“Olympia” — the Mona Lisa of contemporary artwork — has come to America for the first time. Édouard Manet started portray his masterpiece in 1863, simply after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. So its arrival stateside, as a part of the forthcoming “Manet/Degas” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Sept. 24-Jan. 7), ought to by rights be accompanied by bunting, brass bands and tolling bells.

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Lining Fifth Avenue with banners displaying a largely bare prostitute could have been greater than Upper East Side sensibilities may tolerate. But keep in mind: “Olympia,” no matter else she is, is a fiction. You should purchase into the fiction when you like (“Here we have, ahem, a courtesan receiving a floral tribute from a — cough, cough — male admirer,” blah, blah). But that might make you a literal-minded bumpkin. Manet didn’t need to consider you that means. He was an affable soul who epitomized Parisian urbanity and would have liked, I feel, the humor of Twenty first-century New Yorkers. He needed you in on the joke.

Part of the joke had to do with model. In Manet’s heyday, the nudes that have been showered with all the honors at the Salon (Paris’s annual showcase for modern artwork) weren’t photographs of actual girls. They have been composites — sexed-up ciphers for sentimental homilies. The artists who painted them — individuals like William Bouguereau and Alexandre Cabanel — have been rewarded for being showoffs. They created their illusions with gradations of tone so refined as to be invisible and particular results so laboriously achieved as to all however command sighs of admiration.

Manet thought all this unbearable. He was fashionable. He admired actual girls. And he liked paint. Relishing the substrate of actuality in the artwork of his Spanish heroes, Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya, he saved intermediate tones to an absolute minimal, lowered facial options to a number of brisk notations and outlined frontally lit our bodies with stark-looking shadows. From throughout a room, Manet’s vivid, high-contrast work look suave, self-possessed and somewhat tart, like a plum simply wanting ripeness. Up shut, they flicker with the vitality of his ravishing brushstrokes.

To his younger admirers, Manet’s model was dashing and funky. But most individuals noticed every little thing that was lacking: the affected person buildup from darkish to mild, the anodyne shows of technical ability, the kitschy sentiments. It incensed them. “Olympia,” they stated, was cheesy and low cost, like a slapdash theater set. Proper portray certainly ought to be extra arduous than this. And extra plausible.

But Manet had no want to provide souped-up fictions through which everybody would obediently consider. You may have a look at “Olympia” and concoct a cute little story a couple of glamorous courtesan when you needed. But Manet made certain you’d additionally see Victorine Meurent, his common mannequin, and Laure, a Black lady (household title unknown) who lived a brief stroll from his residence in Paris’s Batignolles district. Two identifiable girls, in different phrases, knowingly enjoying elements. By drawing consideration to the fiction’s flimsiness, Manet uncovered the mechanisms of perception and, in doing so, made his fashions extra solidly actual.

Manet deepened the sport by making his sources virtually comically clear. In artwork historical past, “Olympia’s” supply was the “Venus of Urbino,” Titian’s portray of a Renaissance courtesan posing as the goddess of affection. In literature, its supply was “The Jewels,” a poem by Manet’s shut buddy Charles Baudelaire. A couple of years earlier, “The Jewels” had been one in all six poems snipped by authorities censors from Baudelaire’s “The Flowers of Evil” for being, in essence, too horny.

If “Olympia,” too, is a bit filthy, it’s as a result of its spirit is punk. Manet was a passionate republican residing beneath an authoritarian regime; his portray’s saucy audacity was a deliberate affront to conservative style, as dictated by Napoleon III’s paranoid, pettifogging authorities.

But after all, what holds us — greater than the evident nudity, the high-heeled slipper, the black neck ribbon, the jewellery or the hibiscus in her hair — is Meurent’s well-known gaze. Those serenely appraising eyes refuse to be traduced by any fiction. They convey an impregnable calm that matches the unimpressed, unsurprised set of her mouth (neither the ghost of a smile nor the flicker of a frown). It is a gaze that turns the complete sport again on us.