![]() ![]() The third and final section of the show shifts to a “global contemporary” moment, where we are presented with work grappling with the question of what it means to constitute a black female subject-to see Olympia’s maid or Matisse’s reclining nudes from the point of view of the black gaze. © Mickalene Thomas / Artist Rights Society (ARS). Rhinestones, acrylic, oil, and enamel on wood panel, 102 × 84 inches. Mickalene Thomas, Din, une très belle négresse #1, 2012. As if in direct response to the Harlem Renaissance philosopher Alain Locke, who called for a “New Negro” approach to portraiture to counter racist stereotypes, these artists were depicting everyone from Billie Holiday to anonymous black folk with a respect, sense of gravitas, and formal innovation not often seen before. ![]() Johnson, Norman Lewis, and Laura Wheeler Waring. This section makes a leap from Paris to New York, taking curatorial advantage, perhaps, of Matisse’s fascination with American culture (and specifically black American culture, in the form of jazz) to examine work by photographers such as Carl Van Vechten and James Van Der Zee and painters such as William H. But Murrell argues-not without reason-that Matisse upends such readings, placing the two in a relationship of social equivalence. Works like Coffee (Le déjeuner oriental) from 1916 seem to draw on the tired cliché of contrasting white body and black in order to elevate one at the expense of the other. One of these is Aïcha Goblet, whom he portrayed repeatedly with an Italian woman, Lorette. The second part of the show begins with Matisse’s propensity to treat his black models as creative participants in his artistic practice. Henri Matisse, Dame à la robe blanche, 1946. The representational plenitude on offer-the opportunity of seeing dark-skinned Parisians shown many different ways, even if not entirely free from stereotype or bias-is bracing. In the paintings, sculptures, drawings, mass-produced prints, and even one film clip on view in these first rooms, we see black people, primarily women, in their roles as nannies and courtesans, as entertainers and artists’ models, as Orientalist fantasies and personifications of the Negro “race,” as middle-class matrons, and even-in the case of Edmonia Lewis-as artist. Nearby, Nadar’s photographs of Baudelaire and Manet are hung alongside those he took of other residents of the arty neighborhoods in Paris-friends, acquaintances, and strangers who were members of the African diaspora, hailing directly from Africa or, more often, from colonies such as Haiti and New Orleans. Image courtesy Musée d’Orsay, Paris / Art Resource, NY. Prints on salted paper, each 9 ⅞ × 7 ½ inches. Laure is depicted wearing a colorful French Caribbean head wrap and a fashionable Second Empire gown, her face rendered with a flickering, sensitive brushstroke, making her soft eyes and gentle smile all the more touching. While we have to make do with a couple of etchings of Olympia rather than the near-impossible-to-borrow painting, we can revel in one of the two other images Manet made of Laure: his 1862–63 portrait, which has most often (and quite lazily) been titled La négresse by museums despite the fact that Manet noted her name in his diaries. The first, and to my mind most exciting, focuses on Paris in the last third of the nineteenth century. ![]() Denise Murrell, who received her PhD from Columbia in 2014 and returned as a Ford Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the university’s Wallach Art Gallery to curate the exhibition. Posing Modernity is the brainchild of Dr. Édouard Manet, La négresse (Portrait of Laure), 1862–63. In the history of Western art, she argued, the female black body is both overburdened with symbolic meaning-the other side of the coin of white femininity-and simultaneously almost always unheeded, treated as a prop or a sign (a “peripheral Negro”) rather than a subject of art. is what she had better not be,” wrote O’Grady in her pithy analysis. Olympia’s maid played an all too familiar role here, one common in Western painting since the Renaissance-as the darker-hued, contrasting consort to the startlingly pale object of desire at the center of the image. In a 1992 essay, Lorraine O’Grady homed in on the routinely overlooked black-skinned maid in Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), a painting that scandalized visitors to the Parisian Salon of 1865 as much for its frank address of the open secret of prostitution as for its daring formal qualities. Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, 615 West 129th Street, Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870. ![]()
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