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The Course of Empire
John Haberin New York City
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux wanted ever so much to side with the winners, and he seemed marked for success. It took the French sculptor almost to his death in 1875, at only forty-eight, to grasp how much they had let him down. Yet he was still the artist who had sculpted a black woman as a call to conscience. This was not a time for questions, and he titled it with an ungrammatical exclamation point, as Why Born Enslaved! And France shouted back.
When the Met displays it along with plaster studies, watch out. What may look like a key to an artist's thought processes may instead be a mold for copies to keep up with demand. France really was listening. Maybe not hard enough, but an exhibition puts even the best of intentions to the test, 
as "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast." But then you already knew that art is a fiction. Now if only Carpeaux and others of his time were not so easy to tune out.
Siding with the winners
From politics to art, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux played strictly by the rules. Born in the same town as Jean Antoine Watteau, the artist of a more glowing empire, he entered the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts at seventeen and won Prix de Rome in 1854. He mingled with aristocracy, and his statue of the emperor's son found its way into bronze, silvered bronze, Sèvre porcelain, and of course marble—all from the very best hands, with his hardly having to lift a finger. The architect of the new Paris Opéra commissioned reliefs for its façade, and his statues and fountain became part of the new public face of Paris under Baron Haussmann, along with its grand boulevards and department stores. His portrait busts included Jean-Léon Gérôme, painting's ultimate academician, and Alexandre Dumas fils served as godfather for his son. When he portrayed the French troops Defending the Homeland, he meant it from his heart.
He also meant it as a cataclysm, in the clumsy, dark brushwork so typical of his occasional paintings, for Prussia had invaded, the empire had collapsed, and Louis Napoleon was about to become history. Carpeaux followed the emperor to refuge in England to complete busts of him and his wife. Back in France, the sculptor still faced illness, mood swings, a stubbornly bad marriage, and his limits as an artist. As curators, James David Draper of the Met and Edouard Papet of the Musée d'Orsay, speak of "his genius for depicting flesh and blood in stone." If only it were not flaccid flesh and overheated blood. His retrospective gives more insight than they might wish into the rules that Impressionism was soon to cast aside—and their cost to his art.
The Met stages a huge retrospective for a largely forgotten artist, with close to two rooms of portrait busts alone, like a dull cocktail party with far too many priggish guests. He does allow a marquise her wrinkles, much to her displeasure, and the Prince Imperial his bow tie half askew. If it were not endearing enough, the boy also stands with his dog, Nero. More often, though, Carpeaux sacrifices specificity to sentiment. His reliefs for the Opéra, The Dance, run more to tempting nymphs and smirking cupids than to dancers. In his model for a pavilion devoted to agriculture, to connect the Tuileries with the Louvre, a bull lies tamely with a god like just another household pet.
One can see how a formula emerged for Carpeaux from the confluence of his moodiness and the rules. Both drew him to the influences of Giambologna in the sixteenth century, Michelangelo, Michelangelo drawings, and Théodore Géricault. The first taught him skill, but also the exaggerated twists and turns of Mannerism, while the others challenged him to unite Classicism and Romanticism. Already a sketch after Michelangelo's tomb for the Medici Chapel sets aside both the monumentality and the introspection to sink the heads of Dawn and Dusk in shadow. Another sketch shows perhaps his only scene from daily life, the dignified head of a matron, but even there the subject entails a message. And competition for the Rome Prize came with constraints of its own, only starting with an assigned subject matter.
After two failed tries, he learned to unite placidity and volume—with the result that Hector, the doomed Trojan hero pleading to the gods for the fate of his son, could be a male Madonna with child. Philoctetes, the archer whose festering wound so repelled the Greeks that they sent him into exile, could be scratching an itch. Of course, the prize also carried the artist to Italy, like so much of Romanticism in Rome, but a long way from the city's crisp sunlight and architecture for the young Camille Corot. There he undertakes Ugolino and His Sons, his "single masterpiece" (to trust the museum) that, yes, just happens to belong to the Met. He saw the chance to bring together his love of Michelangelo and Dante, with a scene from hell, its plaster model completed in 1861 and the Met's marble in 1867. Just as the young prince gets to name his dog after the cruelest of emperors, Carpeaux brings sympathy to a tyrant and cannibal.
