院藝術來說，我們正在談論被與法國政府聯合的官方研究院所認可的那種藝術。

　　It didn't challenge, particularly. It satisfied.

　　它并沒有挑戰(zhàn)，具體來說。它反倒?jié)M足了。

　　Well, for a couple of reasons. For one, because it had the stamp of the official state. These were the leading artists of the time. They were saying, "This art is of quality, and so of course, it had a ready market value." But at the same time, it was art that was formulaic, that was expected.

　　嗯，有幾個理由。第一，因為它有官方政府的圖章。這些是當時主要的藝術家們。他們正在說：“這是有品質的藝術，所以當然，它有現成的市場價值。”但同時，那是制式化的、可以預料到的藝術。

　　Well, there was an idea that there was a definition of great art. And there was no point in looking for what was new or different, because what great art was self-evident. Great art was based on the classical and the Renaissance. And what someone like Manet is doing is challenging those very established ideas, ideas that seemed as natural as the sun coming up in the morning. She's not a Venus. Her name is Olympia, and she looks very much like a real woman in a real apartment in Paris.

　　嗯，有個想法是有一個偉大藝術的定義。且沒有理由要找尋什么是新的或與眾不同的，因為偉大藝術是不言自明的。偉大藝術是基于古典和文藝復興。像是馬奈這樣的人做的是挑戰(zhàn)那些非常既定的想法，看似和太陽在早上升起一樣自然的想法。她不是個維納斯般的古典美人。她的名字是奧林匹亞，她看起來非常像一個在巴黎一間真實套房中的真實女人。

　　So wait a minute, so how do you know she looks like a real woman as opposed to a Venus? We don't know what a Venus looks like.

　　所以等一下，你要怎么知道她看起來像個真實的女人，和維納斯般的古典美人相比?我們不知道維納斯長什么樣子。

　　Her features are not idealized. They're not perfected. When we look at ancient Greek sculpture or Renaissance paintings of a nude, we have a woman who's perfectly beautiful, and you can see her face is asymmetrical and her lips are a little bit too thin. She doesn't have that perfection.

　　她的特征并沒有被理想化。它們沒有被完美化。當我們看到古希臘雕像或是文藝復興畫作中的裸女，我們有位女性是完美無瑕地美麗，你可以看到她的臉是不對稱的，還有她的雙唇有點太薄。她并沒有那種完美度。

　　In addition, the representations of the academic artist always show Venus or other nudes in a coy way. This woman is looking directly at us. She is sentient, she is thinking, and she's confronting us even as we look at her.

　　此外，學院藝術家的呈現總是以一種靦腆的方式繪出維納斯或其他裸女。這個女人正直直地看著我們。她帶有感情、她正在思考、甚至在我們看著她時，她正面對著我們。

　　And so there was a real problem, I think, for the viewers of this painting. There's no way to look at her and pretend that it was about beauty. One was confronted by her sexuality. There's no way to say, "I'm just looking at the ideal image of Venus of the idea of beauty." Here the reality of a nude woman is present.

　　所以有個實際的問題，我認為，對于這幅畫作的觀眾。沒有辦法看著她并假裝那是有關美感的。人們面對她的性感。 沒有辦法說：“我就是在看著帶著美感概念的維納斯的完美畫像。”這里一位裸體女性事實是存在的。

　　And it's even coarser than that because this woman was recognized as a courtesan that is as a kind of prostitute.

　　這甚至比那更粗糙，因為這名女性被認為是個名妓，就是妓女的一種。

　　The name, Olympia, was common for prostitutes at that time in Paris.

　　這名字，奧林匹亞，在巴黎那時是妓女很普遍的名字。

　　And what we're seeing here is Olympia's servant handing her flowers that presumably have just come from one of her patrons, one of her customers. We must have, as the customer, walked into the room and startled the cat at the foot of the bed as well as the two figures. And so there is this vulgarity here. It really is doing even more than just stripping away the mythology. It's confronting 19th century Paris with its own corruption.

　　我們在這里看到的是，奧林匹亞的仆人遞給她鮮花，那推測是才剛從她的主顧其中之一來的，她的顧客其中之一。我們一定，身為顧客，走進那房間，且嚇到在床尾那只貓，還有那兩個人物。所以在此有這個粗俗感。它真正在做的甚至不只是剝除那神話。它正使十九世紀的巴黎面對它自己的腐敗。

　　When we use the word prostitute, we think of a figure of much lower class. And here we have a woman who's obviously a higher-class prostitute.

　　當我們使用妓女這個詞，我們想到是一個在更低階層的人物。這里我們有位顯然是位較高級妓女的女性。

　　The reaction of the press was pretty vicious. The press said she looked like a cadaver, she looked like she was dead. Manet outlined her in black and hardly modeled her flesh.

