No longer invisible
The black models behind the masters
French art masterpieces have been renamed after their long-overlooked black subjects in a ground-breaking new Paris show on the representation of people of colour in art. The centrepiece of the show, Manet’s Olympia, the scandalous painting of a naked, reclining prostitute that marks the birth of “modern art”, has kept its title. However, top billing for the painting in its display now goes to “Laure”, the woman who posed as her black maid.
But several major works have been given new names after the curators of Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse” — which opened this week at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris — became historical detectives to hunt down the identity of their sitters.
The enormous exhibition, with paintings by Delacroix, Gauguin, Picasso, Bonnard and Cézanne, tackles the depiction of black and mixed-race people in French art from the country’s final abolition of slavery in 1848 until the 1950s.
Scholar Denise Murrell said it revealed how black people had played a major role in the birth of modern art in Paris but had been written out of the story.
From Jeanne Duval, the “Black Venus”, mistress and muse to the poet Baudelaire (also painted by Manet), to Cuban singer Maria Martinez to Count of Monte Cristo author Alexandre Dumas, “there was a black presence in avant-garde circles when artists and writers defied convention” when “interracial socialising” was taboo, Murrell said.
The influence of people of colour had been eclipsed from art history by racism and stereotyping, she said. Instead, their identities had been hidden behind “unnecessary racial references” such as “negress” or mixed-race “mulâtresse” — which comes from the French word for mule.
Murrell and her fellow curators have revealed the subjects’ real names in new titles for the show, “which would have been the case if they had been European”, she added, with the historic titles relegated to second place.
Works from the museum’s own collection will carry both the new name and the historic title when
they go back on display after the show.
The tone is set from the stunning opening Portrait of a Negress — renamed Portrait of Madeleine for the show — painted by MarieGuillemine Benoist in the period between the French Revolution’s abolition of slavery in 1788 and Napoleon’s reinstating it in 1802.
“For more than 200 years there has never been an investigation to discover who she was — something that was recorded at the time,” Murrell said.
Black people featured in some of the greatest artworks of the period, with Géricault giving three the starring roles as desperate shipwrecked sailors in his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa.
The painter’s favourite model, an art-loving Haitian called Joseph, the heroic figure on the raft, finally gets his place in the limelight in the show.
It also hails the campaigning work that abolitionist artists such as Géricault did to end slavery. But abolition, as Cézanne’s The Negro
Scipio demonstrates, did not mean the end of discrimination and despair. Until a wave of volunteers from France’s African colonies fought in the trenches of World War 1, black Parisians were often confined to working as servants, circus performers, prostitutes, nannies and wet nurses, with black women’s milk thought to be richer and more nutritious.
Old art-world habits also died hard.
Even as the US dancer Josephine Baker became a massive star in 1920s France, black models were still largely nameless, including those who sat for jazz fan Matisse, who travelled to New York to soak up the Harlem renaissance. His three black and mixed-race models, who included a well-known actress and journalist, finally get their due in the show.
But it is Manet’s black maid who is its real star. She appears in no fewer than eight takes on his canvas, including two modern versions: I Like Olympia in Black Face by American Larry Rivers, and Congolese artist Aimé Mpane’s even wryer Olympia II, which turns the tables with a white servant offering a bouquet containing a skull to her black boss.