Seeing Laure:

Race and Modernity from Manet’s Olympia to Matisse, Bearden and Beyond

Denise M. Murrell

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2014
 © 2013

Denise M. Murrell
All Rights Reserved
 ABSTRACT

Seeing Laure:
Race and Modernity from Manet’s Olympia to Matisse, Bearden and Beyond

Denise M. Murrell

During the 1860s in Paris, Edouard Manet and his circle transformed the style

and content of art to reflect an emerging modernity in the social, political and economic

life of the city. Manet’s Olympia (1863) was foundational to the new manner of painting

that captured the changing realities of modern life in Paris. One readily observable

development of the period was the emergence of a small but highly visible population of

free blacks in the city, just fifteen years after the second and final French abolition of

territorial slavery in 1848.

The discourse around Olympia has centered almost exclusively on one of the two

figures depicted: the eponymous prostitute whose portrayal constitutes a radical revision

of conventional images of the courtesan. This dissertation will attempt to provide a

sustained art-historical treatment of the second figure, the prostitute’s black maid, posed

by a model whose name, as recorded by Manet, was Laure. It will first seek to establish

that the maid figure of Olympia, in the context of precedent and Manet’s other images of

Laure, can be seen as a focal point of interest, and as a representation of the complex

racial dimension of modern life in post-abolition Paris.

It will then examine the continuing resonance and influence of Manet’s Laure

across successive generations of artists from Manet’s own time to the present moment.
The dissertation thereby suggests a continuing iconographic lineage for Manet’s Laure,

as manifested in iteratively modernizing depictions of the black female figure from 1870

to the present. Artworks discussed include a clarifying homage to Manet by his acolyte

Frédéric Bazille; the countertypical portrayal by early modernist Henri Matisse of two

principal black models as personifications of cosmopolitan modernity; the presentation

by collagist Romare Bearden of a black odalisque defined by cultural, rather than sexual,

attributes metaphoric of the cultural hybridity of African American culture; and direct

engagement with Manet’s depiction of Laure by selected contemporary artists, including

Maud Sulter and Mickalene Thomas, often with imagery, materials and processes also

influenced by Matisse or Bearden. In each case, the fitfully evolving modernity of the

black female figure will be seen to emerge from each artist’s fidelity to his or her

transformative creative vision regardless of the representational norms of the day.

The question of what, if anything, is represented by Manet’s idiosyncratic

depiction of the prostitute’s black maid has seldom been comprehensively addressed by

the histories of modern art. The small body of published commentary about Manet’s

Laure, with a few notable exceptions, generally dismisses the figure as meaning,

essentially, nothing -- except as an ancillary intensifier of the connotations of immorality

attributed to the prostitute. Manet’s earlier portrait of Laure, rich in significations

relevant to her portrayal in Olympia, is even more rarely discussed, and typically seen as

a study for Olympia, rather than as a stand-alone portrait as this analysis suggests. The

image of Laure as Olympia’s maid is frequently oversimplified as a racist stereotype, a

perspective that belies the metonymic implications of a figure that is simultaneously

centered and obscured.

 It is in the extensive body of response to Laure’s Olympia pose by artists, more

than by historians, that the full complexity and enduring influence of the figure’s

problematic nuance can be seen. This dissertation, like the artists, takes its cues from the

formal qualities of Manet’s images of Laure, in the context of precedent images and the

fraught racial interface within Manet’s social and artistic milieu, to suggest new and

revisionary narratives. It suggests that Manet’s Laure can be seen as an early depiction of

an evolving cultural hybridity among black Parisians– visible in Laure’s placement,

affect and attire—that took shape during the early years of the newly built northern areas

of Paris that are today home to some of the largest black populations in central Paris.

Within this context, an iconographic legacy of ambivalent yet innovative modernity can

be asserted for the Laure figure –extending from Delacroix to Matisse, Bearden and

beyond. This lineage can be seen as parallel to the long-established pictorial lineage for

Manet’s figuring of the prostitute Olympia.

What is at stake is an art-historical discourse posed as an intervention with the

prevailing historical silence about the representation and legacy of Manet’s Laure, and by

derivation about the significance of the black female muse to the formation of

modernism. This analysis suggests that the black female figure is foundational to the

evolving aesthetics of modern art. It suggests that Olympia’s standing as a progenitor of

modern painting can only be enhanced by breaking through the marginalization of

Laure’s representational legacy. It asserts that it is only when the bi-figural significance

of Manet’s Olympia is recognized that the extent and influence of Manet’s radical

modernity can be most fully understood.

Contents

Table of Contents i

List of Illustrations iv

Acknowledgements xvii

Dedication xxii

VOLUME ONE

INTRODUCTION 2

Manet’s Laure and the Histories of Art 3

Laure in the Context of Manet’s Paris 7

Bazille’s Homage to Manet 13

Matisse at the Villa Le Rêve 16

Bearden in Harlem and Paris: Collaging Cultural Hybridity 23

The Anterior as Muse in the Art of Maud Sulter and Mickalene Thomas 29

CHAPTER ONE: From the Négresse as Type to a Portrait of Laure

Introduction: Manet’s Three Paintings of Laure 35

The Ethnic Demographics of Manet’s Paris 37

A First Awareness:Children in the Tuileries and the Black Presence in Manet’s Paris 39

Manet’s Portrait of Laure: From Type to Individual 45

Laure Within Manet’s Gallery of Outsiders 47

Racial Interface and Anxiety within Manet’s Artistic Circle 52

Laure as Index: Paris’ Free Black Working Class 60

Portrait of Laure : From Exotic Symbol to Cultural Hybridity in Modern Paris 64

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Stand-alone Portrait or Study for Olympia? 77

CHAPTER TWO: Laure of Olympia

Laure of Olympia : Metonymy and Hybridity in an Emergent Black Paris 81

The Maid as Modernity: The Revision of Precedent 81

Abolitionist Aesthetics and Republican Sentiment 87

Artist Intentionality: Duality of the Baudelairean Muse 94

Modernity and Composition: Laure Constructed and Unbound 101

The Dissipation of Attention: Modern Modes of Viewing Olympia Across Time 105

A Fragmented Audience and Differentiated Modes of Attention 110

Bazille’s Homage to Manet: The Iconographic Legacy of Laure Begins 112

CHAPTER THREE: Matisse at the Villa Le Rêve: Toward a New Baudelairean Muse

Introduction 127

Matisse’s Modernism: From Primitivism to the Cusp of Modernity 132

Tradition and Modernity: The Fleurs du Mal Illustrations 139

The Modernizing Turn: Toward a New Baudelairean Muse 147

Matisse and the “New Negro” Aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance 151

Modernity and Cosmopolitan Beauty in the Final Easel Paintings 157

Influence and Critical Reception of Les Fleurs du Mal 161

CHAPTER FOUR Bearden in Harlem and Paris: Collaging Cultural Hybridity

Introduction 164

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The Reclining Nude: Continuity and Revision 167

Manet and Boucher: Archival Sources for a Synthesizing Pose 172

Re-Situating the Object of Desire 174

The Fragmentary Development of Revision 184

Bearden and the School of Life in Paris 187

Paris Blues Revisited 193

Bearden, Matisse and Baudelaire: Affinities in the Absence of Encounter 194

Martinique as Eden and Inspiration 196

Collage as Manifestation of Identity and Influence 197

The Quilt as Metaphor: Legacy and Materiality 199

Collage as the Visualization of African American Identity Formation 202

Situating Patchwork Quilt Within the History of Modern and Contemporary Art 204

CONCLUSION

Seeing Laure: The Anterior as Muse in the Art of Maud Sulter and Mickalene Thomas

Maud Sulter: A Recuperative Mode of Vision 210

Mickalene Thomas: Presenting a Trés Belle Négresse of the Present Moment 215

BIBLIOGRAPHY 221

VOLUME TWO

Illustrations

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 List of Illustrations

1. Title Page: Seeing Laure: Race and Modernity from Manet’s Olympia to Matisse,
Bearden and Beyond

2. Manet, Children in the Tuileries, 1861 (Rhode Island School of Design); Manet,
Portrait of Laure, 1862 (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino); Manet, Olympia, 1863 (Musée
d’Orsay)

3. Edouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries, 1862

4. A New Modernity for a Genre Type--Edouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries,

1862; Timéon Marie Lobrichon, Promenade des Enfants, ca. 1870, oil on canvas;
Pierre Bonnard, Promenade des nourrices, frise des fiacres [Nannies' Promenade,
Frieze of Carriages], 1897, screen with lithographed sheets

5. A New Modernity for a Stereotype of Popular Culture -- Edouard Manet, Children

in the Tuileries, 1862; Caricature of Alexandre Dumas père as nourrice for theatre, Le
Charivari, 1858

6. A Representation of Everyday Life -- Edouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries,

1862; Anonymous, Femme noire tenant une petite fille sur les genoux –with foulard,
ca. 1865; Anonymous, Nourrice noire tenant une petite fille sur les genoux, ca 1856
(source of photographs Gallica Bibliothèque Numerique– BNF)

7. Formal Qualities: modern vs genre --Edouard Manet, Children in the Tuileries,

1862; Feyen, Baiser enfantin, 1865

8. Artists and Black Residents in 1860s Paris – 9th and 17th arrondissements -- Purple
-Black Parisians; Red -Manet and his circle; Green –Later generations of blacks in
Paris

9. Artists and Black Residents in 1860s Paris 9th and 17th arrondissements –List of
Names

10. Alain Anselin, INSEE, L’émigration antillaise en France

11. The Batignolles Artists and Writers -- Fantin-Latour, Homage to Delacroix, 1865;
Manet, Au Café Guerbois, 1869; Fantin Latour, Studio at Batignolles, 1870

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12. Outsiders in Manet’s Paris -- Manet, Portrait of Laure, 1862; Manet, The
Absinthe Drinker, 1862; Manet, Gypsy with Cigarette, 1862 (Princeton University
Art Museum); Manet, The Old Musician, 1862

13. Literature and Theatre in 1860s Paris: Place Pigalle as Racial Crossroads--
Etienne Carjat, Alexandre Dumas père, 1862; Adah Isaacs Menken, age 19, 1854-55;
Etienne Carjat, Charles Baudelaire, 1863 (Metropolitan Museum); Charles
Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, February 1865

14. Manet’s Portraits: Demimondaine and Bourgeoise --Baudelaire’s Mistress

(Jeanne Duval), 1862; Madame Manet on a Blue Sofa, 1874; Berthe Morisot, 1873,
and Le Repos, 1870

15. Literature and Theatre in 1860s Paris: Place Pigalle as Racial Crossroads --
Etienne Carjat, Alexandre Dumas pere, 1862; Adah Isaacs Menken, age 19, 1854-55;
Dumas and Adah Isaacs Menken, Paris, nd

16. Prominent Black Parisians 1850s-60s--Carjat, Alexandre Dumas pere, 1862;

Nadar, Alexandre Dumas pere; Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, 1865 (Musée d’Orsay);
Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval (Archives Larbor); Soulange-Tessier, Louisy Mathieu,
représentant de la Guadeloupe à l’Assemblée Nationale, 1848

17. Black Parisians 1850s – 1860s --Jacques-Philippe Potteau, Marie Lassus. 19 ans,
Née à la Nouvelle-Orléans. Père parisien et mère noire Amérique du Nord. Créoles;
1860s (source: Bibliotheque National de France Collection Anthropolique-Gallica
bibliothèque numérique); Jacques-Philippe Potteau, Louise Kuling. 35 ans. négresse,
née à Norfolk, de parents venant du Congo. Amenée en France par Mr le
Commandant Louvet. Amérique du Nord. Créoles, BNF site; Jacques Philippe
Potteau, Jean Marquis Borras, Negre de l’archipel de Cap Vert, 1864

18. Prominent Black Visitors to 1860s Paris -- Camille Silvy, Portrait of Sarah
Forbes Bonetta Davies, and with James Pinson Labulo Davies, 1862;
Portrait of Ira Aldridge by Legé and Bergeron, Paris, ca. 1866-67

19. Prominent Black Visitors to 1860s Paris --Camille Silvy, Portrait of Sarah Forbes
Bonetta Davies, and with James Pinson Labulo Davies, 1862; Edmonia Lewis, ca.
1860s; Portrait of Ira Aldridge by Legé and Bergeron, Paris, ca. 1866-67

20. Edmonia Lewis, ca. 1860s --Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867, Howard
University Gallery of Art

21. Racial Interface within Manet’s Circle -- Etienne Carjat, Alexandre Dumas père,
1862; Alexandre Dumas fils, 1864; Etienne Carjat, Charles Baudelaire, 1863
(Metropolitan Museum); Charles Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval, February 1865;
Nadar, Jeune Modèle, n.d. (BNF)

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22. Manet, Portrait of Laure (known as La Négresse), 1862 (Pinacoteca Agnelli,
Torino)

23. Modernizing vs genre -formal pictorial qualities -- Edouard Manet, Portrait of

Laure (known as La Négresse), 1862; Jacques Eugene Feyen, Le baiser enfantin;
Paris Salon Catalog of 1865, Musée des Beaux-Arts Lille (Image of the Black in
Western Art archives, Harvard University, Cambridge MA)

24. Laure as Modern: individual vs symbol -- Manet, Portrait of Laure (known as La

Négresse), 1862; Benoist, Portrait d’une négresse, Salon 1800; Carpeaux, Pourquoi
naître esclave? (Why born a slave?), 1872.

25. Modernity vs Empire --Manet, Portrait of Laure (known as La Négresse, 1862

(Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino); Delacroix, Portrait of Aspasie, 1824 (3 versions)

26. The Aesthetics of Empire -- “Ethnographic” drawing of Saartjie (Sarah)

Baartman “The Hottentot Venus, ca 1810-15; Delacroix, Portrait of Aspasie, 1824
(Musée Fabre, Montpellier)

27. Modernity vs Empire --Manet, Portrait of Laure (known as La Négresse, 1862

(Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino); Delacroix, Portrait of Aspasie, 1824 (Musée Fabre,
Montpellier)

28. A Modernizing Turn -- Manet, Portrait of Laure, 1862; Nadar, Marie

l’Antillaise, 1855, (Musee d’Orsay); Delacroix, Aspasie, 1824

29. Black Parisians 1850s – 1860s -- Nadar, Marie l’Antillaise, 1855 (Musee
d’Orsay); Nadar, Jeune Modele, 1856-59

30. Costume History: The Artist’s Model -- Nadar, Jeune Modèle, n.d.(1850s-60s?)
(BNF); Nadar, Marie l’Antillaise, 1855; Nadar, Sarah Bernhardt, 1865

31. Costume History: Situating the black female subject “in Paris” vs “in the colonies
-- Manet, Portrait of Laure, 1862; Cordier, La Capresse des Colonies (the
goatherder), 1861, From La Guadeloupe Historique: Costume porté par la plupart
des femmes du pays, 1855 (Collection F. Petit); Anonymous, Lucie, 1864

32. Black Parisians 1850s – 1860s -- Nadar, Marie l’Antillaise, 1855, (Musee
d’Orsay); Anonymous, Lucie, 1864; Potteau, Louise Kuhling; Potteau, Marie Lassus,
1860s (Bibliothèque National de France)

33. Costume History: The Foulard (headscarf): “on the-job” uniform” vs self-
presentation --Edouard Manet, Portrait of Laure (known as La Negresse), 1862;
Potteau, Marie Lassus, 1860s; Antillaise ship-boarding song, Adieu foulard, adieu
madras ca. 1900

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34. Stereotypes in popular media, 1863 --An ad from La Vie Parisienne: Cora the
seamstress

35. Stereotypes in popular media -- from La Vie Parisienne, 1863 -the bonne noire
(black maid) as une rivale

36. Caricatures from La Vie Parisienne, 1863 -- Cora the seamstress; The bonne
noire as une rivale

37. Situating Laure: comparative styles --ballgown (Harran), 19th c. fashion plate,
“une couturiére à son compte” (Harran); Baudelaire’s sketch of Jeanne Duval;
Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Duval

38. Costume hybridity: a Parisian “grisette” of Antillaise origin -- Edouard Manet,

Portrait of Laure (known as La Negresse) 1862; Constantin Guys, La Grisette,
Grisettes and Workers, La Loge, mid- 19th century; Harran, a re-enacted Second
Empire costume

39. Pictorial equivalence: Laure and Victorine -- Manet, Portrait of Laure (known as
La Négresse), 1862 (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino); Manet, Victorine Meurent, 1862
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

40. Pictorial equivalence: Laure, Victorine and Suzon -- Manet, Portrait of Laure
(known as La Négresse), 1862 (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino);
Manet, Victorine Meurent, 1862 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

41. Pictorial equivalence: Laure, Victorine and Suzon -- Manet, Portrait of Laure
(known as La Negresse, 1862 (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino); Manet, Victorine
Meurent, 1862 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

42. Manet’s Modernism-- Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863;

Titian, Venus of Urbino, 1538

43. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863; Charles Baudelaire, À Une Malabraise, 1855

44. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863; Edouard Manet, The Balcony, 1868-69 (Musée
d’Orsay)

45. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 -- Manet, Olympia watercolor, 1863 (original);
Manet, Olympia etching, small plate, 1867 (Metropolitan Museum)

46. Modern life in Paris vs Orientalism -- Léon Benouville, Esther with Odalisque,
1844; Delacroix, Women of Algiers, 1834; Delaplance, Allegory of Africa,1878
Musée d’Orsay

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47. The attire of a slave? Abolitionist imagery -- François August Biard,
Proclamation de l’Abolition des Esclavages dans les colonies Françaises (27 avril
1848), 1849, Chateau de Versailles; Carpeaux, La Negresse: Why Born a Slave?,
1872; Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1862

48. The attire of a slave? Abolitionist imagery -- Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Oath

of the Ancestors, 1822; Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1862

49. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863 -- Manet, Olympia watercolor, 1863 (original);
Manet, Olympia etching, small plate, 1867 (Metropolitan Museum)

50. ”I paint what I see” --Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863;J.- A. Moulin, Plate from
Etudes Photographiques, 1853;; Workers at 2 rue de Londres brothel, 1900
(version with four women -n.d.)

