|
|
|
|
|
Who Are They?
John Haberin New York City
Manet's Olympia and Posing Modernity
The Black Model and African American Portraits
Who was the heroine of Manet's Olympia? If you remember only a sexy white nude, the Wallach Art Gallery has news for you. With "Posing Modernity," it seeks to recover the black model.
Who are these people? Let your outrage at the question sink in. Yet African American portraits at the Met ask just that. These, though, are not models, but rather families lost to history. 
Could their portrait photo from studios in the black community be a form of folk art? Perhaps, but they shy away from politics for the stories that history leaves out.
Smears of blacking
When Edouard Manet borrowed a pose from Titian, he was out to stretch not your vocabulary but your mind. In place of a Venetian courtesan, he painted a prostitute—and, befitting his favorite model, an independent woman. And in place of two well-dressed servants well in the background, tending to the clothes that Venus has frankly abandoned, he painted a black woman decidedly in your face. For Columbia University's art gallery, men have been trying to erase her memory ever since. And it places her in turn at the very origins of modernity. It cannot borrow Manet's Olympia from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, but it finds a largely new train of Manet's influence, from Matisse to today.
The curator, Denise Murrell, insists that critics have done their best to overlook the black woman, although Félix Vallotton parodied Olympia in paint so very long ago. If so, I can sympathize with them, for who can help obsessing over Victorine Meurent—her head held high and one hand on her crotch with its fingers aimed unerringly at you? A visitor to the Salon of 1865 spoke for many when he disdained her as "puny" while expressing revulsion at the shadows as "more or less large smears of blacking." For him, "the color of her flesh is dirty," and the dirt cannot help staining those grappling with the painting and their desires. She also changed the course of art from academic ideals to modern life, and it made Manet's career. The flowers in the servant's hand express desire, too, on the part of an unseen client or the viewer, and their slapdash handling could well be the first and finest sign of flatness in Impressionism and beyond.
But did viewers really ignore blackness? That visitor had words, too, for the "ugliness" of the "negress" and black cat (in place of Titian's sleeping dog) that "leaves its dirty footprints on the bed." African and Caribbean cultures had reached Paris, and Parisians would have associated both as well as feminism with witchcraft. Nor have recent historians missed the black woman, although they may not all agree on her dignity. For T. J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life, her "subservience" and, more to my mind, sheer astonishment contrast with Olympia's self-possession. An honest assessment of race and class in Manet's time or today would expect no more and no less.
If the show seems more about contemporary politics than past poses, it does pin down black models for Edouard Manet and others, with a place in art and society all their own. He had a favorite, known as Laure, but he also knew Jeanne Duval, the biracial lover of Charles Baudelaire. He painted her in a broadly flowing dress in front of a fluttering curtain as anything but simply a black face. He may leave the black servant emotionally and physically in the background (or at least the middle ground), but he clothes her, too, in pink. With her head scarf, he is also observing a staple of black culture with, already, a history in art as well. It goes back to the Salon of 1800 and an otherwise forgotten artist, Marie-Guillemine Benoist.
Benoist's Portrait of a Negress with its white scarf, white robe, snaky arm, long neck, and bare breast circulated widely in an etching by another hand. A far more famous Neoclassicist, Jean-Léon Gérôme, had his Moorish woman, too, naked from the waist up—and Gérôme had a student in one of Manet's closest friends, Frédéric Bazille. The show has a painting by the latter of his studio, with Manet at the easel, to which Manet added the figure of Bazille. And Bazille had his version of a young black woman bringing flowers as well. Rather than overlooking the temptation, he thrusts it forward into the picture plane. And rather than overlooking history, he leans on an early Bacchus by Caravaggio bringing ever so much more.
If their bare skin and precision make you think of Thomas Eakins, he painted a black model, too, in the late 1860s. Was he aware of the scandal at the Salon in Paris (or such later ones as Alfred Jarry and Ubu Roi)? Probably, but for him frankness was a matter of course. Nor were these the only black women of prominence in art. The show notes the influence of La Dame aux Camélias, the 1848 novel adapted for the stage by Alexandre Dumas fils, whose grandmother was a slave of African descent. It also notes a high-rising circus performer as a subject for Edgar Degas.
Models of blackness
The French employed black nannies and took an interest in ethnography. And that interest only deepened with Modernism. Henri Matisse painted a black model, probably a servant, in 1917, well after Fauvism, and turned to black women in Nice in wartime—as well as to illustrations for Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Naturally the Harlem Renaissance had its black models, in photographs by James Van Der Zee and Carl Van Vechten or paintings by Winold Reiss, James A. Porter, and Norman Lewis before his turn to abstraction. A black woman artist reclaimed a black woman's image, too, with Laura Wheeler Waring, and Romare Bearden included one among his "global contemporaries" in 1970. He had room, after all, for everything else.
The show concludes with a leap ahead to contemporary art, almost exclusively in the hands of black women. Mickalene Thomas has her version of Benoist's Belle Négresse for her "Glamour Project" and Elizabeth Columba of Manet's Laure, inserted into a Paris street scene by Gustave Caillebotte. Lorraine O'Grady looks at a photograph of her mother and sees a print of Baudelaire's Duval. Ellen Gallagher has a riff on Matisse. Others dismantle Olympia, much as Doreen Garner, not in the show, reduces it to a woman's raw flesh. Lean Pierre Schneider reduces it to white smears, while Aimé Mpane renders it in tiling with the role of black and white reversed.
