Le Modèle Noir
Art imitates life, life imitates art, like a dog chasing its tail. While Black women subjects can be seen as essential to Western iconography,(1) the motif has for the largest part nonetheless been ignored by dominant Eurocentric narratives of art history or misrepresented to erase or retell history. Taking a very close look at artworks we’ve seen many times before can provide a fresh perspective and help address misconceptions about history and racism. It also allows for a counternarrative to European art historical canon in relation to both white identity and white supremacy as an institutionalized form of oppression and to trace the origins of several ubiquitous contemporary cultural tropes. Le Modèle Noir de: Géricault à Matisse(2) provides the basis for this re-examination by shifting the access point into works, offering another prism through which to examine many beloved objects that we thought we understood.
The late 15th century saw a shift in European focus to the commodities and exoticism of Africa, with the interest in the people of the continent exemplified in the depictions of the Black woman subject created from then onwards. Much less focused on nuance related to racial discourse, an obsession with skin colour as the defining trait of African Otherness was born hereafter. This is rendered most obvious in the systematic naming of works using pejorative terms such as Négresse. Let us imagine for a moment that we would speak of The Young White Girl with the Pearl Earring and replace La Joconde with Portrait of a White Girl. You get the point. The label for Eugène Delacroix’s Portrait d’une femme au turban bleu (Portrait of a Woman in a Blue Turban) (1827–28) was formerly known as Tête d’étude d’une Indienne (Study of the Head of an Indian Woman), Une tête de femme mulâtre (A Mulatto Woman’s Head), and Aline la Mulâtresse (Aline the Mulattress). These shifts demonstrate the mutability of the idea of race in general and of the Black woman in particular, who could transform from an Indian to a mulâtresse, to a named individual, and eventually back to an anonymous woman in a blue turban.(3)
This obsessive othering is also visible in the fact that Black women are shown in contorted positions so that the adjacent white female body appears as a signifier of more “natural” beauty. These works serve to perpetuate the inaptness of the Other female body in aesthetic conversations. Titian’s Diana and Actaeon acts to confine Black womanhood to a space of visual servitude to white beauty: Diana’s attendant serves as the quintessential symbol for a Renaissance understanding of Black women. More than a sign of the times, she reflects the beginning of a long and continuing history of Black femininity contrasted with and relegated by white femininity.(4)
As the relationship of Europeans to Africans, with the advent of colonialism and slavery, began to change, the hypersextualization of the female Other’s body moved to the forefront of representations in art. This melange is perhaps most visible in Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait d’une Negresse (1800). Others include but are not limited to Jules-Robert Auguste, Nu assis dans l’atelier (1820-1825); Eugène Delacroix, Étude d’apres une mulâtresse (1824-1826); Félix Nadar, Maria (1856-1859); Édouard Manet, Négresse (1862-1863); Eugène Faure, La Négresse (pre 1866); Thomas Eakins, Étude d’apres un modèle féminin a mi-corps (1867-1869); Victor Jean Desmeures, Femme Dakwas (1931) and Man Ray, Modèle posant avec sculpture de la reine bangwa (1934).
While both tropes have in common a lack of agency, the Otherness present in previous iterations is now compounded with a strong focus on the naked body, turbans, beads, chunky golden jewelry, fruit baskets balanced atop heads, and flowers in hair. Most women depicted do not have names and are simply taxonomized and defined by their Blackness or Otherness. There was little other representation, meaning only few instances in which the Black female subject was afforded at least some dignity like her white female contemporaries.(5)
Posing Modernity(6) is a revelatory study which investigates how changing modes of representing Black women were foundational to the development of Western Modernism and subsequently Modern Art. It begins its inquiry into French art and visual culture in the 1860s, taking as its critical launching point Edouard Manet’s images of the Black Parisian model Laure, who is most famous for her highly charged supporting role in Olympia (1863). This radical painting marked a transition toward modernist portrayals of the Black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic Other. Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of 19th century Paris and the post-abolition community of free Black Parisians.