51. Costume -Laure of Olympia -- Second Empire costume history -nightwear

52. A stereotype from popular culture? -- Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863; Bertall
caricature, Le Charivari, 1865

53. Formal qualities –modern vs genre -- Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863;

Jacques Eugene Feyen, Le baiser enfantin, Paris Salon Catalog of 1865, Musée des
Beaux-Arts Lille (Image of the Black in Western Art archives, Harvard University,
Cambridge MA)

54. Bazille, Studio in the rue Condamine, 1868

55. Fantin Latour, Studio at Batignolles, 1852 -- Bazille, Studio in the rue
Condamine, 1868

56. Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870 (National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC)

57. Frédéric Bazille, Négresse aux Pivoines, 1870 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier)

58. Bazille, Négresse aux Pivoines, 1870; Bazille, La Toilette, 1869-70 (Musée
Fabre)

59. Bazille, Négresse aux Pivoines, 1870 -- Bazille, study for Négresse aux Pivoines
(Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University)

60. Frédéric Bazille, Négresse aux Pivoines, 1870 -what style? -- Exposition
Universelle: mulatresse de la Reunion vendant des produits des colonies, gravure
signee Sautejau in Le Monde Illustré, 1867; re-imagined fashion plate for une
“couturiere a son compte” (self-employed seamstress)

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61. Bazille’s Peonies –A Comparative Costume History -- Potteau, Marie Lassus
-Baudelaire, Jeanne Duval; reconstructed dress of une “couturiere a son compte”

62. Frédéric Bazille, Negresse aux Pivoines, 1870 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier);
Exposition Universelle: mulatresse de la Reunion vendant des produits des colonies,
gravure signee Sautejau in Le Monde Illustré, 1867

63. The Bazille Model: images by other artists -- Eakins, Study of a Young Black
Woman, 1867 (De Young Museum of Fine Art, San Francisco); Henri Regnault,
Figure study, 19th c., Cleveland Museum of Art (Image of the Black in Western Art
archives, Boston)

64. Artists’ Images of Blacks in Paris -- Eakins, Study of a Young Black Woman,
1867 (De Young Museum of Fine Art, San Francisco); Cezanne, Scipion, 1867
(Museo de Arte, Sao Paulo)

65. Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879 (National Gallery, London);
Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879 (sketch). (Tate Gallery, London);
Cirque Fernando Poster, Miss La La: La Femme Canon, ca. 1879

66. Manet and his Circle: Images of Black Parisians

67. Manet’s last portrait: Elisa, Mery Laurent’s maid -now lost

68. Blank Slide

69. Matisse at the Villa Le Rêve : Toward a New Baudelairean Muse

70. Matisse at La Villa Le Reve, Nice (Vence) , 1943-1948

71. Photo by Hélène Adant of Henri Matisse with a Haitian model posing for Les
Fleurs du Mal in his studio at Villa le Rêve, Nice, 1940s (Fonds Hélène Adant,
Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris

72. The Baudelairean Muse: From Laure of Manet to Carmen of Matisse --

Manet, Portrait of Laure, 1862; Matisse, A Une Malabraise, from Les Fleurs du Mal,
1947; Matisse, Tete Haitienne, 1940s

73. The Baudelairean Muse from Manet to Matisse -- Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863
Matisse and Baudelaire, À Une Malabaraise, 1947 and 1857

74. Matisse, Luxe, calme et volupté, 1904; Matisse, Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra,
1907

75. Matisse, La Petite Mulatresse Fatma, 1912 (private Swiss collection);

Matisse, Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra, 1907

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76. Photo of Tuareg women -- Matisse, Two Women ( Two Negresses), 1908;
Matisse, The Back, 1913-16 (Museum of Modern Art)

77. An Evolving Modernity for the Baudelairean Muse -- Matisse illustrations for
Baudelaire’s poetry volume Les Fleurs du Mal, 1946-47: --A Une Malabraise (To a
Woman from Malabar); Les Yeux de Berthe (Berthe’s Eyes); Frontispiece

78. Photographs of the model Carmen , Source: Wanda de Guébriant, Archives

Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux, November 16, 2012

79. Photograph by Hélène Adant of a Haitian model posing for Henri Matisse’s Les
Fleurs du Mal in his studio at Villa le Rêve, Nice, 1940s (Fonds Hélène Adant,
Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris;
Matisse, Les yeux de Berthe, from an illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du
Mal, 1944

80. Matisse, Remords Posthume (Posthumous Remorse), from Les Fleurs du Mal,
1947

81. Matisse in Harlem -- Portraits by Carl Van Vechten of: Henri Matisse (May 20,
1933); Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald

82. Relevés chronologiques correspondance et Agendas Matisse

83. Matisse and the Aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance -- Matisse, Remords
Posthume, from Les Fleurs du Mal, 1947; Carl van Vechten, Portrait of Billie
Holiday, 1949; Carl van Vechten, Portrait of Billie Holiday, 1949

84. Matisse and the Aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance -- Matisse, Remords
Posthume, from Les Fleurs du Mal, 1947; Carl van Vechten, Portrait of Bessie Smith,
1936

85. Matisse and the Aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance -- Matisse, Remords
Posthume, from Les Fleurs du Mal, 1947; Carl van Vechten, Portrait of Billie
Holiday, 1949; Carl van Vechten, Portrait of Billie Holiday, 1949;
Archibald Motley, Brown Girl after the Bath, 1931

86. A Modern Baudelairean Muse --Matisse, La Martiniquaise lithographs

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pierre and Tana Matisse collection);
Photograph of the model Carmen Helouis, Source: Archives Matisse Issy-les-
Moulineaux

87. Matisse and Paul Robeson -- Matisse illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal, 1947
-- Les Yeux de Berthe; Frontispiece; Van Vechten, Portrait of Eslanda (Mrs. Paul)
Robeson, 1920s?

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88. Carmen for Fleurs du Mal frontispiece - Matisse –lithograph posed by Carmen
for frontispiece, Les Fleurs du Mal, 1947; Matisse, Le Chat, Les Fleurs du Mal,
1947 -posing models against type

89. Harlem Renaissance Portraiture Aesthetics: “The New Negro “ -- Archibald

Motley, Brown Girl after the Bath, 1931; Malvin Gray Johnson, Self-Portrait, 1934
Charles Alston, Girl in Red, 1934; William H. Johnson, Man in a Vest, 1939

90. Harlem Renaissance and the African Mask -- Henri Matisse –lithograph posed by
Carmen for frontispiece, Les Fleurs du Mal, 1946; Aaron Douglas, Rise shine for
thy light has come!, 1930; W.E.B. Dubois, editor, The Crisis Magazine, Covers of
May 1929 and September 1927 -published in association with the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

91. Relevés chronologiques correspondance et Agendas Matisse -1930 Premier

Voyage

92. Matisse, unpublished letter (excerpt) March 7, 1930 -- “une pièce nègre
épatante”

93. Relevés chronologiques correspondance et Agendas Matisse –Deuxieme Voyage

94. Relevés chronologiques correspondance et Agendas Matisse –Annee 1933

95. Relevés chronologiques correspondance et Agendas Matisse 1932-1934

96. Relevés chronologiques correspondance et Agendas Matisse 1945-1946

97. Photo by Hélène Adant of Matisse sketching a Haitian model posing for Les
Fleurs du Mal in his studio at Villa le Rêve, Nice, 1940s (Fonds Hélène Adant,
Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris

98. Photos by Hélène Adant of Henri Matisse sketching a Haitian model for Les
Fleurs du Mal in his studio at Villa le Rêve, Nice, 1940s (Fonds Hélène Adant,
Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris

99. Photo by Hélène Adant of Henri Matisse with a Haitian model posing for Les
Fleurs du Mal in his studio at Villa le Rêve, Nice, 1940s (Fonds Hélène Adant,
Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris

100. Matisse, Tete de Haitienne, 1943?; Photographs of the model Carmen Helouis
Source: Wanda de Guébriant, Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux, November 16,
2012

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101. Matisse, La Martiniquaise, lithographs (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pierre
and Tana Matisse collection); Photograph of the model Carmen Helouis, Source:
Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux

102. The Baudelairean Muse Manet and Matisse -- Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863;
Matisse and Baudelaire, À Une Malabraise, 1947 and 1857

103. Matisse at La Villa Le Reve, Nice (Vence) 1945-1946

104. Matisse, preparatory drawings for Les Fleurs du Mal, 1946-1947

105. Matisse with studio assistant and model Lydia Delectorskaya at La Villa Le
Reve, Nice (Vence) 1945-46

106. Matisse Villa le Rêve studio with drawings of Carmen and Lydia

107. Photos by Georges Meguerditchian of Matisse sketching Haitian and Congolese

models for Les Fleurs du Mal in his studio at Villa le Rêve, Nice, 1940s (Fonds
Hélène Adant, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges
Pompidou, Paris

108. Matisse at the Villa le Réve -- Matisse, Young Woman in White, Red
Background, 1944 (private collection); Matisse, Young Woman in White, Red
Background, 1946 (Centre Pompidou)

109. Photo of the model Mme. Von Hyfte -- Matisse, Young Woman in White, Red
Background, 1946 and l’Asie (Asia), 1946

110. Stills from Campaux film –Matisse studio session with the model Mme. Von
Hyfte for Young Woman in White, Red Background -- Matisse, Young Woman in
White, Red Background, 1946 (Centre Pompidou); Source: Archives Matisse Issy-
les-Moulineaux

111.Stills from Campaux film –Matisse studio session with the model Mme. Von
Hyfte for the painting Young Woman in White, Red Background, 1946 Source:
Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux

112. Stills from Campaux film –Matisse studio session with the model Mme. Von
Hyfte for the painting Young Woman in White, Red Background, 1946 Source:
Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux

113. Stills from Campaux film –Matisse studio session with the model Mme. Von
Hyfte for the painting Young Woman in White, Red Background, 1946 Source:
Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux

xii
114. Stills from Campaux film –Matisse studio session with the model Mme. Von
Hyfte for the painting Young Woman in White, Red Background, 1946 Source:
Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux

115. Stills from Campaux filem –Matisse studio session with the model Mme. Von
Hyfte Matisse, Young Woman in White, Red Background, 1946 (Centre
Pompidou) Source: Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux

116. Photos of the model Mme. Von Hyffte

Spource: Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineaux September 2012

117. Matisse’s Three Paintings of Mme van Hyfte: Universality of Beauty --

Photograph of Madame van Hyfte, model for l’Asie; Matisse, l’Asie (Asia), 1946
(Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX)

118. Matisse – posing models against type -- Madame van Hyfte, model for
Matisse’s l’Asie (Asia); Matisse, Jeune Chinoise (Young Chinese Woman), 1947

119. Matisse’s Three Paintings of Mme. Van Hyfte; Matisse, Dame a la Robe
Blanche, 1946

120. Matisse at La Villa Le Reve, Nice (Vence) 1944-1948

121. Return to Paris after the war

122. Photo of Matisse working with the model Athenore, Montparnasse studio, 1947?
(in Carmen’s blouse); Matisse, Drawing of the model Athenore, Paris Source:
Archives Matisse Issy-les-Moulineux September 2012

123. The 1950s: Final Years -- Matisse, La Négresse (National Gallery,

Washington); Matisse, Creole Dancer, 1950 (Musée Matisse, Nice)

124. The Last Years -1950s - Matisse in studio with La Négresse; Photo of Carmen in
New York, ca. 1950s (Source: Archives Matisse)

124. Faith Ringgold, quilt paintings from The French Collection series, 1990-1994 --
Matisse’s Model, 1991; Matisse’s Chapel, 1991

125. Blank slide

126. Matisse and Baudelaire, Remords Posthume, from Les Fleurs du Mal, 1947 and
1857

127. Matisse and Baudelaire, Les yeux de Berthe, from Les Fleurs du Mal

xiii
128. Matisse’s early portraits of Carmen: An evolving iconography for Luxe, Calme
et Volupté; Delacroix, Portrait of Aspasie, 1824 (Musée Fabre, Montpellier); Manet,
Portrait of Laure (known as La Negresse), 1862 (Pinacoteca Agnelli, Torino);
Matisse, Tete de Haitienne, ~1943.

129. Van Hyfte or not?

130. Matisse, lithograph posed by Carmen for frontispiece of Les Fleurs du Mal,
1946

131. Blank slide

132. Bearden and Paris: Collaging Cultural Hybridity

133. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970; Manet, Olympia, 1863

134. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970

(Museum of Modern Art)

135. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970; Manet, Olympia, 1863; Titian, Venus
of Urbino, 1538

136. Frédéric Bazille, Young Woman with Peonies, 1870 (National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.)

137. Bearden archives –reproduction of Olympia, Boucher, Portrait of Marie-Louise

O’Murphy, 1752

138. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970; Manet, Olympia, 1863; Boucher,
Portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy, 1752

139. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970; Egyptian striding figure; Boucher,
Portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy, 1752

140. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970; Boucher, Portrait of Marie-Louise

O’Murphy, 1752

141. William H. Johnson, Mahlinda, 1939-40; Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt,

1970

142. Bearden, the Brothel and Pornography: Romare Bearden, The Apprenticeship of
Jelly Roll Morton, 1971; Romare Bearden, Down Home, 1971

143. Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970 (Museum of Modern Art); Bearden, Patchwork
Quilt, 1969 (private collection); Bearden, Black Venus, 1968 (Kemper Art Museum)

xiv
144. Bearden, Black Venus, 1968; Gauguin, Manao tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead
Keep Watch), 1892; Matisse, Icarus from Jazz (Museum of Modern Art), 1943-47

145. Pictorial Architecture --Bearden, Morning, 1975 (David C. Driskell Collection);

Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970 (Museum of Modern Art); Bearden, Patchwork
Quilt, 1969 (private collection); Bearden, Black Venus, 1968 (Kemper Art Museum)

146. Romare Bearden, Khayan and the Black Girl, 1971; Romare Bearden, Odysseus
Leaves Circe, 1977

147. Black cats in Olympia stance and position (upper right) in Bearden’s collages--
Untitled, 1971; Family Dinner, 1968

148. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt (preliminary drawing), 1970

149. Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt, 1970; Romare Bearden, Patchwork Quilt
(preliminary drawing), 1970 (Museum of Modern Art)

150. Romare Bearden’s “Proffering Woman:” La Primavera, 1967; Family, 1970;

Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1967

151. Romare Bearden in Paris, 1950

152. Bearden and Matisse -- Matisse, The Piano Lesson, 1916 (Museum of Modern
Art); Matisse, The Music Lesson, 1917; Bearden, Homage to Mary Lou (The Piano
Lesson) 1984

153. Bearden and Courbet, Picasso -- Romare Bearden, The Street (detail), 1971-72;
Courbet, The Origin of the World, 1866 (Musée d’Orsay); Picasso, The Three
Musicians, 1921

154. Romare Bearden, Sam Shaw, Paris Blues Revisited, early 1980s

155. Romare Bearden, Sam Shaw, Paris Blues Revisited, early 1980s

156. Cats -- Matisse and Bearden

157. Romare Bearden, Quilting Time, 1986

158. Bearden and Matisse Affinities: Connie’s Inn; Bearden, At Connie’s Inn, 1974

159. Bearden and Matisse Affinities: Martinique Memories and Series -- Bearden,
The Intimacy of Water (L’intimité de l’eau), the Prevalence of Ritual-Martinique
series, 1973; Matisse, Les Yeux de Berthe, from illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal
by Charles Baudelaire, 1947; Matisse, Creole Dancer, 1950

xv
160. Larry Rivers, I Like Olympia in Blackface, 1970 (Centre Pompidou)

161. Richard Hamilton, She, 1961

162. Renee Cox, American Family Series (Untitled), 2001; Renee Cox, American
Family Series: Olympia’s Boyz, 2001

163. Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait (Twin), 1988

164. Blank slide

165. Maud Sulter, Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama, 2003

166. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863; Maud Sulter, Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama,
2003; Maud Sulter, Phalia from Zabat, ~1991

167. Maud Sulter, four images, 2003

168. Benoist, La Négresse, 1800 ; Sulter, Portrait d’une négresse (Bonny Greer),
2002 (National Portrait Gallery, London); Still from Sulter video of studio session, as
seen in Bonnie Greer’s 2004 BBC documentary Reflecting Skin

169. Mickalene Thomas, Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, 2010

170. Mickalene Thomas, Dejeuner sur l’herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, 2010,
MoMA/PS1 photographic installation

171. Mickalene Thomas, Marie, Femme Noire Allongée, 2012; Mickalene Thomas,
Din, Une Trés Belle Négresse, 2012

172. Mickalene Thomas, Din, Une Trés Belle Négresse #1, 2012; Mickalene
Thomas, Qusuquzah, Une Trés Belle Négresse #2, 2012

173. Faith Ringgold, quilt paintings from The French Collection series, 1990-1994
-- Matisse’s Model, 1991 and Matisse’s Chapel, 1991

174. Mickalene Thomas, Marie, Femme Noire Allongée, 2012

xvi
 Acknowledgements

This dissertation is the result of a journey of research and discovery that began

several years before I enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia. Many colleagues,

friends and family members have offered their time, counsel and support, and I am

enormously grateful for all of their efforts.

I express my profound respect and appreciation for the wisdom, encouragement

and support, for both academic and career matters, that the members my dissertation

committee tirelessly provided for me. In addition to their invaluable academic expertise

and guidance, I appreciate that Maryse Condé provided important perspectives and

introductions for my work in France; Alex Alberro offered astute career development

advice and crucial introductions in London; Rosalyn Deutsche was generous with her

time and thoughtful comments as my thinking about early modernism and institutional

critique took shape; and Kellie Jones was always ready to suggest new avenues of

exploration that became vital to my analysis.

Anne Higonnet, my advisor and dissertation committee chairperson, has on

countless occasions provided sage counsel that has helped shape my intellectual and

professional development; she has been my most consistent and committed advocate and

supporter throughout my doctoral studies. Our many discussions have been essential to

my ability to complete this dissertation, and I am grateful for the time she made for office

visits and coffee breaks to review my progress, forays to view relevant works in

museums, and referrals and advice on conferences and fellowships. Professor Higonnet’s

regularly expressed belief in the value of my research topic has been an inspiration as I

now commit to professional endeavors that advance the ideas that emerged during this

xvii
project. I want to thank Daniel Harkett for his early encouragement of my doctoral

studies; it was for his summer 2006 nineteenth century survey that I wrote my first paper

on the Laure figure in Manet and Bazille. His suggestion that I consider the possible

relevance of the literary symbolism of flowers was transformational for my analysis of

the Bazille paintings.

Throughout my research, I relied on the knowledge and persistence of the

dedicated research staffers at the archives where I spent many hours, often entering with

one research objective and emerging having come across wholly unexpected information

that at times reshaped my research. I extend my heartfelt thanks to the scholars,

librarians and archivists who provided access to their facilities, retrieved information for

my review, and often took a personal interest in my project. They include Emma Acker

at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Karine Bomel of the Collections

Photographiques de la Bibliotheque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou; Sheldon Cheek

and Karen Dalton at the Image of the Black in Western Art Archives at Harvard’s W.E.B.

Du Bois Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research; Alison Dickey of

the Fairchild Reading Room at the Morgran Library and Museum, Karen Grimson in the

drawings study center at the Museum of Modern Art; Brigitte Sélignac of the

Documentation Center at the Musée Fabre, Montpellier; Dominique Szymusiak, Patrice

Deparpe and Audrey d’Endecourt at the Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis; Helena

Patsiamanis at the Musée d’Orsay library; Carine Peltier in the mediathéque of the

Musée du Quai Branly; Francesca Odell at the National Portrait Gallery, London; Rachel

Francis at the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the professional staff at the other

archives I visited.

xviii
 I want to especially thank Grace Stanislaus and Diedre Harris-Kelley of the

Romare Bearden Foundation for their patience as I came back again and again, asking to

check just one more folder of Bearden’s source materials as I investigated his interest in

Manet; as well as Ruth Fine at the National Gallery in Washington for taking the time to

share her and Sarah Kennel’s approach to attributing Bearden work to influences from

specific works by earlier masters. Marta Barcaro of the Pinacoteca Agnelli generously

sent voluminous bibliographic materials to me concerning the Manet portrait of Laure in

the Pinacoteca’s collection, while Elena Olivero facilitated my visit there.

My research on the black presence in early modern Paris in relation to the black

modernist muse brought me into contact with many emerging and established experts.