　　新聞界的反應是非常惡毒的。報道指出她看起來像具尸體，她看起來像死了。馬奈用黑色替她上輪廓，且?guī)缀鯖]有將她的肌肉畫出立體感。

　　What's interesting is that some of the characters of the remade of this emphasize the shadow on her hands and feet. And some of the press actually spoke of her hands being filthy. And it's interesting that those are the only areas where there's significant modeling.

　　有趣的事是這幅畫的仿作中其中一些角色強調她手腳的陰影。有些媒體確實說她的手很污穢。而有趣的是那些是唯一有明顯畫出立體感的地方。

　　Where one would expect to see modeling on the female nude would be in the abdomen or on the breasts. And here Manet's kept that really flat. And you're right, there are areas that we do see shadow of unexpected. So the press interpreted her hand as drawing attention to her sexuality even though nudes for centuries had shown women with their hand place across their genitals.

　　人們會期望在裸體女性身上看到有立體感的地方是在腹部或是胸部。但這里馬奈把那維持得相當平坦。沒錯，那些是我們確實看到意料之外的陰影之處。所以媒體將她的手解讀成吸引注意到她的性感，即便數世紀來裸女畫作都將女性以她們的手蓋住生殖器上呈現。

　　You mentioned that kind of flatness of her body, and some artists organization said she's a bit of a paper cut-out. But Manet, of course, in so much of his work, really does reject the field articulation of represented space, and confronts the viewer with the complexity of painting on a two-dimensional surface.

　　你提到她身體那種平坦度，有些藝術家團體說她有一點像一張剪紙。但馬奈，當然，在他很多作品中，都確實拒絕了與描繪空間的場域連結，并在一個平面的表面上以畫作的復雜度面對觀眾。

　　And the area where you can really see that are, for instance, in the way the toes peek out from under her slipper. There is this awkwardness that reminds us that all of this is an illusion. And then in fact, there is just this two-dimensionality of this canvas.

　　你確實可以看到那個的區(qū)域是，舉例來說，那腳指頭從她的拖鞋探出頭的方式。有這種拙劣感提醒我們這所有都是種幻覺。然后事實上，只有這種畫布的平面狀態(tài)。

　　There's a kind of unmasking. Manet's saying, "I'm not gonna pretend that my painting isn't paint. I'm not going to present you with this perfect illusion the way that academic artists are doing, where you don't even see a brush stroke."

　　有一種揭露的感覺。馬奈正在說：“我沒有要假裝我的畫作不是畫的。我沒有要像學術派藝術家做的那樣呈現完美的幻覺給你看，在這種作品中你甚至看不到一道筆刷。”

　　So he's insisting on unmasking that illusion. And then he's insisting on unmasking the illusion of our own interests in looking at these images. He's reminding us that our interest here is a sexual one.

　　所以他堅持揭露那種幻覺。然后他堅持揭露我們本身對看著這些圖像興趣的幻覺。他正提醒我們在這的興趣是帶有性欲的一種興趣。

　　Right. In so many traditional representations of the nude, because the figure is not looking out at us, we can comfortably look at her. But here we're confronted by her gaze and by her thinking, and there is a much more problematic experience here.

　　對的。在許多裸女的傳統呈現上，因為人物并沒有向外看著我們，我們可以自在地看著她。但這里我們面對她的凝視、面對她的思考，這里有許多麻煩的體驗。

　　And that's in the fact that she's a real woman, she's contemporary, and the way she picks her head up, the way she looks out at us, the angularity of her body. It's in all those things. And people at the time, 1865, recognized this.

　　那是因為事實上她是一位真的女性，她是現代的，她抬起頭的方式、她向外看著我們的方式、她身體的僵硬感。那在所有那些事情中。而在那時的人們，在1865年，認同這個。

　　So this is a painting that is only partially about the nude. This is a painting about art-making and about the kinds of conventions that exist in art, then making us, the viewer, aware of those conventions even as we look at this painting.

　　所以這是幅只有部分關于裸體的畫作。這是幅有關藝術創(chuàng)造、并有關存在在藝術中那種傳統的畫作，然后讓我們--觀眾，查覺那種傳統，甚至當我們在觀賞這幅畫作時。

　　Manet's saying, "Let's be honest about the materials. Let's be honest about the subject and our own motives and desires." And I think that that's a really interesting thing for art to do. The great poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire called on artists to paint the beauty of modern life. And I think Manet is taking up that call.

　　馬奈正在說：“讓我們對取材誠實。讓我們對主體以及我們自己的動機和欲望誠實。”我認為那是給藝術去做的非常有趣的事。偉大的詩人及藝評人Charles Baudelaire呼吁藝術家們畫出現代生活的美感。我認為馬奈在接納那呼吁。

　　Manet is inventing what beauty could be for the modern world.

　　馬奈正在創(chuàng)造現代世界可以有的那種美感。