At the Musée d’Orsay, the exhibition “The Black Model, from Géricault to Matisse” seeks to make visible what a certain history of art had hidden: the place of black models in the Fine Arts. Art historian Anne Lafont traces the genesis of the exhibition and offers a guided tour.
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Anne Lafont is one of the four members of the Scientific Committee of the exhibition. She is an art historian and director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Her most recent research has focused on the pictorial imagination of new black citizens in the Atlantic revolutions (Art and Race. The African (all) against the Eye of EnlightenmentPresses du réel, 2019).
His research now focuses on the art of the French Antilles during the colonial and slavery periods.
The exhibition “The Black Model from Géricault to Matisse”, currently hanging at the Musée d’Orsay, represents a break in French museography. It is the first in France devoted to the representation of Black people in a major Fine Arts museum. Focusing on the relationship between white artists and black models, from the first abolition of slavery to the 1940s, it offers an encounter, at a distance from colonial life, with the black models and communities living in Paris. Its ambitions are great: to make visible those who were previously invisible, like Laure, the foil to Manet’s Olympia; to give them back a singularity and an identity beyond the simple fact that they are black; to bring them out of anonymity. Let’s bet that this exhibition will reorient the gaze and renew the questioning of the history of art.
© 2017 Fredrik Nilsen ©Ellen Gallagher. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Asked by The Life of IdeasAnne Lafont explains the biases of this exhibition, which is destined to have lasting political and museographic effects. She shares with us the preliminary work carried out by the curators and members of the scientific committee, as well as some of the discussions they had on the choice of works. She then guides us through the exhibition, stopping in front of the works that we considered the most striking.
Montauban, Ingres Museum. © www.bridgemanimages.com
View of the exhibition, © Sophie Crépy.
Versailles Museum
Source: Wikimedia.