My special thanks go to scholars, curators and writers who met with me, provided

introductions and suggested resources, including Vincente Clergeau, Régine Cuzin, Marc

Latamie, Rémi Labrusse, Anne Lafont, Magali LeMens, Pap Ndiaye, Pascale

Ratovonony and Maboula Soumahoro. Stéphane Guégan at the Musée d’Orsay and

Nanette Snoep at the Musée du Quai Branly also met with me to discuss my project. My

thanks also to all at Columbia’s Reid Hall in Paris who facilitated my research in France

during my 2011 dissertation fellowship, and especially to Brunhilde Biebuyck and Nabi

Avcioglu, who made crucial introductions to French scholars.

I am eternally grateful to Wanda de Guébriant at the Archives Matisse for her

extensive efforts on my behalf; she regularly tapped her unequalled knowledge of

Matisse’s life and work in responding to my requests, not just with information that I had

asked for, but with additional materials that immeasurably broadened my understanding

of Matisse. Profuse thanks to Georges Matisse as well, for his support of these efforts

xix
and his invitations to join the Archives team’s lunch breaks for convivial discussions over

sushi and couscous. Likewise Deborah Cherry and Jane Beckett generously allowed me

to view key Maud Sulter works in their private collection in London, proffering tea and

warm hospitality while sharing their deep personal knowledge and appreciation for

Sulter’s artistic practice.

Several individuals were instrumental to my being able to develop dissertation

ideas during pre-doctoral fellowships and other early experiences as an art history

professional. My profuse thanks to Juliana Ochs Dweck, Betsy Rosasco, Caroline Harris,

Calvin Brown and Mark Harris at Princeton University Art Museum; to Lisa Melandri for

her invitation to write for the Mickalene Thomas exhibition catalog at the Santa Monica

Art Museum; to Mickalene Thomas for generously extending to me many opportunities

to discuss and observe her remarkably inventive studio practice; and to Deborah Cullen,

whose session on dissertation-based curatorial opportunities at Columbia’s Wallach Art

Gallery was an encouraging beacon during my final months of writing. I also thank

Alisa LaGamma for her early help in recommending me for gallery talks at the

Metropolitan Museum. I greatly appreciate Alexandra Schwartz’s interest in and support

for this project from its inception.

Among the many other colleagues, scholars, classmates and artists who took the

time to speak or correspond with me or make introductions concerning research matters,

I thank Judy Brodsky, Beth Brombert, Kate Butler, Charlotte Eyerling, Carla Hanzal,

Lubaina Himid, Christina Hunter, Titus Kaphar, Severine Martin, Katharine Morris,

Linda Nochlin, Elizabeth Pergam, Joachim Pissarro, Phoebe Prioleau, Rebecca Rabinow,

xx
Elinor Richter, Jean Pierre Schneider, Myron Schwartzman, Sara Weeks, Esther Kim

Varet and Saya Woolfalk.

My warmest thanks for the unstinting interest, support and patience of the

wonderful friends who, among countless other acts of helpful support, joined me for

morning coffee breaks while I was writing and came to my gallery talks and museum

openings, including Peg Alston, Jackie D’Aguilar, Anda Boros, John Carr, Marilynn

Davis, Kianga Ellis, Maggy Fouché, Rita Gail Johnson, Jan Kenyon, Nancy Lane,

Monique Long, Carole Natale, Clare Peeters and Frances Traficante.

I will always appreciate the love and support of my nieces Charity, Nia, Nicole,

Latoya, Monica and Ashleigh, who have been enthusiastic companions for myriad art

excursions over the years–with special thanks to Nia for her translation of Italian

documents for this dissertation. My siblings William, Kay and Karen have been patient

with my distraction, at times, from full participation in family matters. I am grateful for

festive holiday celebrations around spectacular feasts with my New York family Mattie,

Marcya and Kinara, and for the many caring words and deeds of other members of my

far-flung extended family.

I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of my maternal grandmother, Ruth

Webber Williams Armstrong, who remains a powerful inspiration for our family to this

day; and to the memory of my mother, Mildred Williams Cooper, who in addition to

being a loving parent and wise friend, was a wonderful travel companion. Our shared

experiences exploring art at home and abroad were foundational to my decision to pursue

a second career in art history.

xxi
 IN LOVING MEMORY OF

MY MOTHER

AND

MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER

xxii
VOLUME ONE

1
INTRODUCTION

During the 1860s in Paris, painting styles and modes of viewing were transformed

to reflect an emerging modernity in the social, political and economic life of the city.

Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) is invariably cited as foundational to the new

modernist manner of painting that simultaneously represented modern life in Paris and

revealed bourgeois anxieties over the increasing lack of class stability that accompanied

these changes.

The discourse around Olympia has centered almost exclusively on one of the two

figures depicted: the eponymous prostitute whose portrayal constitutes a radical revision

of conventional images of the courtesan. This dissertation will attempt to provide the

first sustained art-historical treatment of the second figure, the prostitute’s black maid,

posed by a model whose name, as recorded by the artist, was Laure.1 Taking its cues

from comparative visual analysis, the dissertation will seek to establish that the maid

figure is formally positioned, by her placement, attire and affect, as a focal point of

interest, even as she is simultaneously effaced through a pictorial blending with

background tonalities. The dissertation sets forth a socio-cultural context for the painting

that situates the profound ambivalence of this depiction as a representation of the

complex racial aspect of modern life in Manet’s Paris. It then examines the continuing

resonance of Manet’s Laure across subsequent generations of artists.

1
Manet archivist Achille Tabarant, in Manet et ses Oeuvres (1947: 79), cites Manet’s notes in his
studio carnet about sessions with “Laure, trés belle négresse, 11 rue Vintimille, 3e.” See detailed
discussion of this source in Chapter One.

2
Manet’s Laure and the Histories of Art

The question of what, if anything, is represented by Manet’s idiosyncratic

figuring of the prostitute’s black maid has rarely been raised and never comprehensively

addressed by art history.2 The small body of published commentary about this figure,

with a few notable exceptions, generally dismisses it on formal terms, except as an

ancillary intensifier of the illicit hypersexuality attributed to the prostitute.3 Some

2
See discussion in Chapter Two of Cachin’s insightful analysis of Olympia in Manet 1832-1883,
.exh. cat,. (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art(, 1983 and of Theodore Reff’s Manet:
Olympia. (New York: Viking Press), 1977.Two texts typify the prevalent tendency to discuss the
figure, if at all, primarily in terms of precedent paintings depicting black maids with white
mistresses of varying social stature. In both cases, there is an absence of analysis of either the
formal or socio-cultural context of the Manet figure itself; thus there is virtually no discussion of
how the image might be a modernizing turn, albeit a fraught one, from such precedent. James
Rubin’s essay on Manet, “The Artist as Subject,” provides a brief formal analysis of the prostitute
and a more detailed discussion of the social phenomena surrounding prostitution in Paris; but
provides no such context for the maid, beyond noting that France had colonies in Africa and the
Caribbean, and describing her as an “African” servant -- an anomaly if true, since most black
domestic workers in Paris at that time, as discussed in Chapter One, were from the Caribbean.
(See Impressionism, London: Phaidon, 1999: 64-69). The far more extensive essay “Manet and
the Impressionists,” found in the survey Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1994, 2007) by Stephen Eisenman, Thomas Crow, Linda Nochlin et al,
provides a useful short overview of “the practice of depicting ‘negresses’ in art”, which it
observes is almost as longstanding as that of the white “fallen woman,” while also noting that, as
discussed herein in Chapters One and Two, both “figured lasciviousness and evolutionary
retardation.” It also, atypically, mentions Laure by name. But again, it makes none of the formal
and iconographical analysis for Laure that it provides over several pages for the prostitute. For
texts that, in contrast, specifically interpret the Laure figure, see the Cachin, Pollock and Reff
essays cited in Chapter 2.
3
Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d’Orsay’s 2011 retrospective Manet: The Man Who
Invented Modernity, like Eisenman et al, takes an important step toward breaking the general
silence about Laure by including a short discussion of the figure in the exhibition catalog; and
even more remarkably, he moreover displayed Manet’s seldom-seen portrait of Laure in the
exhibition. But he repeats the standard review of precedent images, with no discussion of the
Manet image in its own right. He notes that it was Manet’s friend Emile Zola who first applied a
strictly formalist analysis to its presence in saying that “the black servant woman is only there to
introduce a patch (of black ) required for the chromatic balance of the composition.” Guégan
dismisses this as “disingenuous,” asserting a need for a broader reading; but he then cites the
literature for the “extent through its exotic component {the maid}, black connoted free, available,
animal sexuality. It is indeed a must in ‘gallant’ paintings.” While this narrative captures then-

3
analyses perform the necessary and important postmodernist project of deconstructing the

racial and colonialist agendas behind the figure’s metonymic presentation.4 Others join

in the long line of parody and satire dating to Olympia’s 1863 Salon exhibition.5 Such

stereotyping can, however, be overly simplistic, given the metonymy of a figure that is

simultaneously centered and obscured.

The assumptions underlying the art-historical privileging of the prostitute and

inattention to the maid in Olympia are perhaps most explicitly stated by T. J. Clark who,

in his widely read essay “Olympia’s Choice,” asserts that, while the prostitute was ”the

main representation of modernity in 1860s Paris,” the maid figure, while “modern,”

ultimately meant “nothing.”6 Clark subsequently acknowledged an ideological

prevalent perceptions about black femininity, it does not address Manet’s breaks from precedent,
and the ways in which he clearly modernizes the figure.
4
The canonical work of postmodernist (and feminist) critique, as discussed in Chapter Two, is
Lorraine O’Grady’s "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity", reprinted with
"Postscript" in Grant Kester, ed, Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage,
Duke University, 1998; especially when read together with Anne Higonnet’s “Hybrid Viewer,-
My Difference,-Lorraine O’Grady!” In New Histories, Sharon Nelson ed. Boston: Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1996. Jennifer DeVere Brody recaps the main veins of postmodernist critique
in “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia,” in Theatre Journal, 53:1 (2001), 95-
118.
5
T. J. Clark, cited below, provides a useful summary of critical reaction at the time of Olympia’s
1863 Salon showing, as well as images of cartoon caricatures appearing in the popular press.
Larry River’s 1970 I Like Olympia in Blackface exemplifies satirical vein of modern artistic
response, which includes caricatures by Cezanne and Picasso. See discussion of the Rivers work
in relation to his friend Romare Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt, made in the same year, in Chapter
Four.
6
T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Revised
Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 103, 93, 146. In a Preface to the Revised
Edition written ten years later, Clark noted that “’Olympia’s Choice’ was a difficult chapter to
organize and keep clear….And I remember one of the first friends to read the chapter saying,
more in disbelief than in anger, ‘For God’s sake! You’ve written about the white woman on the
bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her!’ It is, and
remains, an unanswerable criticism; and the fact that I truly had not anticipated it, and saw no
genuine way of responding to it within the frame I had made, is still my best, and most rueful

4
“blindness” underlying his conclusion, rooted in his observation that “the fiction of

‘blackness’ meant preeminently, I think, as the sign of servitude existing outside the

circuit of money –a ‘natural’ subjection, in other words, as opposed to Olympia’s

‘unnatural’ one….”7 Within this frame, Clark implies that art history seems to justify

giving only nominal attention to the maid because she is perceived to be in a familiar, or

natural role, and to focus on the prostitute because of the shock of her perceived

“unnatural” circumstances.

This dissertation, in contrast, seeks to critique this prevalent blindness, or silence,

in art history as a manifestation of what Walter Benjamin, and other historians, have

described as a propensity of institutions, whether political or cultural, to omit dissonant

episodes when constructing a body of historical knowledge, in order to serve the interests

of the ruling classes –which in nineteenth century Europe centered on the maintenance

and expansion of empire, and the myths of white cultural superiority invented to justify

it.8 This institutional silence, or blindness, can be seen to render depictions of blacks,

such as Manet’s images of Laure, as unimportant, unworthy of attention. The figure

therefore, in the absence of narratives that animate viewer curiosity and interest, becomes

invisible even while in plain view.9

example of the way the snake of ideology always circles back and strikes at the mind trying to
outflank it. It always has a deeper blindness in reserve....” (1974 xxvii)
7
Clark, ibid., Preface to the Revised Edition, 1984: xxviii.
8
Walter Benjamin discusses the manner in which ruling classes construct cultural treasures to
reflect their own interests, as a metaphorical “triumphal procession” over those subordinated to
their power; in this way, cultural institutions (which I would argue include art and its histories)
become tools of suppression and control. (in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in
Illuminations (New York: Schocken), 1969: 253-264.
9
As suggested by Jennifer Gonzales on the manner in which the viewer can be positioned, by an
art institution --which in this case would be an absence of narrative about a readily visible object

5
 The dissertation, in contrast, suggests that, given the formal properties and socio-

cultural context of the Laure images, the past lack of historical attention or curiosity

about this figure is increasingly divergent from the concerns of the more diverse viewing

public of today’s globalized art world.10 As Benjamin writes, “In every era, the attempt

must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to

overpower it…..For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one

of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”11

The objective, therefore, is to achieve what Foucault describes as the final phase

of postmodernist deconstruction: the generation of new and revisionary narratives.12

Informed by an excavation of overlooked fragments of the art-historical archive, this

generative effort hopes to be a catalyst for an expanded historical discourse for Manet’s

Olympia and its iconographic legacy. Its approach to this task is to look beyond the

ideologically-determined art-historical silence about Laure, and to focus instead on the

extensive artistic response to Manet’s vision. It suggests that this body of work by

subsequent artists is a manifestation of the distinctive artistic vision that defined the

-- to effectively blend even an “excessively visible” object into the background, in “Against the
Grain: The Artist as Conceptual Materialist,” in Maurice Berger, Fred Wilson: Objects and
Installations 1979-2000. Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland,
2001. In his 1991 performance piece Guarded View, Wilson first gave a gallery tour to a group
of museum docents, then found that when he returned to the gallery in the uniform of a guard, no
one recognized him –an example of how even a readily recognizable figure can blend into the
background if in a role perceived to be unimportant.
10
Jennifer Brody analyses the differentiated capacity to “see” images among observers of
different backgrounds in her 2001 essay “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia.”
Jonathan Crary writes of agnosia, or the inability to see an object due to an inability to form a
conceptual or symbolic identification with it, in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle
and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
11
Benjamin, ibid.
12
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks), 1972: 6.

6
modernist avant garde, a creative impulse often separate from and in opposition to or

disregard of the artistic conventions of its day. This creative autonomy is first seen in

Manet’s depictions of Laure, and then in iconic works by subsequent artists –from Bazille

and Matisse to Bearden and beyond.

Laure in the Context of Manet’s Paris

Central to an expanded understanding of Manet’s Laure is the socio-cultural

context of modern life in the new quartiers of northern Paris where Manet lived his entire

adult life. Manet was an artist firmly committed to painting the realities of everyday life

that defined 1860s Paris. And one readily observed development was the emergence of a

slowly expanding population of free blacks just 15 years after the final French abolition

of territorial slavery in 1848. Nowhere was this new free black presence more visible

than in the city’s northerly ninth and seventeenth arrondissements. The area was

simultaneously home to the studios, apartments and cafes of Manet, his bourgeois family

and his circle of avant-garde artists and writers, as well as to a small but highly visible

population of black Parisians; the Olympia model Laure herself lived in this area, less

than ten minutes walk from Manet’s studio. (Image 9)

From the Place de Clichy and Place Pigalle south to the Gare St. Lazare, and on

through the Tuilieries Gardens to the Louvre, Manet strolled the area’s boulevards and

parks on a daily basis, often with his friend, the critic and poet Charles Baudelaire. As a

prototypical Baudelairean flaneur, he observed every aspect of life, from destitute

shantytown dwellers to the statesmen, socialites and demimondaines, all of whom he

portrayed in empathetic and elegant portraits regardless of social stature.

7
 The Olympia figure will first be examined within the context of Manet’s full

oeuvre, including his two other paintings posed by Laure -- Children in the Tuileries and

a portrait generally referred to as La Negresse. (Image 2) Each can be seen as an index

not only of the evolving formal style with which Manet became definitive of modern

painting, but of Manet’s evolving awareness of and engagement with black Parisians.

Accordingly, the Portrait of Laure will be presented as among the gallery of

Parisian outsiders, including the Absinthe Drinker and the Street Musician, that Manet,

from the start of his career, rendered with the same humanity and empathy embued in

portraits of his bourgeois family and friends. (Image 12) Like Laure, these outsiders were

dismissed by the academic establishment as unworthy subjects of fine art. The

dissertation asserts that this portrait, given that Laure is identified and described by

Manet himself, must be seen as a named portrait, a revision of its longstanding relegation

as merely an anonymous study for Olympia.13 It is therefore referred to herein by the title

Portrait of Laure. It further suggests that the Portrait of Laure, together with her

markedly different rendering in Olympia, can be seen as capturing early manifestations of

a hybrid culture taking shape within Paris’ black working class, a hybridity blending

Caribbean and French influences, as seen in the model’s placement, facial affect and

attire.14 (Images 24, 28)

13
This painting is consistently referred to in art history, from Tabarant to Guégan, by the
anonymous title La Negresse; this title is still used by the current owner of the painting, the
Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin. In exceptions to the established historical norm, Hugh Honour, in
the Image of the Black in Western Art, uses the Portrait of Laure title (Houston: Menil
Foundation), 1989: 204; also see Hanson 1977: 78.
14
See a discussion of the evolving cultural hybridity of Paris’ black populations in the 1995
essay collection Penser la créolité (Thinking Creoleness), edited by Maryse Condé, who
critiques what is described as an “outdated opposition between France and the Caribbean,
metropolitan center and tropical margin” in characterizing black French culture a century later.

8
 At a time when images of blacks in popular culture were still invariably

stereotyped, Manet‘s work comprises a uniquely modernizing artistic representation of

this presence. (Image 5) This becomes clear when the Laure images are seen in

comparison with precedent and contemporaneous representations of the black female

figure in nineteenth century French painting, photography and sculpture; costume history;

images from popular culture provides added context. (Image 37)

The premise of the dissertation’s analysis of Manet’s Laure is that the maid

figure in Olympia constitutes a de-Orientalized figuring of the black working class

woman in Paris that breaks with key precedents dating from the Renaissance to

Orientalism.15 This revision is, however, an ambivalent one; the maid is both pictorially

centralized and blended into the background. The Laure figure can therefore be seen to

manifest an unresolved anxiety about race in Paris society just fifteen years after the 1848

emancipation of slavery. The resulting duality of the maid’s pose simultaneously thwarts

the attention of the public viewer base for the Salon, including most of the art world

establishment, and even invites its derision; yet offers a contingency of layered meanings

Madeleine Dobie, in “Invisible Exodus: The Cultural Effacement of Antillean Migration,”

writes of the development of a hybrid culture in the metropole even while noting a parallel
silence in French literature about Antillaise migrants to France. In Diaspora (2004: 149-183).
This forging of a cultural hybridity based on disparate influences has also been theorized as part
of a diasporic condition found across the “Black Atlantic” defined by, among others, Paul Gilroy,
and within African American culture as defined by W.E.B. DuBois’ articulation of a “double
consciousness” –see a discussion of these texts in Chapter Four.
15
Griselda Pollock helps to differentiate the “de-Orientalized” black female figure, in understated
everyday French work attire, from the bared breasts, ornate turban and jewelry, and , clothing in
print fabrics read as “tropical,” of her Orientalized precedent; this figure is also typically placed
in a non-Parisian setting, as in Delacroix’ Women in Algiers (Image 46). Pollock’s important
essay, “A Tale of Three Women: Seeing in the dark, seeing double, at least with Manet,”
appears to be the most detailed treatment to date of the Laure figure; it also reviews Manet’s
portraits of Jeanne Duval and Berthe Morisot. In Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and
the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

9
discernible with more sustained attention. This contingency, with its sense of openness to

the viewer’s interpretation, evoked response from a smaller number of artists and writers.

