Changing representations of the black female body
An exhibit at the Wallach Art Gallery traces the evolving representation of the black female figure, from the early stages of Impressionism to the present day
Written by Bruna Shapira
At some point, every art lover or art history student will come across Édouard Manet’s Olympia (below), a painting widely considered as a foundational work of modern art. First exhibited in 1865, it displays a nude white woman lying on a bed, while her black servant brings her flowers. Curator Denise Murrell remembers the first time she saw a slide of it, as a student. Immediately drawn to the black figure, she was eager to listen what was going to be discussed about her. Instead, the professor completely ignored the black maid, speaking only about the white model. Denise then embarked on a journey to find out about that figure. A seminar paper expanded into her PhD thesis and eventually into this show, on view at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University through February 10.
Using Olympia as a starting point, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today discusses the representation of the black figure in the history of modern art. At the Wallach, it focuses on the female figure, beginning with Manet’s 1860s portrayals of Laure, the black model who posed for some of his artworks, including as the maid in Olympia. The original artwork, which the Musée D’Orsay declined to loan, will be on display in an extended version of the show in the French museum from March 26 to July 14, 2019. Despite this absence, two precious etchings of Manet’s masterpiece and much more make this exhibition an inspiring highlight of the season.
Murrell’s research uncovers a little-documented facet of the Modernist era in Paris: the multiracial artistic milieu surrounding Manet and his followers. With the abolition of slavery in the colonies following the French Revolution (1848), the city’s black population began to expand. Newcomers from the French Caribbean settled in the northern part of the city, with immigrant women generally making a livings as servants, sex workers, street vendors, or artists’ models. Art was changing fast too. With the advent of photography, painters, also mainly living in the city’s northern arrondissements, were sticking to modern life and depicting city people and their different professions and classes. The model Laure, as Murrell discovered, lived among the Impressionists in the Batignolles neighborhood of Paris.
Through the exhibition of around 100 paintings from different moments of art history, as well as letters and photographs, the show tracks the evolving representation of the black female figure. From Laure’s portraits, we see the break from stereotypical representations of the black female figure in art history, as seen in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Moorish Bath” (1870), to less exotic portraits by Manet as well as his followers in the early years of Impressionism, including Frédéric Bazille’s “The Young Woman With Peonies” (1870), and Edgar Degas’ “Miss Lala at the Fernando Circus” (1879) (see the gallery below). Bazille’s painting is one of the most astonishing on view: The model is seen in clear light, not pushed against a dark background. Her clothes are modest and cover her up to the neck – there is not a trace of those earlier bare-breasted models, the standard mode of portraying black models. There is no client or employer – she does not serve a white figure.
Work after work, seeing male painters depicting female bodies with different levels of empathy, there is a delightful surprise: Laura Wheeler Waring’s portrait of a former slave, Anna Washington Derry, made in Harlem in 1927 (see the gallery below). Active in the Harlem Renaissance movement with fellow artists Charles Alston and Norman Lewis, she may have interacted with Matisse. A fan of jazz, the French painter visited Harlem during his trips to United States, all in the early 1930s, to meet artists and paint some female models. These exchanges inspired a shift in Matisse’s artistic style. In the 1940s, after these trips, he illustrated selected poems from Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil,” especially those inspired by Jeanne Duval. The drawings are light single-line portraits that eschew headwrap, hoop earrings, and other ethnicity markers often deployed in his earlier depictions of black women. Also on view is his 1951 “Creole Dancer,” a lively papier collé (pasted paper) thought to depict the black dancer Katherine Dunham.
Édouard Manet’s portrayal of his model Laure (1862) Laure also posed as the maid for Manet’s Olympia (1865)
Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Moorish Bath (1870)
Frédéric Bazille’s The Young Woman With Peonies (1870)
Edgar Degas’ Miss Lala at the Fernando Circus (1879)
Laura Wheeler Waring’s Anna Washington Derry (1927)
The final part features postwar and contemporary artworks by American, European, and African-born Paris-based artists, including Mickalene Thomas, Lorraine O’Grady and Aimé Mpane (whose Olympia, from 2013, changes models’ places and roles: the black model lays down while served by a white maid). They all look back critically at earlier representations of the female black figure, including Laure. Considered as nothing or as merely a marker of exoticness for generations of art historians, she now represents everything that is quintessentially contemporary — issues of race, gender, and class.
Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today
Through February 10 atthe Wallach Art Gallery
Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University
615 West 129th Street, New York
Wednesday/Friday: noon – 8 pm
Saturday & Sunday: noon – 6 pm
Admission: free and open to the public
Read also: NWNY Cultural Trip to the Wallach Art Gallery
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