“Shifting modes of depicting the Black female figure are foundational to the evolving aesthetics of modern art, and are part of what makes Modern Art modern”, Murrell explains.(7)
It brings home the point that this combination of race and sex traded on fantasies of exoticism that had already informed generations of artists. As conventional as the subject was, in the hands of modernist artists such as Manet, Cézanne, and Bazille, its combination of race and sex reemerged as a hallmark of modernity. Later avant-garde artists such as Man Ray and Pablo Picasso engaged Blackness in their search for new forms of modern expression, uncovering possibilities for queries into Black women’s impact on and participation in European avant-garde practice.
In all fairness, there are a few notable exceptions, but the fact that they are exceptions to begin with, underlines the tenacity and ubiquity of the usual depictions. One is Fanny Eaton, who began working as a life-drawing model at the Royal Academy in her early twenties. After Simeon Solomon featured Eaton in his painting The Mother of Moses, she quickly became a favourite subject for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including artists such as Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John Everett Millais and Joanna Mary Boyce. Given that representation of Black women was often non-existent throughout the 1800s, positive representation was – and still is – unusual.(8) Another is the portrait of Lady Elizabeth Murray and Dido Elizabeth Murray, by David Martin. Dido Elizabeth Belle, whose father was Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay, was born to an unknown Black mother and then raised at Kenwood House in Hampstead. In the painting Dido, albeit wearing a turban and feather, is staring directly back at the spectator, with a very confident eye, flipping tradition of 18th century portraiture.(9)
Honorable mentions aside, there are a few striking similarities that emerge throughout: the representation of Black women in Western visual culture is defined by an impressive conceptual ambivalence. Either depicted as subservient, demure, sometimes childlike, overlooked and diminished, but also cast as the exotic novelty, sensationalized and adorned with a wild assortment of mismatched symbolic decorations to create a deliberate – not inherent – hypervisibility, always with a generous dose of sexual titillation in comparison to the depictions of white women, who were afforded more period-appropriate modesty - because there was little incentive to underscore their lack of respectability, availability and perceived “wildness.” There is a clear tendency towards a passive display of the body, sexually suggestive and more importantly always accessible to the implied (white male) spectator, establishing a clear power dynamic between the two. Another exception was Josephine Baker, who took center stage as a hallmark of modernity when she came to represent, consciously or not, many of the conceptions about Black women as primitive and erotic, established long before she danced topless in a banana skirt at the Folies Bergère, laced with her signature humor - and more importantly, laughing all the way to the bank.
This essay was taken from a chapter of the book Hot Mixed Girl which delves into much more detail of how art history documents the ever-evolving roles and also conceptions of Black women in Western social imaginations. It isn’t pretty. To read more, follow the link under the references.
1 David Bindman, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 1–5.2, (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010–2014).
2 Le modèle noir: De Géricault à Matisse (Flammarion, 2019).
3 Adrienne L. Childs, 'Le modèle noir: De Géricault à Matisse', Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, (2019), Vol. 18 (2).
4 Jaelynn Walls, The Overlooked Role of Black Women in European Renaissance Paintings, Artsy, May 27, 2020.
5 Adrienne L. Childs, 'Le modèle noir: De Géricault à Matisse'.
6 Denise Murrell, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (Yale University Press, 2018).
7 Nadja Sayej, Matisse to modernity: the evolution of black female models in art, The Guardian, October 22, 2018.
8 Lydia Figes, Fanny Eaton: Jamaican Pre-raphaelite muse, Art AK, October 23, 2019. Sarah Cascone, Who Is Fanny Eaton? The Jamaican Model Who Inspired the Pre-Raphaelites Is the Latest Art-World Figure to Get a Google Doodle, Artnet News, November 18, 2020.
9 Dido Elizabeth Belle, English Heritage Website.