The dissertation will attempt to sketch a profile of the emerging black Paris of

Manet’s time, including high profile figures –such as Alexandre Dumas fils --who were

members of Manet’s artistic and social circles, as further context for the reception of

Manet’s work. (Images 15, 16,19) This will include a discussion of Manet’s presumed

awareness of the controversy surrounding his friend Baudelaire’s relationship with his

mulatto mistress Jeanne Duval as one possible motivation for this conflicted image of

Laure in Olympia. Baudelaire expressed his conflicted passion for Duval in the poetry of

Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), which was censored for indecency; it is now seen as a

foundational text of modern literature and included in French secondary school curricula.

Courbet painted Duval out of the final version of a portrait of Baudelaire in his 1855

painting The Artist’s Studio; Manet nevertheless painted Duval’s portrait in 1862, in a

pose similar to that seen in Manet portraits of his wife and other Parisian elites. (Image

14) The Manet archivist Tabarant speculates that Duval referred Manet to the model

Laure.16

It is in this context that, through his serial images of Laure, Manet can be seen to

have manifested the racial ambivalence of the day. Laure, who is both a “trés belle

négresse” and a pictorially obscured brothel maid, personifies this dichotomy. The

dissertation, in seeking to analyze how she could simultaneously embody both of these

disparate descriptions in Manet’s depiction, will therefore assert that Manet’s final image

of Laure, in Olympia, when seen in tandem with the previous two paintings, is a

culmination, albeit a deeply problematic one, of the formal and iconographic issues raised
16
Achille Tabarant, in Manet et ses Oeuvres, 1947: 79. ; also noted in Pollock, 1999: 277-278.

10
in Manet’s earlier Portrait of Laure of his placement of Laure in a recognizable scene

from modern life in Paris. Its ambivalent and metonymous depiction of Laure, whose

controversial reception can be related to varying modes of viewing, is framed as

emblematic of the deeply conflicted racial context of Manet’s day.17 (Images 41, 42, 47,

50)

This analysis will, however, examine the Laure of Olympia within the context of

compositional process, preliminary studies and the evolution of its title to suggest

significant discrepancies between Manet’s likely intended portrayal of Laure and viewer

perceptions. One aspect of this will be a discussion of the Laure figure as a prototypical

Baudelairean muse –a personification of themes from the poet’s seminal Les Fleurs du

Mal that are symbolic of the fraught issues of race, empire and class represented by

Laure, and by Duval. These poems manifest a highly problematic modernity,

simultaneously evoking the denigration of exoticizing stereotypes, yet placing the black

female figure not in a remote non-Western locale, but as a culturally hybrid figure at the

heart of modern life in Paris. This would offer one resolution of how Laure, or Jeanne

Duval, could be “belle” to avant-garde thinkers like Manet and Baudelaire, but still

project negative stereotypes to the general public. (Images 43, 49)

17
Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture
(Cambridge: MIT Press), 1999, presents a helpful analysis of disparate modes of attention,
namely modern (distracted attention, the result of viewing conditions such as crowds, insufficient
leisure for close viewing, etc.) vs traditional (sustained attention, based on close repeat viewing,
such as that of an artist, art student or well-informed connoisseur); Jennifer DeVere Brody’s
previously cited “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia” (2001) advances the
concept of the socially constructed fragmentation of the viewer base. The dissertation suggests
that these two factors combined render certain observers, including crowds, mass media critics
attending, to be literally incapable of seeing the modernizing aspects of the Laure image, but
instead fall back on easy, familiar stereotypes.

11
 This racial dimension of 1860s society, in the context of present-day French

socio-political concerns, is an issue emanating from Olympia that will arguably be of

more enduring relevance than concerns about the sex-as-commodity phenomenon

embodied by the prostitute that informs the current art-historical narrative about Olympia.

Manet’s revisionary depictions of Laure are left as an unfinished beacon, for the

clarification, recuperation and re-imagining of subsequent generations of artists.

The Manet discussion concludes with an analysis of two paintings by Manet

acolyte Frédéric Bazille made in homage to Manet’s images of Laure. (Images 56, 57,

61, 63) The Bazille paintings mark the start of an iconographic legacy that extends not

only contemporaneously across Manet’s Batignolles cohort (images of black Parisians by

Degas, Cezanne, Nadar and others are briefly examined) but down through successive

generations of artists into the present day.

Subsequent chapters will examine continuities of this legacy in the work of later

artists whose work has been resonant of or directly influenced by the Laure figure. In

addition to Bazille, this will include signature works by the School of Paris early

modernist Henri Matisse, African American collagist Romare Bearden, and selected

contemporary artists. These artists’ strategies of evocation, clarification, recuperation

and transcendence locate the Laure image as central to innovations in figural

representation from the avant-gardes of the late 19th century though 21st century

contemporary art. Throughout this analysis, a critique of the evolving modes of vision

constructed by the social context of each period will trace the iterative process through

12
which segments of the observing viewer base acquired the capacity to perceive and

articulate the significance of Manet’s representation of the Laure figure.18

The dissertation will therefore be foundational in asserting that the art-historical

importance of Olympia’s Laure is based on the formal qualities of the image within the

context of 1860s Paris, as well as its sustained influence on subsequent artists. It will, in

this way, seek to intervene with prevalent art histories and suggest an iconographic

lineage for the Laure figure that parallels the long-established Renaissance-to-Cubism

context for the prostitute.

Bazille’s Homage to Manet: A Clarifying Revision in Manet’s Own Time

Frédéric Bazille, the scion of a wealthy family from Montpellier in Provence,

became a Manet protegé after moving to Paris in 1862, where he abandoned his medical

studies to become a painter. After studying with the Orientalist painter Gerome, Bazille

joined the circle of artists surrounding Manet in order to pursue his preference for realist

painting of modern life. In his 1868 painting, Atelier de la Rue de la Condamine, Bazille

depicts a visit to his studio by his friends Renoir, Sisley, Astruc, Monet (his former studio

mate) and Manet. (Image 54)

In 1870, Bazille made two paintings, both titled Négresse aux Pivoines, that are

invariably described as an homage to his mentor and friend Manet.19 (Images 56, 57)

The Peonies paintings can be seen to mark an Olympia-inspired prefiguring of a

subsequent Impressionist focus on painting modern working-class Paris. The Bazille

18
Ibid., Crary, Suspensions of Perception and Brody, “Black Cat Fever.”
19
As stated in a detailed profile of this painting on the National Gallery of Art in Washington’s
website. The Gallery also renamed its version Young Woman with Peonies, while the Montpellier
version retains the title Negresse aux Pivoines. The DeYoung Museum archives in San Francisco
reveal a similar retitling, as part of a wider trend of name changes in U.S. museums to eliminate
the use of the word Négresse in titles of works in their collection.

13
paintings appear to be figured as a direct reference to the flower-bearing black woman in

Olympia; with these images he embraces Manet’s commitment to the depiction of

modern life and resolutely turns away from previous Orientalizing work as a student of

Gerome, like La Toilette. (Image 58) Bazille not only resumes Manet’s de-Orientalizing

project; he clarifies it. Bazille depicts his subject with un-ambivalent directness as a

modest but engaging black member of the Paris working class.

The most important Bazille revisions are that she is the single figure in the

image, and that her occupational status remains unclear. No mistresses hover to

marginalize her interest as the focal point of attention. She is overtly a member of the

Parisian working class, but her work with the peonies and tulips she holds might be as a

maid or a self-employed flower vendor. This figure is quiet, industrious, even

unremarkable. She is simply part of the daily life of the city. Bazille therefore appears to

clarify Manet’s ambivalent impulse to paint Laure as he sees her. The figure not only

retains the de-Orientalized and culturally hybrid features of the Portrait of Laure and

the Laure of Olympia; he depicts it with heightened clarity. Her crisply tailored dress,

cinched to fit a trim waistline, distinctive earrings and madras headscarf can be said to be

stylish, and thus perhaps even more modern, combining meticulous detailing with the

loose brushwork characteristic of Manet.

Part of the significance of the Bazille paintings is their representation of the

varied roles occupied by black women settling into Parisian society in the early decades

post-abolition. The subject poses a maid or a street vendor, but she herself is clearly a

black woman working as a professional model in 19th century Paris. The fact that the

model also wears the same earrings and headscarf as in her earlier poses for a Thomas

14
Eakins study (Image 63) and other paintings, suggests an element of collaboration

between artist and model; she participates at least nominally in the styling of her image.

The flowers with which the Bazille figure is juxtaposed appear to go beyond the

expected nature vs culture subtexts, in which the flowers can project onto non-European

women the stereotype of an excessively sexualized nature that cannot be tamed by

cultural refinement. They seem instead to broaden the range of roles that she might

plausibly represent. While there has been no published attempt to explore the relevance

of flower symbology for the Peonies paintings, art historians have established that Manet

referenced the literary associations of flowers in his paintings.20 The dissertation

therefore examines popular 19th century flower symbology texts which link tulips and

peonies to connotations including Bazille’s abandoned profession of medicine and

healing, as well as turbans, the moon goddess and forbidden love.

Given Bazille’s likely awareness through Manet of the Baudelaire-Duval story,

such associations would only strengthen the Bazille paintings’ ties with Olympia. Other

contextualizing images might include his friend Degas’ painting, after sixteen

preparatory studies, of a black Paris circus star Miss La La at the Folies Bergere.21

(Image 65) The Bazille and Degas paintings exemplify the little-recognized body of

images that represent a black Parisian proletariat that was often resident post-abolition in

20
Reff discusses Manet’s use of flower symbology in Manet, Olympia. New York: Viking Press,
1977. I reviewed several texts about 19th century French flower symbology, including Beverly
Seaton’s The Language of Flowers: A History (Charlottesville and London: The University of
Virginia Press, 1995).
21
The National Gallery in London has begun in recent years to present extensive on-line
information about this painting, as does Marilyn Brown’s analysis of the development of the
work through multiple preliminary sketches in “Miss La La’s” Teeth: Reflections on Degas and
Race,” in The Art Bulletin, Volume LXXXIX, No. 4, December 2007, 738-765. In February
2013, the exhibition “Miss La La at the Folies Bergere” opened at the Morgan Library and
Museum.

15
the Batignolles quartier of northern Paris where Bazille, Manet, Degas and many

Impressionists maintained studios. (Image 66) The dissertation suggests that these

paintings are comparable to canonical works by Manet and his circle depicting the ballet

dancers, laundresses, millinesses and bar maids who also populated the area’s venues of

modern, late 19th century life in Paris.

Matisse at the Villa Le Rêve: Toward a New Baudelairean Muse

If Bazille’s paintings clarified the presence of the black woman within modern

life in nineteenth century Paris, it was in the late work of Henri Matisse that the

representation of the black woman was transformed into an icon of modernity

transcending any single ethnic identity. The seemingly unlikely resonance between the

urbane Manet and eden-seeking Matisse is rooted in each artist’s profound engagement

with different aspects of Charles Baudelaire’s vision for the artist’s role in modern life.

Manet exemplified Baudelaire’s concept of the artist as flaneur, a member of Parisian

café society who tirelessly roamed the city’s boulevards observing life high and low.

Matisse at the Villa Le Rêve, in the hills above Nice, embraced the poet’s invitation to

the voyage, to a perpetual quest, by turns actual and imaginary, for the remote idyll-by-

the-sea and a life where all is “luxe, calme et volupté.

The evolution of Matisse’s imagery from nineteenth to twentieth century modes

of modernism is often chronicled primarily by monographic reviews of his paintings.

However, Matisse himself repeatedly insisted that he did not distinguish between the

construction of a book and that of a painting.22 This chapter will therefore trace this

22
Alfred Barr quotes from Matisse’s 1946 note “How I Made My Books” in Matisse: His Art
and His Public (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1951: 563.

16
formal and thematic evolution in large part through an examination of Matisse’s seldom-

discussed late graphic works, specifically those posed by a New York –based Haitian

dancer, Carmen Helouis; while also reviewing parallel developments in several of his

final easel paintings that were based on his work a second black model, the Belgian-

Congolese Madame Van Hyfte, Both bodies of work are in turn related first to Matisse’s

longstanding passion for jazz and his friendships with artists and writers of the Harlem

Renaissance; and then to his culminating engagement, in his paper cutout paintings, with

the image of African American dancer Josephine Baker.

In late 1930, after returning to France from a world tour that included visits to

New York on the way to Tahiti, and the Caribbean during the return voyage, Matisse

accepted a commission to create the illustrations for a new edition of Baudelaire’s Les

Fleurs du Mal. 23 Although delayed for years by other major projects, including the

Barnes Foundation Dancers murals, which entailed three subsequent visits to New York,

Matisse returned to the Fleurs project in 1943. During the years 1943-1946, he made

multiple drawings, prints and paintings posed by several black models during a series of

sessions at his Villa Le Rêve studio. This work most notably included numerous images

Carmen Helouis for the Fleurs illustrations; these were made during studio sessions that

were extensively photographed by Hélène Adant.24 (Images 70, 71, 97, 98 ) Matisse

ultimately selected images of Carmen for ten of his thirty-three Fleurs illustrations, more

than any of his three other Fleurs models; as well as the frontispiece. (Images 77, 80)

23
Matisse’s itinerary is detailed in the timeline of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalog
Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, 1992: 297.
24
Adant’s archives are in the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou. Several of these Adant
photos appear in the book Matisse a la Villa Le Rêve (Thames and Hudson, 2004), by Marie-
France Boyer, Paris editor of the English magazine The World of Interiors; the book documented
Matisse’s life and work at the villa, as well as its interiors.

17
Carmen also posed for stand-alone drawings, meticulously developed in several states,

and illustrations for other book projects. (Image 86) This was the only period in his

career when Matisse worked with a black model on a sustained basis over a period of

several years.

Some of Matisse’s images of Carmen, including for the Fleurs poem “À Une

Malabraise,” appear to directly evoke Manet’s depiction of Laure in Olympia, itself a

figure that, as discussed in Chapter Two, has been considered to be a personification of

the poem’s subject. If Manet’s Laure can be seen as a personification, both stereotyped

and empathetic, of the Malabaraise after her arrival in Paris, Matisse’s more idealized

depiction, while in the trope of the Manet image, appears to suggest her life prior to

departure. (Images 72, 73) Other Carmen illustrations veer decidedly toward wholly new

and modern modes of portraying the black female figure (Image 77). This was a clear

break in the artist’s representational style for a subject which Matisse had episodically

depicted in his earlier Orientalizing and primitivist periods. (Images 75,76)

The dissertation suggests that this modernity instead had affinities with the

representational style of Harlem Renaissance artists including portraits of jazz singers by

Carl van Vechten.25 (Images 83, 84, 85) Citing previously unpublished correspondence,

agendas and photographs, obtained from the private archives of the artist and surviving

family members of a model, the dissertation suggests that one influence for this new

universalized modernity may well have been Matisse’s encounters, during his 1930s

visits to New York, with leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. While in New York,

25
Richard Powell and David Bailey summarizes the Harlem Renaissance artists’ approach to
modernizing the image of African Americans in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem
Renaissance (Los Angeles: University of California Press and London: Haywood Gallery), exh.
cat., 1997:18-19.

18
Matisse sat for portraits by Carl van Vechten, a photographer and journalist who hosted

Harlem Renaissance salons, and who also knew and made portraits of many leading

Harlem Renaissance figures in addition to the aforementioned jazz singers. (Image 81)

This chapter suggests formal affinities between the modernizing images among

Matisse’s Baudelaire illustrations –which he agreed to create just after his first New

York visit --and the aesthetics of Harlem Renaissance portraits that Matisse may have

become aware of through van Vechten and other friends, including Paul Robeson.

(Images 77-82, 90) These images reflect the ideas that define the “New Negro” as

described by Alain Locke, the philosophical founder of the Harlem Renaissance artists

who was himself portraitized by van Vechten. Locke advocated a depiction of black

subjects as urbane and stylish subjects in contemplative poses that rejected prevailing

stereotypes; this approach to portraiture was visible in photographic portraits by van

Vechten and in paintings by a range of Harlem Renaissance artists. (Images 85, 87, 89)

This analysis supports its discussion of Matisse’s engagement with Harlem

Renaissance aesthetics with quotes from the artist’s unpublished family correspondence

and journals describing Matisse’s little-known but frequent visits to black theater and

jazz performances in Harlem while in New York, and the many hours he spent listening

to his personal collection of jazz recordings.26 These engagements with modern black

culture can be seen as opportunities for Matisse to gain exposure to the modern modes of

representing women of color later seen in his 1940s work with Carmen and other black

models. The dissertation therefore suggests that, through his Fleurs illustration work,

Matisse moved beyond past nineteenth-century exoticizing imagery and re-presented the

26
Unpublished correspondence provided by Wanda de Guébriant, Director, Archives Matisse,
Issy-les-Moulineux.

19
black female subject as fully present within the modern world of France and New York in

his own mid-twentieth century.

Matisse’s Fleurs work is also significant as a site for the development for the

artist’s signature single-line drawing technique, through which he advanced the

revolutionary flatness of his pictorial style. The artist‘s engagement with Baudelairean

imagery was therefore central to his pictorial innovation. This work places resonances of

Manet’s Laure at the heart of Matisse’s serially inventive figural style, informing much of

his work with the abstraction of the female figure into a non-naturalistic system of signs

that further developed the possibilities of contingent meaning, open to the viewer’s

interpretation, begun by Manet’s flattened painterly style. While his School of Paris

rival and colleague Picasso did this through the fragmentation of figural volumes,

Matisse, though maintaining the integrity of the figure, did so with the semiotic use of

color, line and white space.

Fleurs is moreover significant not only in itself, but because it appears to have

also informed both the subject and style of his subsequent work in cut paper–including

Jazz and Creole Dancer, and his final series of easel paintings. Jazz, was being made at

the same time as Fleurs, and features Matisse’s breakthrough paper cut-outs as well as

text in his handwriting; his apparent fluency with the themes being illustrated suggests

some level of knowledge of jazz and modern culture. This idea is reinforced by

Matisse’s later monumental cutouts Creole Dancer, known to have been inspired by

Caribbean dancer Katherine Dunham, and La Negresse, whose inspiration was Josephine

Baker. (Image 122)

20
 Matisse’s work for Fleurs and Jazz –which may have been interrelated --was

therefore a turn that had no readily discernible influences or parallels within Matisse’s

School of Paris cohort. While Matisse’s imagery evolved beyond archaic or tribal black

images, and depicted the modernity of black culture itself, Picasso never moved beyond

working with the aesthetic ideas of traditional tribal sculpture. Matisse, in his 1940s work

with black models, moved beyond the now-problematic premises of primitivism in a

manner that Picasso never did.