But wait. What happened to the show's claims along the way, and do they hold up? Quite apart from loaded questions about Manet, can it seriously pretend to survey two hundred plus years of black models—even apart from the hot topic of the black male? Maybe or maybe not, but this is, thankfully, not too huge a show for the new uptown gallery on the edge of Harlem. It places a partition over the Renzo Piano windows in the interest of space, although at the expense of air and light. What, then, is it to leave out or to put in?
It includes an early portrait by Eugène Delacroix, although only its blue turban testifies to his amazing color. It does not mention a closer parallel to Manet in the artist's Women of Algiers. Its harem, too, has a black servant, who slinks away just as the others settle into sensuality. Could there be racial tensions even in Africa, much like the ones that Manet foregrounds rather than overlooks? It might surprise you to know that Cleopatra probably had light skin, although Shakespeare's characters call her swarthy. She did descend from the invasion of Egypt under Alexander the Great.
What about the actual dynamics of employment, ethnography, colonialism, the sex trade, and biracial lovers? The one painting of a black nanny in a park has her in a constrained space to the right with a faceless white child, while other girls walk free. And what does Matisse say about race with his late etchings? Their spare but fluid outlines allow large lips but no trace of color. He could be dignifying a type while refusing stereotypes. How does this relate to color for its own sake in his late cutouts, and does it subvert the very notion of color in society and art?
Yet the show feels focused and dead on. It centers on the origins of modern art, and it never leaves them altogether behind. The example of Matisse runs everywhere through the selections from the Harlem Renaissance, most brilliantly in a red dress from 1934 by Charles Alston. His woman also has a long neck right out of Neoclassicism, and contemporary selections all plainly refer to Manet and his world. The gallery may not always ask the right questions, but it comes up with some intriguing answers—and anyway Women of Algiers has made it to the Delacroix retrospective at the Met. Now if only it could borrow Olympia.
Those people
"Does anyone here look familiar?" The question appears explicitly, with seeming snapshots from long ago. A room at the Met, half hidden behind far larger galleries for works on paper, only accentuates their place apart from prying eyes. Yet accompanying text all but begs visitors to supply the names. Not that many museum-goers will recognize faces from the 1940s or 1950s, especially from the Deep South—but then the show's very premise, much like Columbia's, is to recover an experience lost to history. Well over a hundred photographs pass quickly but insistently, like the pages of a family album long after the collective memories are gone.
It hardly helps that museums attract mostly white Americans, including moneyed New Yorkers and tourists who can afford the trip, but that underscores the show's premise, too. In a nation still torn by racism, its question has a more sinister meaning: who are those people, and how dare they appear? And museums everywhere have taken up the dare with renewed attention to people of color. It has motivated exhibitions like that of outsider art just down the hall, as "History Refuses to Die," or "Painted in Mexico" next door to that. It has motivated, too, the recent acquisition of hundreds of prints from which the Met draws now.
It shows African Americans as happy and hopeful, in their Sunday best, to recover not just people but their very human dignity. It shows them at key moments in their lives—taking up the uniform for World War II or setting it aside, celebrating a birthday or an anniversary, becoming a couple or a larger family. For a further irony, one cannot always know which one. The show singles out those decades, too, as a time of transition, for America between the Great Depression and the Great Society or, for blacks, between the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Act. This time, though, it does so without noted African American artists. The photographers are as anonymous as their sitters.
Not that they are anything less than professional. Past museum departures from art photography have run to fashion photography, penny photographs, postcards, and Instagram. These are instead studio photos, and their subjects came to Beale Street in Memphis or a tri-state fair to seek them out. They could not, after all, pose for a selfie or even a Brownie. (For those too young to remember, look it up.) Even a man swigging booze has taken up a studio prop.
The show, then, marks a moment in photography's history as well. It holds the PDQ Model G that professionals used for paper positives—and that its maker advertised as an "automatic photo machine." It holds hand-colored photos, for which studios charged twice as much and Kodak marketed a choice of dyes. If this version of black history seems awfully rose colored, with hardly a trace of anger or pain, it could be tinted yellow or blue as well. Settings may look like home, only fancier, or tropical climes (suggested, perhaps, by the Pacific theater in a time of war), with a studio stage set as backdrop. Dispensing with negatives means flipping left and right, so studios took care to hand-letter any signs in reverse.
The Met sees undercurrents of racism throughout, in segregated communities and segregated branches of military service. Still, the undercurrents are as well hidden as the names. The show includes a daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass from 1855 and a silver print of Sojourner Truth from 1864, but then it leaves longings for freedom and justice largely behind. It takes its poignancy from the conventions of its time and the collaboration between photographer and sitter. Couples sit together in a modest embrace, while young men in double-breasted suits look like a singing group. Just when you thought that photography had won the battle for recognition as an art form, it throws art photography to the winds. Yet there are other means of searching for identity than art.
"Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" ran at the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University through February 10, 2019, African American portraits at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 8, 2018. I rely for quotes on the classic History of Impressionism by John Rewald.