Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse and Beyond

The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and the Musée d’Orsay have partnered to present an exhibition entitled Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today in New York and Le Modèle noir, de Géricault à Matisse in Paris. Following the Wallach show, the exhibition will be expanded at the Musée d'Orsay from March 26 to July 14, 2019.

The exhibition explores the changing modes of representation of the black figure as central to the development of modern art. The models' interactions with and influences on painters, sculptors and photographers are highlighted through archival photographs, correspondence and films. The artists featured in the exhibition depicted black subjects in a manner counter to typical representations of the period. The works included highlight the little-known, multiracial aspect of each artist’s milieu.

In New York, the presentation focuses specifically on the black female figure, beginning with Edouard Manet’s 1860s portrayals of Laure, the model who posed as the maid in Olympia. In Paris, a broader and expanded treatment of the black figure begins with portaits by Marie-Guillemine Benoist and Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault at the start of the 19th century.

In both New York and Paris, the exhibition explores the work of Manet’s Impressionist-era cohort, including Frédéric Bazille, Edgar Degas and the photographer Nadar; sculptors including Charles Henri Joseph Cordier and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux; paintings, drawings and prints of Henri Matisse (before and after his 1930s Harlem visits); the portraiture of diverse artists of the Harlem Renaissance, including Charles Alston and William H. Johnson; and the legacy of these depictions for successive generations of postwar modern and contemporary artists, from Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold through to the current moment.

By taking a multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the connection between the history of art and the history of ideas, the exhibition will study aesthetic, political, social and racial issues as well as the realm of the imagination—all of which is revealed in the representation of black figures in visual arts from the French and American abolition eras to the present day.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.  

Image: Frédéric Bazille. Young Woman with Peonies, 1870. Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 29 1/2 in. Courtesy the National Gallery, Washington, DC

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, is an ambitious investigation of the black female figure in modern art. featuring over 175 illustrations and profiles of several models. Tracing the legacy of Manet through to contemporary art, this revelatory study exploress how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art.  ... The book concludes with a look at how Manet’s and Matisse’s depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices.

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