While the Villa le Rêve drawings and cut-outs demonstrated a continuity of the

pictorial resonances of Manet’s Laure, Matisse simultaneously moved, in his final easel

paintings, still further beyond ethnic specificity. Three of the paintings including l’Asie

and Young Woman in White, Red Background, were posed by a biracial Congolese-

Belgian neighbor, Mme Franz van Hyfte who was living in Nice with her husband, a

Belgian lawyer. (Images 108, 117, 119)27 One remarkable iconographic implication of

these paintings is that they make no explicit reference to their black model’s ethnicity

beyond the specificity of her facial features and flesh tones. Though posed by a black

model, the demeanor, bodily stance and sartorial style is interchangeable with paintings

posed by European models. These paintings therefore appear to be among the earliest

modernist uses of a black model for non-black imagery. In l’Asie, Matisse’s depiction of

Madame van Hyfte as a personification of Asia, Matisse expands the realm of modern

beauty. He includes subjects of multinational origin in poses that are unfaithful to the

27
Matisse’s biographer, Hillary Spurling briefly discusses Matisse’s easy social rapport with
Mme van Hyfte in Matisse The Master (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 2005:439. Unpublished
correspondence and photos for both Carmen and Mme. van Hyfte provided to the author by
Archives Matisse in Issy-les-Moulineaux. The sessions with van Hyfte for White Dress, Red
Background, were filmed for a 1947 documentary by Francois Campaux.

21
more prevalent but formulaic depictions of ethnic specificity; he thus escaped ethnic

essentialization to an extent unmatched by his School of Paris colleagues.

Despite the iconic standing of these two paintings, and the extended working

relationships Matisse maintained with both Carmen and Mme. van Hyfte, these two

models are most often omitted from histories of Matisse and his models. This is despite

extensive coverage, in exhibitions and monographs, of Matisse’s work during this period

with other important models, most notably Lydia Delectorskaya, his longtime studio

assistant and muse.28 In contrast, this dissertation references unpublished photographs

and correspondence that provide biographical information about both Carmen Helouis

and Elvira van Hyfte, while also documenting the artist’s ongoing friendship with both

models long after their studio sessions. (Images 91-96, 100-101, 109, 116-119, 123)

Like Manet, Matisse’s work with black models emanated from a radically

personal creative vision that disrupted traditional modes of representation for the black

female figure. Just as Manet before him had represented Laure not as an exotic, but as a

culturally huybrid figure integral to urban modernity, Matisse disregarded longstanding

racially based hierarchies of beauty that remained very much in place in the 1940s. In this

way, the iconographic legacy of Manet’s Laure can be seen as a precedent for Matisse’s

serially inventive late figural style. With Fleurs he evolved an increasing abstraction of

the female figure through new treatments of flatness, the minimization of detail. For the

paintings posed by Madame van Hyfte, Matisse used flesh tones that evoked, but did not

seek to replicate, observed reality. All of these modernist gestures opened up Matisse’s

28
See also the recent catalog for an exhibition Matisse and the Model (New York: Eykyn
Maclean), 2011. In which the essay by Anne Dumas focuses on the Villa le Rêve period. While
retrospective monographs, including that of the Museum of Modern Art, cite the 1947
documentary made during the Woman in White, Red Background studio sessions; the
commentary focuses on the painterly gesture of the artist.

22
figural portrayals into realms of gradually decreased ethnica codification, even as they

made no attempt to homogenize or Europeanize racially specific facial features and flesh

tones.

With these images, Matisse broke with longstanding binaries that ascribed iconic

modernity to the white subject. Instead, these works prefigured the late twentieth century

postmodernist call for an expanded realm of beauty, through the dismantlement of the

very notion of a single universal standard of beauty, in favor of an inclusiveness that

retained individuality while avoiding essentialized archtypes. Matisse appears to have

started with depictions of black models derived from Baudelairean re-imaginings of

Manet’s Laure and Jeanne Duval –figures viewed as radically modern in a nineteenth

century context. But he then evolved, through his experiments with color and graphic

form, to depict these models simply as emblems of modern femininity transcendent of

race. Matisse arguably remained tethered to his early modernist roots with his

continuation of odalisque traditions that did little to critique the objectifying aspects of

displaying female subjects as objects of beauty. But Matisse also anticipated the future,

whether deliberately or not, by broadening the realm of beauty to embrace ethnic

multiplicity.

Bearden in Harlem and Paris: Collaging Cultural Hybridity

If Matisse rendered his Laure-inspired figures as racially sublimated universal

objects of desire, Romare Bearden achieved the inverse--a specifically black overlay of a

universal trope of desire. Bearden’s 1970 collage Patchwork Quilt exemplifies his view

that art is “an old tune that the artist plays with new variation. He attempts to see things

with fresh eyes yet he must determine his relation to his past history.” With Patchwork

23
Quilt’s highly stylized depiction of a female nude reclining on a bed, Bearden re-

imagines the Titian-Manet pictorial representations of the female as object of desire, by

figuring the odalisque as black. (Image 135 ) He thus supplants the erasure, stereotyping

and marginalization of the black female subjectivity that permeates art history, and re-

imagines her as the focal point of interest.

Bearden intensifies his revisionary agenda by contextualizing the figure, not

within the traditional European boudoir, but with attributes--attire, furnishings,

compositional materials--that signify the legacy and aesthetics of African American

culture. Patchwork Quilt thus extends the iconic reclining nude from the Renaissance

and nineteenth century France into postwar American modernism. It can be seen as a

manifestation of civil-rights era artistic initiatives to establish the modern black woman

within the lineage of women depicted as objects of beauty and desire.

Patchwork Quilt also anticipated another radical revision--the subsequent

feminist-motivated push for the de-objectification of women, by its shift of visual

interest from the nude’s physical attributes to its representation of the mix of tradition

and improvisation that characterized mid-20th century African American culture.

Bearden’s face-down nude presaged the formal qualities deployed by a later generation of

black female artists, including the conceptual photography of Lorna Simpson featuring

turned-away black women.

A formal analysis of Patchwork Quilt reveals several similarities to the pictorial

structure of Olympia. These include the spatial flatness of the interior, its division into

three pictorial planes and the subdued green-black color tones of its upper right expanse.

Bearden wrote extensively about his admiration for Manet’s painterly style; after a 1950

24
stint in Paris, he systematically copied many iconic European works, including Manet

and Matisse.29 He highlighted what he described as the unfinished, improvised quality

of Manet’s surfaces, which he likened to jazz. He notes, significantly, that although he

changed the color tones of other masters’ works while copying them, he retained the

palettes of Manet and Matisse.

Archival research at the Romare Bearden Foundation in New York reveals that

Bearden owned at least one large color reproduction of Olympia. (Image 137) It

appears, together with images of nudes by Renoir, Titian, Boucher and others, as part of

a 5-page article titled “Languorous Ladies on Couch and Cushion,” torn from what

appears to be a 1960s issue of Look magazine. Scrutiny suggests that Bearden’s

Patchwork Quilt nude could be a blend of the Olympia pose and another image-- shown

on the missing opposite page, but identified by a caption below the Olympia image --of

Boucher’s portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy, a teenaged mistress of Louis XV.

(Images 138-139) The coincidental parallels between O’Murphy’s face-down pose with

dangling legs, and the aesthetics of the Egyptian tomb reliefs frequently visible in

Bearden’s work, strengthens Bearden’s ability to create Patchwork Quilt from elements

of both Western and African aesthetics. The fragments of quilts across the surface add a

specifically African American process, materials and design. In combination, these

pictorial components signify the culturally hybrid genesis of the Patchwork odalisque’s

29
Bearden discusses his views of Manet, Matisse and other artists in his and Carl Holty’s book
Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting. New York: Crown
Publishers, 1969; Myron Schwartzman also discussed this in Romare Bearden: His Life and Art.
New York: Charles Abrams & Sons, 1990. Ruth Fine quoted Bearden on his approach to
copying Manet and Matisse in her exhibition catalog The Art of Romare Bearden. exh. cat.
Washington, D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 2003. Correspondence with Fine in February
2009, while researching a paper for Professor Kellie Jones, clarified attribution methods for the
Olympia images found in the Bearden archives.

25
face-down pose. The flowery pillow beneath her head symbolizes an iconographic

continuity with the flower-bearing black women of Manet and Bazille, and the floral print

blouse of the Matisse muse Carmen.

Bearden’s engagement with Manet’s imagery thus appears in a repertory of

collage techniques, including fragmentation, inversion and de-contextualization, which

manifest a commitment to pictorial improvisation that Bearden believed he shared with

Manet. Yet, as Kobena Mercer, quoting Ralph Ellison, has suggested, the method of

collage is also a manifestation of the cultural processes that shaped African American

cultural identity as it became increasingly integrated with mainstream society in the

postwar civil rights era.30 As described by Toni Morrison, the African American psyche

is “multilayered, with many dimensions that are not readily seen or fathomed.31 If, as

Mercer suggests, the diasporic identity is itself a collaged condition, then this collaged

figure is constructed as emblematic of that identity. In this context, Patchwork Quilt can

be seen as a completion, and a re-vision, of Manet’s unfinished Laure figure.

Bearden’s admiration for Manet crystallized, while expanding to include Matisse

and other twentieth century masters, during his nine-month stay in Paris in 1950, when

he used income from the G.I. Bill to join African American artist and writer friends

30
See Kobena Mercer’s analysis of the cultural hybridity imbedded in Bearden’s collage as in
jazz in his chapter “Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen,” in Cosmopolitan
Modernisms. London and Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press and The Institute of
International Visual Arts, 2005.
31
Robert O’Meally discusses Toni Morrison’s comments in the essay “Layering and Unlayering:
Jazz, Literature and Bearden’s Collage,” in Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition, 2008:
96-97.

26
already in France.32 (Image 151) Through letters of introduction, he met with Brancusi,

and with Picasso in Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera, describing the latter event, which took

place amid an unending flow of other visitors, as “like going to see the Eiffel Tower, a

colossal tourist attraction.”

Bearden’s most memorable observation of an artist in Paris was a sighting of

Matisse while Bearden was at the Dome café in Montparnasse with friends. Bearden

described the scene as Matisse, then elderly and in the last four years of his life, walked

past, supported by a young man and a young woman on each side: “A waiter hollered

something like, ‘He’s passing by,” and all the waiters ran to the front of the café and

started clapping….Matisse then walked over to shake hands with the waiters, and all the

people were reaching over to shake his hand. I though ‘isn’t this wonderful. They’re not

applauding a movie star, but a man who changed the way we saw life because he was a

great painter.’ After being in the States, Paris was a miracle because things like that could

happen.”33

Bearden also found disillusionment in Paris. Despite the black American artists’

feeling of well-being in Paris, their experience remained invisible in the American press,

in stark contrast to the high-profile European tours of jazz musicians, Bearden also

came to believe that the center of the postwar art world was shifting to New York. Once

back in the United States, he returned to Europe for only two brief visits.

32
See Schwartzman, (1990:160-170), for the most complete and detailed account, including
excerpts from correspondence, of Bearden’s time in Paris; unless otherwise noted, statements of
fact and correspondence excerpts are drawn from this invaluable source. Since Bearden by his
own account (see Fine p23) did not paint while in Paris, monographical accounts of Bearden’s
artistic career give relatively cursory attention to this period. As one example, Ruth Fine, The Art
of Romare Bearden. exh. cat. 2003:23-24 the most impressively comprehensive treatment of
Bearden to date, covers the period in two pages \
33
Diedra Harris-Kelley at the Romare Bearden Foundation first alerted me to this quote, which
can found in its entirety in Schwartzman, 1990:168.

27
 One lasting impact of his time in Paris was Bearden’s decision to systematically

undertake critical deconstructions of admired paintings. Having read Delacroix’ journals

about his own such explorations, Bearden felt that he too could develop artistically by

extensively and analytically copying masterworks.

We thus see a conflation of influence from two Matisse Piano Lesson paintings

in Bearden’s Homage to Mary Lou, in which he depicts a scene reminiscent of his native

rural North Carolina, and names it in tribute to the great jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams,

who like Bearden moved from the South to Pittsburgh. (Image 151) We see quotations

from Picasso and Courbet in a version of The Street, arguably Bearden’s greatest single

work. (Image152) In both collages, Bearden displays antecedent ideas about color, about

masklike figural treatment; but always deployed to representing these scenes within the

context of African American life.

While Matisse was arguably a greater influence for Bearden than any other

twentieth century master, Bearden apparently was unaware of some aspects of their

numerous affinities. The fact that the two artists both viewed cats as intriguing

household companions may seem trivial, until we connect the connotations of cats to

Baudelaire, an author whom both read and admired. (Image 25) Noting that Bearden

referred to his cat by its French name “le chat” should lessen the strain of credulity that

he may have such ideas in mind.

Matisse and Bearden each made serial works inspired by the Caribbean island of

Martinique. For both artists, the island was an idyllic destination, redolent of

Baudelairean “luxe, calme et volupte.” Matisse noted that his 1940s residence near Nice,

the Villa Le Rêve, inspired reminiscences of Tahiti and Martinique, the latter a stopover

28
on his way to New York. This was perhaps a factor in his choice to complete his thirty-

three illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal there. Bearden produced at least thirty works

featuring Matisse-like black cutout figures, inspired by Martinique following a 1973

cruise there, which were later exhibited together in a Prevalence of Ritual – Martinique

exhibition. (Image 159)

One interface that perhaps closes this circle of affinities was Carl van Vechten,

Matisse’s 1930s Harlem Renaissance portraitist. In 1944, van Vechten published a

review of an early exhibition by the young Bearden, who was then working in a more

traditional style predating his collages. Van Vechten described Bearden as a “young

Rouault,” evoking evoking Matisse’s friend and fellow Fauvist from his own artistic

breakthrough years a half century earlier a half century earlier.34

Seeing Laure: The Anterior as Muse in the Art of Maud Sulter and Mickalene Thomas

In its conclusion, the dissertation examines the iconographic legacy of Manet’s

Laure as one that remains resonant today for diverse contemporary artists, including two

who, like their predecessors, re-imagine past imagery to create works definitive of their

own time. The project of British artist Maud Sulter, who was of Ghanaian-Scottish

descent, was one of retrieval, of claiming the Laure figure as an art-historical legacy for

an emergent black European diaspora. Mickalene Thomas infuses the bold visuals of

late twentieth century African American film and media images sensibility into the

odalisque and portraiture traditions.

34
See Sharon F. Patton, and Mary Schmidt Campbell. Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare
Bearden 1940-1987. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem and Oxford University Press,
1991:27.

29
 In her 2002 series Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama, Sulter combined the

compositional strategies of 1970s conceptual art with Dadaist-inspired photomontage

superimposed on a reproduction of Olympia. Sulter’s intervention mediates an imagined

recuperation of Laure’s obscured subjectivity through an overlay of the maid figure with

a photograph of a black artist’s model who, given the photograph’s 1850s date, was a

near-contemporary of Laure.35 (Images 165-167)

Sulter constructed viewer attention for this intervention through a conceptualist

use of scale --her overlay photograph blown up to be larger than the prostitute, as a

metaphoric effort to retrieve the subjectivity of Manet’s model and establish its value as

equivalent to that of the prostitute. 36 Still, Sulter acknowledges the impossibility of full

retrieval of subjectivities lost to history; the identity of the Nadar model herself remains

unknown. Sulter captures this reality with a second element of photomontage on the

lower right –a portrait of herself, taken from the back-- hair wrapped with a madras scarf

reminiscent of Baudelaire’s sketch of Jeanne Duval-- shown leaning on the rail of a

tourist boat, gazing pensively at the Paris skyline as seen from the Seine.37 With the

conceptualist-inspired de-aestheticization and unskilled qualities of the grainy black-and-

35
As discussed in Deborah Cherry’s essay in the exhibition brochure for Jeanne Duval: A
Melodrama, Edinburgh: The National Gallery of Scotland’s 2003 exhibition.
36
Alexander Alberro outlines the main veins of conceptual practice, several of which are seen in
Sulter’s work, including the negation of aesthetic content and gestures of de-authorship, in the
preface, “Reconsidering Conceptual Art,” of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Alexander
Alberro and Blake Stimson, editors, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999. Sulter’s
overscaling in order to call attention to the obscured Laure is an inverse, of sorts, of Louise
Lawler’s institutionally critical photographs unmasking the way the Metropolitan Museum
positions the viewer to venerate a classicized sculpture of Greek hero Perseus, as discussed by
Rosalyn Deutsche in “Lawler’s Rude Museum,” in Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking
Back). Columbus, Ohio and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wexner Center for the Arts and MIT
Press, 2006.
37
As described by Deborah Cherry in a London discussion with me while we viewed the Jeanne
Duval series, which is in her personal collection, in September 2012.

30
white snapshot deflecting attention from herself, this portrait instead directs the viewer to

follow her gaze –in the direction of the Musée d’Orsay, the Louvre, and other art

institutions along the banks of the Seine. These institutions, and their display and

interpretive strategies for the images of black Europeans among their holdings, are the

true subjects of Sulter’s work.

Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama advanced Sulter’s extensive engagement with

nineteenth century representations of black women, as in her re-imagined appropriation

of Benoist’s 1800 painting La Négresse, a precedent for Olympia discussed in Chapter

One. This painting was reconstituted by Sulter in 2002 as a monumental photograph and

video, Portrait d’une négresse (Bonny Greer), 2002 posed by a prominent African

American writer. (Image 168) As with Duval, Sulter uses dramatically overscale

dimensions to draw viewer attention to and reverence for a portrait of a black woman

that, as discussed in Chapter One, was detested by some critics in its own time for its

choice of subject. Even though working with photography, a medium noted for mass

mechanical reproduction, Sulter’s photographs are one-of-a-kind, and their size (8x10

feet) approximates that of 19th century history paintings –all devices enlisted in service

of her intent to inspire belated respect for the sublimated black female subject.

Mickalene Thomas has since the onset of her career forged a creative

process and pictorial style that re-imagines past masterworks as vivid evocations of the

contemporary moment. With her signature rhinestone-studded portraits of vibrant black

women, Thomas fuses a global artistic legacy spanning the modernizing turn in early

modern France from Manet to Matisse’s School of Paris: the visual strategies of postwar

31
African American artists; and the meaning-laden processes and materials of

transnational studio practice today. (Images 170 -172)

The originality with which Thomas mines this trove of found imagery is manifest

in her portraits, which evoke yet transcend past figurings of the black female body. These

works embody Thomas’ expressed intention to inject socially, sexually and artistically

empowered black women of socially, sexually and artistically empowered black

femininity into the canon.38 She thus embraces the Foucauldian exhortation to push

beyond the mere excavation and deconstruction of the documents of history and the

marginalizing agendas underlying them, and to replace outmoded convention with an

overlay of new narratives.39

With her most recent work with long-favored studio models, a practice resonant

of Manet and Matisse, Thomas embeds the models’ names in the titles, in refutation of

past black models’ obscured identities. With paintings like Portrait of Qusuquzah 2,

Une Trés Belle Négresse and Din, Une Trés Belle Négresse #1, both from 2012, Thomas

retrieves the legacy of Manet’s Laure, long marginalized and unnamed in art history,

with subtitles quoting Manet’s description of Laure. (Image 172) Thomas’ direct link of

the black female subject with the appelation of beauty performs an intervention with a

longstanding history that Western art has no place for representations of black female

beauty, a convention also disregarded by Matisse’s 1940s work in Vence.

38
See Denise Murrell’s essay “The Anterior as Muse: Recent Paintings by Mickalene Thomas,”
in Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe, the exhibition catalog for Thomas’ 2012-2013 solo
exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Unless otherwise
noted, all references to the artist’s comments are from the author’s several meetings with
Mickalene Thomas in her Brooklyn and Giverny studios from April 8 through November 11,
2011.
39
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks), 1972: 6.