Carpeaux converts the High Renaissance pyramid to a spreading hemisphere, with a suffering hero towering above. Hands pleading from below become sculptural support, while upturned feet from behind complete the volume. Heads thrown back or to the side stretch the Renaissance quarter turn, or contrapposto, to the point of madness. Much the same composition governs agonized scenes from the Gospels later, but nothing has quite the obviousness and agony of Ugolino. Not just his teeth but even his toes are clenched. You will leave impressed, along with a better understanding of the excesses that haunt sculpture as late as Auguste Rodin, but do not be surprised if your teeth are clenched, too.
Fictions of freedom
Just entering his forties, a rising star had become the establishment. Born in 1827, Carpeaux captured the French imagination with the bathos of Ugolino, that image of hell after Dante. The Ministry of Fine Arts cast it in bronze and put it on view in the Tuileries, alongside a replica of classical sculpture in the Vatican, and it appeared again in marble at the 1867 International Exposition. The empress herself purchased his Neapolitan Fisherboy. Now, less than a decade after his retrospective, the Met once again celebrates a recent acquisition, with an exclamation point.
If that sounds a bit much for a sadly academic artist, its very weakness has lessons for today. You can hear the voices. With his cry for freedom of 1868, has Carpeaux reduced black lives to racial stereotypes? Does he glorify an empire that extended from the Caribbean to Africa? He began with plans for public sculpture, of the four parts of the world supporting the celestial sphere. Can one trust a white male to represent a black woman, and could he not have made her more upbeat and proud of her freedom?
Does all that sound like the controversy descended upon Dana Schutz at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, for painting the death of Emmett Till? The curators, Elyse Nelson and Wendy S. Walters, are nothing if not politically aware. They speak of the sculpture as racialized and eroticized, in service to slavery, colonialism, and empire. France had abolished slavery some twenty years before, at least in the Atlantic—but this is still, they argue, "ethnographic sculpture." If so, it is not alone. Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier traveled to Africa for his bronze portrait of 1851, but he confessed to building on his home-grown fantasies. Ten years later, he gave her the weight and color of amethyst in marble.
The period's leading sculptor, Jean Antoine Houdon, had his own head of a black woman and Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi his Allegory of Africa—while the Impressionism that you and I may remember had none. Dantan Jeune may have observed his Ethiopian male youth in Paris. In paint, Jean-Léon Gérôme rendered a black soldier of fortune as a romantic rebel. While Carpeaux worked from life, he plays to stereotype with a woman's wild hair and skin tones in umber. In each case, a black male is aggressive, if burdened by experience, and a black female passive. Even Edmonia Lewis, herself of African American ancestry, followed convention.
This time the Met has thirty-five works in a single room, as one small show and one big mess, but no context in the artist's life and work. It seems only right that the room lies between decorative period art and the Lehmann wing, in tribute to a rich collector. Yet its subjects demand attention, quite as much as the moral fables and ham acting of Auguste Rodin in decades to come. As an inscription on Wedgewood porcelain has it, Am I not a man and a brother? And Carpeaux allows his black woman to turn aside rather than submit to the male gaze. There is no getting around the sense of a real woman.
Her firm eyes have outgrown Ugolino's grimace and a fisherboy's cuteness, and France shared in the outrage. The cause of freedom inspired medallions and other collectibles, but nothing like the commercialization of art today. Kehinde Wiley, for one, turns her into an LA Laker, much as he pictures a young African American as Napoleon after Jacques-Louis David. Beyoncé has adapted Carpeaux, too, to plug a clothing line. With Kara Walker, her pain and her haunting may yet have the last word, relegated to a corner by the floor and overwhelmed by rougher plaster to every side. Walker has made sculpture out of sugar before, but this is not all sweetness and sentiment.
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 26, 2014, and March 5, 2023.