raised behind the altar, under oak and ash

nice art, but there are actually two women in this painting:

the black model in Manet's 'Olympia' was called Laure and her presence in the painting has been famously overlooked by critics until fairly recently. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby (screenshot from article above!) even suggests that Manet's work deliberately responds to anti-slavery sentiment in france in the mid 19th century, using Laure to criticise her white mistress' reliance upon her. others have suggested it just replicates an existing tradition of using black people as basically accessories, secondary subjects who are the property of their white counterparts (and by their darkness highlight the whiteness of those counterparts), but critical opinion is quite mixed as to what Manet's painting is doing here to either contribute to or complicate that legacy. in many ways it's not surprising that she's been omitted here, but i thought i'd use the opportunity to highlight her existence if people want to find out more!

A Modern Language of Nerves 

Klimt’s portraits society women presented them as insubstantial, distracted, tense, refined, cultured, sexualised.

The figures were rigid, placed alone on the canvas. Their hands were flexed in uncomfortable manners which made them look ugly. Some women were portrayed wearing chokers, which makes them look so tense they could hardly breathe. Such portraits illustrate Vienna’s intense obsession with Neurasthenia and various other ‘nervous illnesses’ around 1900; intense in a sense that it was perceived fashionable to be nervous, tense, having trouble sleeping or giving up smoking, and having a constant need to be reading, writing or talking.