32
 It is both poignant and ironic that Willia Marie Simone, the African American

protagonist of Matisse’s Model, Faith Ringgold’s 1991 quilted story painting, goes to

Paris at age 16 and in posing for Matisse and Picasso, “leads a life that no African

American woman artist could have dreamed of having at the time.”40 (Image 173). This

assumption is an index of the unintended misperceptions constructed by the silences of

art history. The historical obliteration of the black modernist muse was so profound that

Ringgold, an acclaimed African American artist who had studied in France and

maintained an extensive engagement with modernist masters, appears to have been

unaware in the 1990s, like Bearden in the 1970s, of Matisse’s work fifty years earlier

with Carmen Helouis and Mme van Hyfte.

It is within this context that Mickalene Thomas engages with the iconographic

legacy of precedent artists including Manet, Matisse and Bearden, while bringing the

gradual modernization of the black female subject into the present moment. Thomas’s

investigation of Manet’s Olympia offers compelling interrogations of this painting’s

problematic iconographic legacy. It is with her renderings of the flower-bearing black

woman that Thomas advances the iterative transformation of this figure, across

successive artistic generations, from the servant of Olympia to a personification of

empowered contemporary black womanhood

In her collage Marie: Femme Noire, Nue Couchée, (Image 173) Thomas

resurrects the self-assured demeanor of her previous portraits of black female subjects,

but now in the iconic trope of the reclining nude. Posing languidly on a floral patterned

sofa, old prints overhead suggestive of dreams, she dons glittering jewels and dramatic

40
See the exhibition catalog Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and
Other Story Quilts (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art), 1998:9.

33
animal prints, projecting new connotations of glamour and success for these attributes of

past alterity. Thomas reinforces her intervention with a unique update of the nineteenth-

century flower-bearing black woman. This twenty-first century odalisque allows her

bouquet to fall away, with a casual confidence derived as much from her own sense of

self as from others’ admiration.

Mickalene Thomas’ reformulation of this figure links her with contemporary

artists who address a need, expressed by Lorraine O’Grady, for “...images of the black

female body by black women made as acts of auto-expression, the discrete stage that

must immediately precede or occur simultaneously with acts of auto-critique…When, in

other words, does the present begin?”

34
CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Manet’s Three Images of Laure

In late 1862 Edouard Manet (1832-1883) noted in his studio carnet that a model

he described as “Laure, trés belle négresse” sat for a portrait in his rue Guyot studio in

northern Paris.41 This session would produce the second of Manet’s three known

paintings posed by Laure, all made within a twelve-month period.

During the previous summer, Manet had depicted a nursemaid figure with

Laure’s deep brown flesh tones, but with indeterminate facial features, along the right

41
The Manet archivist Achille Tabarant comments that “ …Manet a consacré a la Négresse une
étude a part (61x50)… Elle est en buste, coiffée de son madras, les épaules nues... Cette
négresse, nous avons pu l’identifier grace a notre Carnet de notes de Manet (1862). Il porte en
effet cette mention: “Laure, très belle négresse, rue Vintimille, 11, au 3e. Cette adresse, ne peut-
on penser que ce fut Baudelaire qui l’indiqua?“ (Manet et ses Oeuvres, 1947: 79) Tabarant’s
attribution is invariably cited on the few occasions when Manet scholars mention this quote,
including in noteworthy essays by Françoise Cachin in the 1983 catalog for a Manet retrospective
shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Musée d’Orsay, and Griselda Pollock in her
essay, “A Tale of Three Women: Seeing in the dark, seeing double, at least with Manet,” in
Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and
NewYork: Routledge), 1999: 277. I have not been able to locate and view the 1862 carnet; all
signs are that it is no longer extant. Juliet Wilson Bareau, discussing sourcing problems for the
2011 Musée d’Orsay Manet retrospective, writes that many of Manet’s papers appear to have
vanished, after being mainly in Leon Leenhoff’s possession until the early twentieth century. (In
“The Manet Exhibition in Paris,” The Burlington Magazine, December 2011: 816. I have
decided, nevertheless, to accept the Tabarant quote as fact, in part because he provides a carefully
observed formal description of the “etude,” including of the double pearl earring dangling from
Laure’s one visible ear, as well as a summation of its provenance; and because highly esteemed
Manet scholars have previously cited the carnet with no mention of having viewed it. I was
particularly struck by Cachin’s use of the quote, since her 1983 exhibition is widely considered to
be the definitive postwar Manet show, and because she did not include the carnet in her catalog
bibliography’s listing of the primary sources she viewed in the original. I did view excerpts of a
later carnet, covering Manet’s 1870s-1880s practice, which is packaged with other materials
under the title Cahiers Leenhoff, on microfilm at the Bibliothèque National de France in Paris.
These documents apparently passed from Manet’s widow Suzanne to her son Leon Leenhoff,
whom Tabarant knew, and then to the Bibliothèque National. A version of the Cahiers is also in
the Tabarant archives that I viewed at the Morgan Library in New York.

35
border of his painting Children in the Tuileries,.42 The result of this second sitting was to

be completely different. If the Tuileries nursemaid had been rendered as a “type,” one of

several stock figures in a genre scene, Laure was now the subject of a carefully observed

painting, in which the blank visage of Children is rendered with portraitizing detail in

demeanor and attire; her direct gaze meets the viewer’s eye.

Manet’s presentation of Laure as the sole focal point of interest introduces us to

her as a specific individual who compels the same sustained attention from the viewer

that she received from the artist. Within months, Laure would return to Manet’s studio, to

pose the maid figure to a prostitute in Manet’s groundbreaking Olympia.43 The Laure of

Olympia assumes such a markedly different stance from her portrait, one characterized by

formal and thematic ambiguity, that this final pose situates the earlier portrait not as a

mere study for Olympia but as a standalone work in its own right.

Manet’s three representations of Laure can collectively be seen as an important

manifestation of his defining artistic commitment -- to paint what he saw in the daily

life of modern Paris, in a radically modern style, and in defiance of the romanticized

classicism and exoticism that defined the academically sanctioned art of his day.

Manet’s images of Laure figure modernity with their formal pictorial values –a broad,

loose brushstroke and flattened pictorial effect -- that were antithetical to the

illusionistic mimicry prevalent since the Renaissance. Laure also figures modernity

through a simultaneous citation of, and evolution beyond, the stock figure of the exotic

black servingwoman. Long featured in academic painting as existing irreducibly outside

42
While there do not appear to be extant records confirming that Laure posed the Children nanny,
Pollock also asserts that the model was Laure (Pollock, 1999: 278), and given Manet’s habit of
working repeatedly with a single model, this seems plausible.
43
Pollock (Ibid., 1999: 277) and Tabarant (1947: 79)both suggest this sequencing and timeline
for the two paintings.

36
modernity. Manet, to the contrary, placed her squarely in the midst of scenes of modern

life in the Paris of Manet’s time. Laure moreover figures modernity by her depiction in a

manner strikingly apart from the derisive stereotypical caricatures with which the

period’s popular media invariably depicted black Parisians. And finally, Laure figures

modernity as part of Manet’s effort to assert the artistic merit of marginalized subjects,

individuals whose ethnicity, class, regional origins or occupation place them firmly

outside bourgeois European society, at a time when only portraits of elite or historical

subjects were sanctioned by academy convention.

The three Manet images of Laure are collectively noteworthy because they not

only manifest the new modern style of painting, but because they depict, as a

documentary of sorts, the range of the roles –nanny, artist’s model, brothel maid and

more -- with which free black Parisian women, just fifteen years after abolition, gained

an economic foothold and became a fixture in the daily life of Paris.44

The Ethnic Demographics of Manet’s Paris

Taken together with later works by other artists in Manet’s circle, his images of

Laure can in retrospect be seen as a representation of the early formation of one of the

principal black communities in central Paris. Manet’s Laure personifies a small but

visible black presence in Paris that took root in the aftermath of abolition and still exists

today.45 (Image 10) Nowhere was this new free black presence more manifest than in

44
The first emancipation of slavery was implemented in 1794, as part of the French Revolution
and suspended in 1801 with the rise of Napoleon, whose wife Josephine was from a slaveholding
Caribbean family. Blanchard, et al, La France Noire, 2011: 23, 31.
45
The areas from the Place de Clichy to Place Pigalle, and especially around Barbes-
Rochechouart, the Gare du Nord and Belleville are today the main quartiers of central Paris
where there are concentrations of black Parisians large enough to form a visible residential
community clustered around predominately black and North African commercial districts. See

37
the city’s northerly ninth and seventeenth arrondissements. (Image 8) This was the area

where Manet also lived and worked at the time, along with his artist and writer friends

Monet, Renoir, Baudelaire and Zola, especially in and around the Nouvelles Athenes

quarter of the ninth arrondissement, and Batignolles in the adjacent seventeenth. (Image

9) The title of Fantin-Latour’s painting Studio at Batignolles, a group portrait of Manet

and his friends, captures this reality, as does the artists’ gathering seen in Manet’s Au

Café Guerbois. (Image 11)

Tabarant points out that, in addition to Manet’s physical description of Laure,

he noted in his carnet that she lived at “11 rue Vintimille, au 3e” –an address within ten

minutes’ walk of Manet’s apartment and studio. Several notable Parisians of color

resided nearby, including Alexandre Dumas père, who lived on Avenue Frochot, a

private street just blocks away from rue Vintimille. This presence anecdotally indexes

census data that, while incomplete, suggests that these northern areas have traditionally

hosted some of the largest black Antillaise populations in central Paris, a fact that

persisted over successive generations and is manifest today.46 (Image 10)

discussion of the black population in Paris, including the presence of nannies and household
servants recruited from the Caribbean in the years immediately after the 1848 abolition, in La
France Noire: Trois Siecles de Presences, edited by Pascal Blanchard (Paris: Editions de la
Découverte, 2011: 42-43). After World War II, as the numbers of migrants from the Antilles to
Paris expanded, and as expanding numbers of immigrants from West Africa arrived, often
recruited as guest workers to meet the demand for labor, additional black communities formed in
the banlieues.
46
French census demographer Claude-Valentin Marie writes that , while only 16,000 people of
Departements d’Outre Mer (DOM) origin resided in France in 1952, this number swelled to
183,000 by 1982. ("Les populations des DOM-TOM, nées et originaires, residant en
France...sondage de 1990" in INSÉE Resultats 24 (1993). In La Condition Noire one of the first
scholarly histories of black France, EHESS researcher Pap Ndiaye suggests a stability of numbers
from the 19th century until World War II, while noting that “Le XIX siècle est malheureusement
mal connu en ce qui concerne l’histoire des populations noires de France. …Il est probable que le
nombre de Noirs en France à la fin du XIX siècle avoisiait le millier, dont quelques centaines à
Paris, qui étaient d’autant plus visibles qu’ils etient rares.” (2009: 126)

38
 Manet and his friends maintained studios along streets emanating from the

Place de Clichy, and many of their paintings were set in specific locations throughout the

area. They gathered daily in the cafes and cabarets lining the stretch between Place

Clichy and Place Pigalle, and walked south along newly built residential streets to the

Louvre and Tuilieries Gardens. They departed from the nearby Gare St. Lazare for

leisurely outings in Argenteuil and other pleasure destinations along the Seine. They

attended performances and society events at the Opera and observed popular

entertainments at the circus and cabarets in Places Blanche and Pigalle. The ninth

arrondissement in the 1860s was an area where migrant workers, avant garde artists, the

bourgeoisie, and the demimondaines who served and entertained them all, lived in close

proximity and mingled in public spaces.

In working with Laure, therefore, Manet followed his career-long practice of

engaging models who were part of his daily lived experience. The evolving specificity

of his images of Laure, from type to portrait to the Olympia pose, is perhaps an indication

of Manet’s gradual awareness of this expanding black presence, as through pesonaages

like Alexandre Dumas fils and Jeanne Duval, the mistress of Baudelaire, some black

Parisians became part of his personal artistic circle.

A First Awareness: Children in the Tuileries and the Black Presence in Manet’s Paris

Children in the Tuilieries (1862) depicts an everyday scene that Manet could

well have observed during his regular strolls through the Tuileries gardens, on his way

from his studio to sketching sessions at the Louvre.47 This view of well-dressed

children strolling through the Tuileries gardens, carefully attended to by their uniformed

47
Manet biographer Beth Brombert suggests that Manet visited the Louvre several times each
week in Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1997:162.

39
nannies, captured a commonplace occurrence. Children is thus an example of Manet’s

commitment to painting ordinary events from daily life. These excursions may also have

been a context for Manet’s first awareness of Paris’ changing black population, as black

nannies became increasingly visible.48

The painting is also an early manifestation of the formal strategies and subject

matter that became hallmarks of Manet’s art; in choosing to portray this scene, Manet

embraced a well-established subject of genre painting, while updating it to reflect current

realities. Its pictorial methods display the abrupt break with convention that also

characterizes his work. This becomes clear when Manet’s Children is juxtaposed with a

painting that typifies the sanctioned approach to this scene, Timoleon Marie Lobrichon’s

Promenade des Enfants. (Image 4) Promenade fits within a standardized genre painting

style – generalized figures arrayed before perspectival vistas sweeping over manicured

gardens into a distant background expanse. The palette of pleasant pastel pinks, blues and

greens accentuates the artist’s depiction of a scene of charming and well-ordered

bourgeois leisure –the children are regimented into parade-like columns yet display the

inevitable unruliness of toddlers at play, even as their impeccably aproned nannies gently

assert a semblance of discipline. The sunny skies and brilliant green foliage project

optimism, well- being and security, the latter reinforced by the dignified gray-bearded

gentlemen hovering nearby, ready to impose masculine authority and protection as

needed. It is a decorative scene, updated with uncomplicated realism, intended to please

48
As previously cited, for a discussion of the expanding presence of black nannies in Paris, see
La France Noire (Blanchard ed., 2011: 42-44). Tabarant suggests that Manet may have met
Laure while she was working as a nursemaid for a family friend; he also speculates that Manet’s
friend Charles Baudelaire may have introduced them. In Manet et ses Oeuvres, 1947: 79.

40
without provocation, and to adorn bourgeois interiors as a sort of luxe wall backdrop for

other luxury possessions.49

Manet, like Lobrichon, captures the beguiling aspects of coming across a

children’s outing –the amusing efforts of the nurses to keep the youngsters moving ahead

in formation, the charming round straw hats and loose cream-colored playclothes, the

affectionate gestures of nannies adjusting children’s caps or shooing them back into line.

But Manet reduces the cuteness factor by depicting slightly older children, from a back

view, in a far less open and sunny setting. The perspectival view into background is

closed off, the murky black tree trunks seem to close in; the distant view is indistinct,

rendered with blanked out spaces and loosely gestural brushstrokes to create a flattened

picture plane. It is an economy of detail, a pictorial flattening, that sets off a generation of

modernizing depictions of such genre scenes, exemplified by Bonnard’s Promenade des

Nourrices decades later. (Image 4) The slightly sinister sense of the figures, who are

pushed forward into the foreground by a garden that seems to close in on them, is

underscored by Manet’s version of the gray-bearded male presence; idealized and

dignified in Lobrichon, he now seems more like a vagrant, a figure that the children

perhaps are being steered away from, rather than a soothing protective presence.

Manet thus evokes a genre scene but depicts it in a modern way, both in his

formal pictorial devices and by his choice of figural types. 50 If Lobrichon paints a scene

49
Timoleon Marie Lobrichon (1831-1914), studied at the Academie des Beaux-Arts and
successfully exhibited, and won prizes for, portraits and genre scenes depicting children
throughout the 1860s-1870s. While his work has received scant scholarly attention, he was
elected Chevalier of the French Legion of Honneur in 1882, just one year after Manet received
the same award.
50
Other artists with ties to the Batignolles artists painted scenes of nannies with children in
gardens, that, like Manet’s Children, escaped the conventions of genre. See Linda Nochlin’s

41
of sanitized orderly cheer, Manet paints a scene perhaps closer to observed reality – a city

where displaced loiterers and bourgeois families intermingled at every turn.

Manet’s rendering of the right-most nurse with the brown skin tones of his

model Laure seems to advance the picture’s real-world qualities. If Lobrichon shows the

nannies as his bourgeois viewers would perhaps like them to be –elegantly uniformed

Europeans –Manet, even if marginally, injects a dose of the reality that nannies in 1860s

Paris were a mix of races, even if still predominantly European. Lsure’s deep brown

skin tones break with Lorichard’s idealized figures; this can be seen perhaps as an effort

to depict the demographic fact that a Parisian nursemaid could very well, by the 1860s,

be black.

Manet tapped into a tradition dating back to the Renaissance of depicting

bourgeois subjects with black servants to emphasize that their wealth was extensive

enough to import costly exotic help.51 Yet the prevalent view of black women was

clearly negative and suspicious. The frequent depictions of black nannies as caricatures

in popular media illustrates that this prejudice is anything but obscure–it is commonplace

enough, and loaded enough with racist connotation, that it is a highly effective gag line.

The brown-skinned nanny and foreboding greybeard in Children are, therefore, part of

discussion of the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot’s 1879 Wet Nurse in “Morisot’s Wet
Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting,” in Women, Art, and
Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row) 1988: 231-241. Morisot also
reconfigured standard mother-and-child imagery in depicting her family in a garden setting in
her painting Eugene Manet and his Daughter. Eugene was Edouard Manet’s brother. Also see
Anne Higonnet’s biography for a discussion of Morisot’s unconventional approach to depictions
of children, including her “solemn contemplation” as she gazes at her enfant daughter in The
Cradle, in Berthe Morisot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press),
1995: 91, 111.
51
As discussed in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Titian’s Laura Dianti (1523-1529) is an
iconic image of this genre, an interesting fact in the context of this dissertation given that Titian
did not repeat this model in his 1538 Venus of Urbino, a prototype for Olympia (eds David
Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Vol. III Part 1, 2010: 107-109).

42
Manet’s mode of escaping the most saccharine aspects of genre, by painting everyday life

in a way that is radically modern, both formally and in subject matter. Children depicts

life as it is, not as the conservative upper classes may have wished it to be. It is striking

that the flesh tones of the later Bonnard nanny are racially indeterminate, far removed

from the rosy-cheeked hues of earlier genre works like the Lobrichon.

Still, Manet evokes tradition even as he transcends it. He uses the figural

devices of genre types and at times echoes aspects of Lorichon’s figurations. Both the

nannies and their children are composed as types –their sketched in faces uniformly

indistinct so as not to distract from the detailing of their attire that defines their social

position. These figures are clearly intended to depict an occupation or social position

rather than specific individuals. This typing is directly descended from the interest by

Romantic painters in depicting sweeping scenes, even in everyday life. It was Delacroix

who advanced the idea, in paintings like Liberty Leading her People, that a range of

Parisian “types” should be depicted in paintings, but with all the metaphoric classicism

of history painting rather than the specifics of actual appearance. From the radical worker

and the street urchin to the dandy flaneur, each is defined by costume and context; there

are few or no portraits.52 The focus on costume as the main manifestation of socio-

economic status also typifies the popular media genres of fashion plates and the then-

recently completed Balzac mega-opus Les Francais peints par eux-memes. It is thus

essential for social placement of the figures to represent the expensive round straw hats

52
Ségolène Le Men discusses the roots of genre painting in Romantic illustration, which uses
durable formulaic types to visualize a narrative by isolating a figure and giving it instantly
recognizable, and therefore defining, specifics of costume. If background is added at all, it is
only to add “local color.” Le Men cites as an example a palm tree in the background as part of
what defines the Creole de Cayenne type, or an arid mountainous backdrop for “Le Maure.” In
Les Francais Peints par eux-memes: Panorama social du XIXe siècle, exh.cat. (Paris: Musée
d’Orsay), 1995: 9-11.

