Lunch with Olympia

The book Lunch with Olympia commemorates the exhibition of that name, held at the Yale School of Art’s Edgewood Gallery,that was co-organized by the then-Dean of the School of Art, Robert Storr, and Prof Carol Armstrong of the History of Art Department, in 2013,on the occasion of the 150-year anniversary of the infamous Salon des Refuses of 1863,  along with Edouard Manet’s two most famous paintings,Olympia and the Luncheon on the Grass, painted that same year.

The exhibition, which accompanied a symposium titled the Olympiad, and which was followed by another in-house exhibition of works by artists in the School of Art (faculty, students, alumni), was dedicated to the global afterlives of those two paintings—quotations, references to and riffs on them in paintings, prints, photographs, videos, installation art, and popular-culture imagery.  That series of events represented the active collaboration of the School of Art and the Department of the History of Art, and we are pleased that we now have a short book of essays, including contributions by graduate students Harrison Adams (PhD’18) and Izabel Gass, and illustrations of the works in the exhibition to commemorate it.