43
and loose white playclothes of bourgeois children as well as the high-buttoned white-

collared dress and matching headscarf of their nursemaids, as posed here by Laure.

The headscarf is particularly characteristic of typing the black female servant –

by piling it high on her head, tied to the side, its two-tones evoking the madras worn in

the Antilles, Manet deftly captures a reality also seen in the anonymous photograph

Portrait of a black woman holding an enfant on her knee. (Image 6) The instant

recognition factor in popular culture for the black nanny figure is underscored by the

caricature from popular media satirizing famed mulatto writer Alexandre Dumas pere as

a nursemaid to the theatre. Here the type makes its facile transition to a stereotype of the

black nourrice figure so well-established in Paris that it is instantly recognizable. (Image

5)

Manet’s earliest break with his conventional teachings was his decision, while a

student of esteemed academician Thomas Couture, to discard the classicized

Romanticism that was the academically sanctioned mode of advanced painting.53 Before

doing so, Manet maintained continuity with such conventional subject matter including

portraits of upper bourgeois personae and mythological subjects deemed worthy of fine

painting, as in his 1860 portraits of his upper bourgeois parents and in The Surprised

Nymph of 1861.

After Manet successfully exhibited such works at the 1861 Salon, his friend

Fantin-Latour placed him at the center of an 1865 group portrait, Homage to Delacroix,

of artists and writers who he believed best advanced the tradition of the recently deceased

Romantic master. But Manet bolted from this early trajectory, abandoning a style that

53
Manet studied with Couture from 1850-1856, but after traveling in Italy to copy the Old
Masters—and meeting Fantin-Latour—Manet set up his own rue Goyot studio in 1862. See
Guégan, Manet: The Man Who Invented Modernity. Exh. cat. (Paris: Musée d’Orsay), 2011: 269.

44
had placed him on the path toward a secure position as a respectable Salon-sanctioned

artist.

By early 1862 he had turned irrevocably to representations of the more ordinary

aspects of daily life, with Children in the Tuileries as a prelude to his masterpiece Music

in the Tuileries a few months later.54 Such material had long been relegated to genre

painting, characterized by a matter-of-fact/nondramatic realism in depicting workaday

scenes. Genre painting therefore occupied the bottom rung in an established hierarchy of

fine art that privileged the vivid color palette and melodramatic subject matter of history

painting above all others. Children in the Tuileries anticipated Manet’s contrarian attempt

to ”paint what I see” in everyday life, while deploying the avant garde pictorial values

previously reserved for loftier content.

Manet’s Portrait of Laure: From Type to Individual

Manet’s first depiction of Laure in Children, as an anonymous, yet modernized,

figural type, suggests that, while Manet saw black servants as part of the city’s public

life, and chose to depict that reality in Children, this awareness was initially a distanced

one. They were anonymous figures that he could well have seen during his strolls around

the city.

In contrast, his second image of Laure is a closely observed portrait of an

individual –the opposite of a faceless genre type. And once again, with this representation

of a specific personality who compelled his close attention, Manet combines tradition and

54
Rubin provides one of the most detailed discussions of the multiple social classes depicted in
Music in the Tuileries (1999: 56-7) while the Musée d’Orsay’s Guégan discusses its formal
inventiveness (2011:31)

45
innovation in both iconographic details and picture-making style, much as he had done

months earlier in Children.55

The portrait, finished in early 1863, depicts the subject in a pale dress that sits

low on the shoulders. She wears a subtly colored, vaguely patterned head-wrap, and

simple jewelry comprising a double pearl pendant earring in the one visible ear and a

necklace of colored stones set in golden links. The image may appear at first glance to be

more a study than a finished painting –the color tones of the shoulders seem to be

unfinished and do not match those of the face, where splotches of pigment are left

unblended. But this open brushwork and lack of blended half-tones are also seen in other

Manet portraits throughout his career; they are an early harbinger of Manet’s

revolutionary approach to painting. It is a style that depicts the figure more in flat planes

of color, loosely bound by outline, than in fully contoured and naturalistically molded

forms.56 It exhibits almost none of the genre-like realism seen in Feyen’s rendering of a

55
There is a paucity of scholarly, curatorial and critical commentary about Manet’s portrait of
Laure, beyond a passing mention, as discussed in the Introduction for this dissertation, in essays
about the broader history of images of black women in nineteenth century French art, as seen in
Nochlin, Guégan and Rubin. Pollock, after noting Laure’s sitting for this “portrait study, an early
essay for another scene of modernity,” focuses on Laure’s Olympia pose. (1999:277)
Pinacoteca Agnelli, the current owner of the painting, which it labels La Négresse and dates
1862-63, provides a superb reproduction of the work in its collection catalog, accompanied by a
label text that quotes Manet’s “trés belle négresse” description. In Pinacoteca Giovanni e
Marella Agnelli al Lingotto (Milano: Bompiani), 2002: 68-69. A separate bibliography provided
by the Pinacoteca lists several Italian periodical articles, primarily for survey exhibitions with
little commentary specifically about this painting. The Pinacoteca also establishes a provenance
for the painting that extends from Eva Gonzales, a student of Manet to whom he gave the portrait,
through several collectors in Paris (Auguste Pellerin, Prince de Wagram), in Budapest (Marczell
de Nemes, Baron Herzog) and in Turin (Riccardo Gualino of Torino). The painting entered the
Agnelli family collection in 1959, after ownership by the Honolulu Academy of Art.
56
During a viewing of the Laure portrait during the 2011 Manet exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay,
the artist Mickalene Thomas remarked that, as an artist, she could see from the loosely brushed
flesh tones’ variegated browns, applied in slightly impastoed swirls, evoking the material
presence of a palette, that Manet seemed to be searching for the best representation of the model’s
flesh tones.

46
woman who appears to be the same model in Baiser Enfantin.57 (Image 23) The

contours and modeling of her face and shoulders, like the drape of her dress fabric, are

suggested, but not fully articulated; rather than the posed charm and smooth surface of

Feyen’s academic illusionism, Manet leaves the presence of the canvas support manifest,

his model’s gaze direct, frank and engaging rather than charmingly diverted.

Yet it is a portraitizing image that captures the specificity of the model’s rounded

facial features and her faintly bemused gaze. It is a salutary example of Manet’s

modernity –he retains the capacity to reveal character even as he simplifies its formal

qualities.

Laure within Manet’s Gallery of Outsiders

Manet’s Laure portrait is striking in its resemblance to The Absinthe Drinker,

another Manet single figure painting of 1862. The two paintings share a blank

background of brown-grey tonalities that keeps the viewer’s attention focused on the

figure. The pants leg displays the same kind of outlined shaping of flat color bands seen

around Laure’s shoulders. As previously discussed, this loose, open brushwork and

flattened form, while it may appear to some observers as unfinished, is actually a

characteristic of Manet’s radical new painting style, one that would be more fully realized

in the multi-figure paintings such as Music in the Tuileries and Olympia made during the

same period.

57
I make this assumption based on visual analysis of this image, which I first came across in the
Image of the Black in Western Art archives at Harvard’s W.E.B. Dubois Institute. I found very
little information elsewhere about this painting, but the Image of the Black archives cover sheet
indicated that the painting was shown at the Salon of 1865; the fact that this is the same year that
Olympia reinforces the possibility that the model could have been Laure.

47
 Just as Manet’s neighborhood included one of Paris’ most concentrated black

populations, it also abutted the labyrinthian medieval allies and shantytowns that, though

long home to immigrant gypsies, Italians and Spaniards, as well as migrant French

provincials, were being razed by the 1860s to make way for the broad boulevards and

plazas of modern Paris. For both Manet and Baudelaire, this reconfiguring of central

Paris, planned and ruthlessly executed by Baron Hausmann, Napoleon II’s Prefect of the

Seine, placed compelling personalities from all walks of life in close and regular

proximity and on public display as they went about their daily peregrinations along the

broad new, tree-lined boulevards lined with elegant new apartment buildings.58 The

Baudelairean “painter of modern life” was drawn not just by the opulent lifestyles of the

city’s upper classes, and the café society of fellow artists, writers and their

demimondaine lovers, but also by the plight of the city’s working classes of servants,

laundresses and shop workers and the underclass displaced by Hausmannization. 59

Many were migrants from the poorer countries of Europe, drawn to new employment

opportunities in Paris created by the industrial revolution.

58
Beth Archer Brombert’s Manet biography (1997: 54-55) provides a detailed discussion of how
Haussmann –a trained musician and lawyer – became prefect of the Seine in 1853 and from 1853-
1870 replaced 300 miles of haphazard streets with 85 miles of open thoroughfares and started
remaking central Paris. This program, known as Hausmannization, involved evicting the poor to
make way for the new middle class and their dwellings, businesses and places of entertainment.
A new water supply and sewer system was established and the Gare St. Lazare was a major new
construction. Streets were illuminated, new bridges and wide, tree-lined streets were built.
These sidewalk-lined boulevards radiated from grand new plazas including the Etoile and the
Place de l’Opera. New parks and gardens, hospitals, and the rue de Rivoli bordering the Tuileries
were built, as was the now-demolished central market. This massive program changed the face of
the northern Paris areas where Manet lived and worked, but it left much of the rest of the city
intact, including the Marais, the aristocratic eighteenth-century Saint-Germain quarter on the Left
Bank, and the sixteenth and seventeenth arrondissements.
59
This was a key tenet of Baudelaire’s argument that artists should focus on modern subject
matter in his seminal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and
Other Essays. (New York and London: Phaidon), 2005: 1-42.

48
 Manet’s notation, in recording Laure’s rue Vintimille address, that she resided

on the third floor there underscored the mix of economic classes living in close

proximity that provided a lifetime of richly diverse subject matter for Manet. 60 The

third floor of such bourgeois apartment buildings was typically a no-frills working class

domain, located up narrow flights of stairs above the elegant bourgeois apartments on

the first and second floors. Laure’s third floor residence signified the likely proximity

between Paris’ free black population, as part of a multiethnic working class, and their

affluent neighbors.61

Manet’s portrait of Laure came during a year when he painted several other

single figure portraits of outsiders. (Image 12) Manet’s 1862 portrait of Laure can thus

be seen, together with works such as the Street Musician, the Absinthe Drinker and Gypsy

with a Cigarette, as part of Manet’s commitment to representing the full range of

personalities whom he encountered in the streets and squares of his immediate

neighborhood. (Image 12)

This was a period of artistic transition when Manet began to fully embrace the

exhortation that “il faut etre de son temps“ –one must be of one’s times –advanced by his

60
Rue Vintimille was built up in part during Hausmannization, among the blocks of bourgeois
housing built in areas where extensive razing of old neighborhoods took place. It was built in
1844 at the same time as much of the surrounding quartier, known as Nouvelle Athenes; Berlioz,
Monet and later Vuillard lived at intervals on rue Vintimille, and Zola lived a block away, during
the 1860s-1870s.
61
This detail completed the previously referenced notation in Manet’s carnet; as recorded by
Tabarant, it read in its entirety “Laure, trés belle négresse, 11 rue Vintimille, 3e.” The presence
of a resident named Laure at this address has been documented beyond Tabarant’s comment by at
least one other source. Griselda Pollock describes her research assistant Nancy Proctor‘s
discovery of the name Laure listed in the 1860s rent register of 11 rue Vintimille at the ninth
arrondissement’s town hall. (1999: 255)

49
friend the essayist and poet Charles Baudelaire. 62 Baudelaire’s ideas were central to

Manet’s proactive transformation of his artistic identity from student of the classicizing

masters into foundational modernist, committed to capturiing the daily life around him.

Manet embraced Baudelaire’s ideal of the artist as flaneur, the impartial yet empathetic

observer of every aspect of life around him.

Baudelaire was at the time finalizing his Painter of Modern Life essay of 1863,

which called on the artist to move away from the exoticized content of Romanticism,

drawn from antiquity and past history, despite Baudelaire’s earlier embrace of Delacroix.

He now profiled a prototypical modern artist as a flaneur, a man of the crowd who

roamed the streets and back alleys of Paris, standing apart from but observing and

recording all aspects, high and low, of daily life.63 Baudelaire had gained recognition in

the 1840s as a critic for his essays in admiration of the color palette of Romantic master

Eugene Delacroix, but by the next decade, struck by the drastic changes in the cityscape

of a rapidly modernizing Paris, he came to believe that the true artist must depict the new

and definitive aspects of his own time. Some members of the newly displaced

populations were regularly visible on the area’s streets, sometimes due to homelessness,

or were employed in the nearby cabarets and brothels of Batignolles. These figures,

including menial day laborers, homeless alcoholics and itinerant entertainers were

therefore readily visible to Manet and his Impressionist friends.

62
Brombert, 1997: 48, 66.
63
Scholars believe that it was the artist Constant Guys whose sketches captured a wide spectrum
of Paris life, who inspired Baudelaire’s exhortation, even though Baudelaire by the early 1860s
was visiting Manet’s studio. See Linda Nochin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?” for a discussion of the nineteenth-century constraints on women’s access to art
schools, on their movement outside the home, and other factors that contributed to the lack of
women among painters of life observed in public venues. (1988: 145-177)

50
 While Manet himself was securely rooted in the upper bourgeoisie, he therefore

had regular encounters with people on the margins of French society. 64 Manet thus

captured Parisian “types” ranging from his bourgeois social peers residing along

Haussmann’s new Grands Boulevards, and the demimondaines with whom they

mingled at cafes and theaters, to the destitute street performers, vendors and other

denizens of the area’s street life. The model for The Old Musician, for example, was a

gypsy who lived near Manet’s rue Guyot studio and worked as an organ grinder.65

Baudelaire described the itinerant man who posed for the absinthe drinker as a “street

philosopher.”66 Laure, like the absinthe addict and the gypsy singer, was among the

outsiders who populated Manet’s world.67

Manet’s portraits of such figures, who were still considered unworthy subjects of

fine art by leading academicians, combines Courbet’s gritty realism with the loose

brushwork, flattened picture plane, and discomfitingly direct gaze toward the viewer, that

came to characterize modernist painting. Manet represented these figures with an

empathetic dignity comparable to that he gave to his bourgeois and café society friends;

he took care to note their names and addresses, and in that way to immortalize

personages relegated to the margins of society.

64
Manet’s father, August Manet, was a senior French jurist; his mother was the daughter of an
affluent merchant. Manet was financially independent due to a direct inheritance from his father’s
estate, as well as regular cash infusions from his widowed mother. Brombert, 1997: 4-5.
65
The National Gallery in Washington’s nga.gov site includes commentary on The Old Musician.
66
See Rubin, Impressionism, 1999: 53
67
As discussed with the Martinican artist Marc Latamie in January 2013, his 2012 exhibition at
the Americas Society New York, ironically in this context, investigates, among other things, the
export of the absinthe business from Paris to Martinique in the late nineteenth century.

51
 Manet’s images of Laure therefore bridge an important transition in the content

and subject matter of Manet’s paintings. While his later depictions of scenes from the

lifestyles of artists, writers and demimondaines are now seen as Manet’s masterpieces, it

was primarily with portraits of single figures that Manet first broke free of his training in

Couture’s studio in the late 1850s-early 1860s. Manet’s three images of Laure also

manifest the artist’s serial treatment of such subjects as his work evolves from single

figures to group scenes. Just as Laure appears both as herself, and then as a character in

constructed scenes, so the Absinthe Drinker is repeated in Street Musicians; Manet also

repeatedly posed his wife and her son Leon in both portraits and in constructed

scenarios.

Racial Interface and Anxiety within Manet’s Artistic Circle

While there is no evidence that Manet had social interaction with Laure, he

clearly saw Baudelaire, at times accompanied by Jeanne Duval, on a regular basis. As

mentioned earlier, Tabarant speculates that it was Baudelaire who introduced Manet to

Laure, who may have known his biracial mistress Jeanne Duval. Laure therefore indexes

some minimal degree of racial and economic diversity among the general population

within Manet’s environs while also manifesting the multi-ethnicity of Manet’s close

social and artistic circles.68

Baudelaire was not among the twelve artists and writers with whom Manet met

every Friday at the Café Guerbois off Place de Clichy, but the two friends often met to

stroll the city’s parks; Baudelaire also sometimes joined Manet’s daily table at the

68
Tabarant, as previously mentioned, also suggests that Baudelaire may have referred Manet to
Laure. (1947: 79)

52
Nouvelle Athènes cafe in the Place Pigalle and regularly visited Manet in his studio.69

Baudelaire’s longtime mistress was Jeanne Duval, a former actress of biracial Antillean

and French parentage. (Images 13-14)

It is noteworthy that, during the same period that Manet noted Laure’s

residence on rue Vintimille, Baudelaire sent letters to Jeanne Duval at 17 rue Sauffroy in

nearby Batignolles. This proximity of Duval and Laure underscores the sense of a

geographic and social intermingling between Manet’s social circle and black Parisians.

Duval was known to have sometimes accompanied Baudelaire during his Manet

studio visits, and in early 1862 Manet painted a portrait, known as The Mistress of

Baudelaire, that critics generally agree is a depiction of Jeanne Duval.70 Baudelaire and

his mistress had by then been an established couple for decades, and although this was

accepted, if perhaps ambivalently, within their artistic circle, they were the subject of

extensive derisive commentary in published accounts specifically because of Duval’s

mixed race heritage.71 The tumultuous life story of Jeanne Duval surely awaits its

69
Manet biographer Beth Brombert points out that, from the early 1860s until 1875, and
especially after Delacroix’s death in 1863, twelve artists gathered on Fridays at the Café
Guerbois, 19 avenue de Clichy, pulling together two tables to the left of the entrance; in addition
to Manet, the group included Monet, Bazille, Renoir, Degas, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Legros and
the writers Zola, Duranty, Astruc, Burty and Babou. Many members of this group are depicted
in Fantin-Latour’s 1865 and 1870 group portraits. This was in addition to Manet’s daily visits to
the Café Nouvelle-Athenes on the south side of Place Pigalle. (Brombert, 1999: 29-60, 164)
70
Guégan (2011: 107) discusses the couple’s joint visits to Manet’s studio. Moreau-Nelaton is
one of the earliest writers to note these visits (1926:65). Pollock (1999: 263) questions the
premise that the portrait is of Duval, citing Jean Adhemar’s earlier demurral, and suggesting that
the portrait dates to a period when Baudelaire and Duval lived separately during one of their
many breakup-reconciliation cycles. Dolan is convinced that the model is Duval; but allows that
Manet may have worked from a photograph of Duval, possibly made by Nadar. (1997: 615)
Baudelaire himself made at least one extant sketch of Duval, now in the Musée d’Orsay, that he
labeled with Duval’s name.
71
See Griselda Pollock’s commentary on Jeanne Duval in “A Tale of Three Women: Seeing in
the dark, seeing double, at least with Manet,” in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and
the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and New York: Routledge), 1999: 267.

53
biographers; from the sketchy details and speculation available, she appears to have been

born to a black Nanterre brothel worker and an unknown French father; she was an

actress and already well-established in Parisian demimondaine circles when Baudelaire

met her; and may have been Nadar’s lover at the time.72

Duval’s relationship with Baudelaire was both turbulent and emotionally

intimate, featuring multiple cycles of break-up and reconciliation as well as shared visits

to the studios of artists and writers and to a coffee house in the rue Richelie. 73

Baudelaire expressed feelings about Duval that acknowledged her as his principal muse

for many years, but also revealed a mix of admiring and disparaging views about her

ethnic heritage. In a September 1856 letter to his mother after a breakup, he describes

how much, when he sees a fine object, he wishes Duval was there to admire it with him.

Yet his two pen-and-ink sketches of Duval, while sensitively capturing the strong

personality and facial features described by Nadar and others, were inscribed “quarens

quem de voret” (“in search of someone to devour”). (Image 16)

While Duval inspired an extended suite of poems in Baudelaire’s seminal

volume Les Fleurs du Mal (1957), some of the poems similarly exhibit ambivalence –on

the one hand an emotional need and a powerful sexual attraction to her as an emblem of

idyllic faraway lands, but also exoticizing attitudes about non-European cultures shared

by Baudelaire’s early idol Delacroix. As Anne Higonnet writes, in Baudelaire’s

descriptions of and allusions to Duval, she “evokes the experience of a black woman

72
Ibid. Duval is the third of Manet’s models, together with Laure and Berthe Morisot, profiled in
Pollok’s 1999 essay.
73
Roberto Calasso characterizes the emotional and intellectual intimacy of Baudelaire’s
relationship with Duval in La Folie Baudelaire (New York: Farrar Strauss), 2008: 34, 40-41.

54
whose suffering and degradation has obliterated identity.”74 The pressures of public

controversy and private turbulence in the couple’s relationship may have helped

determine the final version of Baudelaire’s portrait in Courbet’s allegorical painting The

Artist’s Studio of 1855. Some scholars suggest that a portrait of Duval initially appeared

hovering over Baudelaire’s shoulder, and though painted out by Courbet, is still

discernible as pentimento.75

Although Duval was disparaged by Baudelaire’s mother as a “black Venus,”

Manet depicted her in a semi-reclining pose that he also used for bourgeois members of

his innermost social circle.76 (Image 16) Duval assumes a seated position on a sofa, her

legs elevated and extended somewhat stiffly before her, a pose in which Manet painted

his wife Susanne, facing in the opposite direction on a blue sofa, a decade later.77

74
See Higonnet’s discussion of this mix of admiration and exoticizing objectification, as
explored in contemporary artist and critic Lorraine O’Grady’s work on Baudelaire and Jeanne
Duval, Miscegenated Family Album, 1980-94. In “Hybrid Viewer,-My Difference,-Lorraine
O’Grady!,” New Histories, Sharon Nelson ed. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art), 1996:
154-160.
75
Discussed by both Guégan of the Musée d’Orsay and Clark 93. Guégan notes that Baudelaire is
among the art-loving friends – “shareholders’ –who are juxtaposed with the exploitative ruling
classes and oppressed poor of everyday life in this work intended to be a “summation of seven
years of my (Courbet’s) artistic and moral life.”
76
Pollock, 1999: 262.
77
Therese Dolan provides an in-depth reading of this portrait in “Skirting the Issue: Manet’s
Portrait of Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining,” in The Art Bulletin, December 1997: 611-629.
Dolan summarizes the known facts about the turbulent Baudelaire-Duval relationship, assesses
the portrait subject’s heavily crinolined dress, with its strong connotations of another complex
woman, the Empress Eugenie, and concludes that the portrait is a visualization of the Baudelaire
Fleurs du Mal poems inspired by Jeanne Duval and of Manet and Baudelaire’s shared ideas
about fashion, modernity and femininity For a more recent discussion of the Duval portrait, see
Suzanne Singletary’s essay “Manet and Whister: Baudelairean Voyage” in Perspectives on
Manet edited by Therese Dolan (Burlington VT: Ashgate), 2012:58-60. Singletary reprises
commentary linking the portrait to the Duval suite in Fleurs (as does Guégan, 2011: 101,107);
she also suggests that Manet’s decision to “entomb” Duval in white may have been an “ironic”
comment on Whistler’s Symphony in White, which Manet probably saw. Griselda Pollock also
provides an extensive account of Duval’s known biography and sets forth a contrarian view, one

55
Brombert notes that, while Duval’s tempestuous, on-and-off relationship with Baudelaire

may have animated Manet’s portrayal of her amidst billowing white skirts and fluttering

lace curtains, his wife’s prim control of her own ruffles suggests the static propriety of his

married life. Yet the placement of Duval’s right hand is comparable to that in Manet’s

similarly posed portrait of Berthe Morisot; the black fan is held by both Duval, a

demimondaine, and Morisot, Manet’s sister-in-law, artistic colleague and social peer.

The similarity of all three women’s white hosiery and velvety black shoes belies an

equivalence in the pictorial worthiness Manet assigns to these three women of radically

different social standing.

Duval was not unique as a person of color circulating among Manet’s close

associates. The celebrated writer Alexandre Dumas, whose grandparents were a French

nobleman and an enslaved woman from Haiti, lived on Avenue Frochot, an elegant gated

private street one block south of Place Pigalle. While Dumas gained international fame

for his novels The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845), he

was outspoken about racism in the French upper classes whose literary salons he

frequented; he also published a short novel, Georges, which dealt with the prevalence of

racial prejudice in French Caribbean society.78

noted and refuted by Dolan, that this portrait may not be of Duval given that the timing falls
during a period when Duval and Baudelaire were separated; (1999: 262-269).
78
In one oft-repeated anecdote, Dumas confronts a speaker who derisively mocked his mixed-
race heritage at a literary salon by saying “Mon père était un mulâtre, mon grand-père était un
nègre et mon arrière grand-père un singe. Vous voyez, Monsieur: ma famille commence où la
vôtre finit.” ( “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather a black man and my great-grandfather a
monkey. You see, sir, my family begins where yours ends. ) C. Brighelli and J.-P.Rispail
Alexandre Dumas ou les aventures d'un romancier, Paris, Gallimard, Coll. Découverte, 1986: 75.

56
 The photographer and caricaturist Étienne Carjat, a friend of Manet and

Baudelaire, made a late-life portrait of Dumas in a style that, while capturing the gravitas

apparent in Carjat’s earlier portrait of Baudelaire, subtly references Dumas’ penchant for

flamboyant self-parody. 79 (Image 13) Dumas, who lived lavishly and had many

mistresses, was a sought-after habitué of both the lavish salons of his father’s aristocratic

class and the cafe society of upper class males and demimondaines – the young women

from a working class background who worked as cafe waitresses, shopgirls, stage

performers and prostitutes at varying levels of economic success.

Duval and Dumas thus both embody a duality of racial attitudes that

contextualizes Manet’s representations of Laure in 1860s Paris. Each had intimate

personal relationships and social privileges transcending racial lines, yet each was

regularly confronted with racial animosity and prejudice. Racially based anxiety can thus

be seen as embedded in the social fabric of Manet’s day.

Each also had subject roles in some of the period’s most definitive works of art

and music, manifesting the ethnically hybrid origins of these icons of European culture.

Duval, though generally historicized solely as Baudelaire’s mistress, was an established

actress in her own right when Baudelaire first saw her on stage at a Montparnasse

theater.80 A decade later, she inspired much of his poetry, including a major suite of

79
Carjat, while not an intimate of Manet, was clearly part of his extended social circle. Brombert
(1997:99) describes Baudelaire’s 1863 letter to Carjat expressing suprise at Manet’s marriage to
Suzanne Leenhoff, someone that neither of them knew.
80
While most historians and novelists writing about Duval have considered her primarily through
her relationship with Baudelaire, the black British artist Maud Sulter, in addition to her Duval-
inspired artmaking, attempted to construct a standalone biography, including her family origins
and theatrical career before Baudelaire. She summarizes her efforts, and her frustration at the
fragmentary nature of available facts, in her essay “Maud Sulter on Jeanne Duval,” in Jeanne
Duval: A Melodrama, Edinburgh: The National Gallery of Scotland, 2003: 21-24.

57
poems in Les Fleurs du Mal.81 When published, Fleurs was censured and Baudelaire

faced an 1857 obscenity trial, due in part to some peoems’ sexually explicit paeans to

« exotic » beauty. Today Fleurs is esteemed as a classic of French literature,

regularly appearing on required reading lists for French public schools.

Alexandre Dumas fils, the elder Dumas’ illegitimate son by one of his many

mistresses, chronicled this era in an 1850s play, La Dame aux Camélias, which inspired

the Verdi opera La Traviata, first performed in Paris in 1856 at the Theatre-Italien.

(Image 21) As in his other works, Dumas fils draws on the plight of his own mother and

of his abandoned Haitian great-grandmother, to craft the story of a tragic courtesan whose

loyalty is exploited by rich male patrons. Dumas fils was known to be a friend of Manet

at the time of Camelias’ Paris debut, to the extent that Manet traveled with him to

Normandy the day after the successful opening. 82 Scholars note that Olympia is the

name of the rival of Dumas’ heroine Marguerite Gaultier in the play. Manet’s

familiarity with the Camelias narrative may thus have influenced his decision to paint

Olympia.

Dumas fils’ Camelias prefigured by just a few years the life story of one of his

father’s other mistresses, the young mixed-race American actress Ada Isaacs Menken.

(Images 13, 15) Menken, one of the most highly-paid American actresses of the period,

81
See Jacques Dupont for one of the more specific discussion of the poems scholars generally
agree were inspired by Duval. He states that “c’est au minimum dix-huit poems des Fleurs (de
“Parfum exotique: à “Je te donne ces vers “ que Jeanne aura certainement inspirés.” In
Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: GF Flammarion), 2004: 13 .
82
As described, based on a quote by Proust, by Nils Gosta Sandblad, who suggested in the 1950s
that past scholars had not yet fully examined Manet’s friendship with Dumas fils. In his Manet:
Three Studies in Artistic Conception, (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup), 1954: 97-98. Also see Phyllis
Floyd’s discussion, in her 2004 essay, “The Puzzle of Olympia,” of possible links between the
Manet painting Olympia and the eponymous Dumas theatrical character.

58
began an affair with Dumas, who was almost twice her age, during her successful tour of

London and Paris in 1864-66.83 She died in Paris just two years later, at age 33, after a

sudden illness.

What we know of Jeanne Duval’s final years renders true-to-life the archtypal

tragic ending that was invariably the fate of demimondaine heroines of the era’s works

of opera and literature.84 The photographer and Manet friend Nadar wrote of spotting

her hobbling along a city street after Baudelaire’s death, in apparently failing health, just

before the siege of Paris during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War’s Commune.85 Many

thousands of Parisians died from starvation and disease during the war’s siege of Paris.

There is no known subsequent mention of Duval.

Jeanne Duval, Alexandre Dumas pere and fils, and Ada Menken were early

examples of a black presence in the environs of Pigalle’s entertainment district that

expanded exponentially in the decades after their deaths. Degas painted the famous

Cirque Fernando performer Miss La-La in action during the 1880s ; she most likely lived

during the season at the Cirque’s residence near Place Pigalle. Toulouse-Lautrec

depicted Rafael Padilla, a well-known black male concert hall dancer whose stage name

was Chocolat86 Ada Isaacs Mencken was in Paris in the early years of a steady stream

of African American actors and writers whose European tours included high-profile visits

83
The historian Renee Sentilles chronicles Menken’s life in Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs
Menken and the Birth of Americsn Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2003.
84
As discussed in Chapter Two, Brombert, 1996: 114, recounts the ubiquity of the tragic
courtesan narrative in popular culture and in opera and literature.
85
Pollock (1999: 270) is among the scholars who cite Nadar’s account.
86
Rafael Padilla, aka Chocolat‘s biography is detailed in the 2012 book Chocolat clown negre by
EHESS scholar Gerard Noiriel.

59
to Paris during Manet’s time. This included the landscape painter Robert Duncanson, the

sculptor Edmonia Lewis and the Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge.87 (Image 18) Many

free families of color in New Orleans sent their children to schools in France; some

settled in Paris, including the playwright Victor Séjour, who had several successful plays

produced in Paris during the 1850s-1860s.88 (Image 17) The French photographer

Camille Silvy, who divided his time between Paris and London, was commissioned by

the British royal family to make wedding portraits of Sarah Bonetta Davies, a young

woman of West African origin who, after being orphaned in a British

military expedition, became a goddaugher of Queen Victoria.89 (Image 18) This trickle

became a strong current in the early twentieth century, when many well-known African

American creative personalities spent extended periods in Paris or became long-term

expatriates. Legendary stars including Josephine Baker, Katherine Dunham and Langston

Hughes lived and performed in and around the Place Pigalle entertainment district (see

map) until the later evolution of the Left Bank as the epicenter of creative Paris.

Laure as Index: Paris’ Free Black Working Class

If Duval and Dumas embodied the little-examined extent to which interracial

social contacts were commonplace within Manet’s immediate social circle, then Laure
87
When Aldridge performed as Othello at Versailles in 1866, Alexandre Dumas pere, who was in
the audience, embraced Aldridge afterward and exclaimed “Moi aussi, je suis Nègre!” (La
France Noire: Trois Siècles de Présences, edited by Pascal Blanchard, 2012: 50.
88
See discussion of New Orleans creoles and other African American visitors to nineteenth
century Paris in Tyler Stovall’s history of Paris’ African American expatriate community Paris
Noir: Afro Americans in the City of Light; while it covers the twentieth century, the preface
recaps the late 1800s. (1996: xiv)
89
Silvy’s portraits of Davies were exhibited during a Silvy retrospective at the National/Royal
Portrait Gallery in London in 2010; Davies has been the subject of a good deal of recent research
focused on excavating the stories of prominent black figures in pre-modern Britain. It is likely
that the Silvy portraits were made in his London studio, though the Bonettas may well have
visited Paris during their honeymoon trip from London to the Maldives.

60
represents the greater number of black Parisians who were intermittently visible along

the margins of that world. Even though Laure may have been an associate of Jeanne

Duval’s, we have almost no factual information about her independent of Manet’s

description.90 Yet Laure indexes the fact that northern Paris was home not just to

prominent blacks, but to a small but much-noted population of ordinary black people,

either born in Paris or new migrants, generally from the Antilles.

As the first histories of black Paris have emerged in recent years, scholars,

while noting a paucity of census data, suggest a numerical stasis in this population from

the 1848 emancipation of slavery in French colonies until the 1950s postwar period.91

As data from the postwar years show that northern Paris had the highest concentrations

of residents of Antilles origin, it might be inferred to support the presumption that this

pattern existed in the nineteenth century.92 (Image 10) Socio-economic conditions in the

Antilles motivated a small but steady stream of migration to the metropole which, after

90
Two descriptive details of the model Laure show up in sources other than Manet: Ross King,
in his book Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that gave the World Impressionism
(2006), states that Laure was 24 years old, but appears to incorrectly cite Tabarant as the source,
based on source materials that I reviewed. Eunice Lipton, in Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search
for Manet’s Model and Her Own Desire (1999), a semi-fictionalized account of her research on
Victorine Meurent, has Victorine describing Laure as a friend and novice model who worked as a
milliner’s assistant in a Left Bank shop. This would be a plausible “day job” for an artists’ model,
as discussed later in this chapter. But I have found no archival evidence of either of these details.
91
On the absence of census data on black French populations, in addition to Ndiaye, already
cited, the recent La France Noire: Trois Siècles de Présences (2012), edited by Blanchard, states
that prioe to 1900, ”...on voit …peu de Noirs dans la vie quotidienne de la métropole, tout au plus
peut-on estimer qu’ils sont un petit millier à y résider, en étant bien souvent de passage pour
quelques mois.” Joel Dreyfuss discusses the fact that France did not collect racial data in its
census as a factor complicating modern-day French blacks’ demands for political representation
–see his May 27, 2012 article “Why France Can’t Say the M-Word” in The Root.com, a blog of
the Washington Post. Two texts, Parinoir by Nicolas Silatsa, and Paris Noir, edited by Pascal
Blanchard and Eric Deroo) are useful precursors to Blanchard’s subsequent La France Noire.
92
This chart was included in the 1979 publication L’émigration antillaise en France by Alain
Anselin of INSEE.

61
the 1950s, surged into a postwar wave of mass migration.93 While prominent black

Parisians later joined the French avant-garde’s early twentieth century move to the Left

Bank, northern Paris, especially from the Barbes-Rochechouart area just east of Pigalle to

Belleville and Gare du Nord, remained the main choice for blacks living in central

Paris. Simultaneously, the Paris suburbs (banlieues) became home to much greater

numbers of postwar migrants, including from Africa, as guest worker programs

accelerated after the 1950s. It is this combination of the newer banlieues and the northern

areas of central Paris that draws most black Parisians today.

The even keel of Paris’ late nineteenth century black population can be

attributed to a sense that abolition, while attracting strong support among the French

intelligentsia, was not in 1848 the same burning issue, on a standalone basis, as it was

fifteen years later in the United States.94 It was instead, like anticlerical and anti-imperial

views, a requisite issue on the mandatory checklist that came hand-in-hand with

republicanism; it is worth noting that just as France’s first abolition of slavery in 1794

was an outcome of the French revolution, its final 1848 abolition was part of the

establishment of the short-lived republic that preceded the Second Empire. It is

therefore important to understand that any visual expression by Manet of a common

93
See La Colonisation aussi est un crime: de la destruction du système esclavagiste à la
reconstruction colonial” by Guadaloupian historian Oruno D. Lara (L’Harmattan, 2007) for an
assessment of post-abolition French colonial rule as so exploitative as to be a crime against
humanity comparable to that of slavery itself. Lara also includes a discussion of strong class
distinctions, often color-based, among Antilles blacks. Lara asserts that both of these factors
motivated migration to France. See also Mireille Rosello’s writings denouncing the recruitment
of Antillean women as domestic workers in France as the new slave trade ( “Lettres à une noire
de Françoise Ega: la femme de ménage de lettres.” In l’heritage de Caliban, Maryse Condé, ed.
(Paris: Ed. Jasor), 1992: 178, 180.
94
Anne Lafont, faculty member at INHA, expressed this view of the role of abolition in
republican politics during a discussion with the author at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art
(INHA) in Sept 2011.

62
humanity across race and social class most likely stemmed from his adamant and well-

known republican political views.95

The most direct impact of the 1848 abolition on Manet’s representations of Laure

as an ordinary person was that it unleashed opportunities for persons like Laure to act as

individuals due to a greater degree of agency to live autonomously. Before the 1848

abolition, black household servants of Antillean origin–whether slaves or free during the

short-lived abolition of 1794-1803 –were technically free to live as they pleased when

they accompanied their masters to metropolitan France. But their opportunities to earn a

living, should they try, were circumscribed by French social customs respecting the

claims of visiting employers.

In contrast, after the 1848 abolition, persons in similar occupations had increased

opportunities to live more independently of employers and perhaps maintain one’s own

household. This was the time of the mid-nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, when

entire families poured in from the provinces, and poor families’ extra daughters were sent

to the cities to find work in shops and small businesses, as well as in the entertainment

and sex industries, or as self-employed vendors and service providers. The migrant from

the French Caribbean could thus be seen overall as a part of the era’s broad-based

working class quest for work.

95
See Philip Nord’s discussion of Manet’s republican sentiments in Impressionists and Politics:
Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2000: 31-34)

63
Portrait of Laure : From Exotic Symbol to Cultural Hybridity in Modern Paris

Manet’s Portrait of Laure is simultaneously rooted in conventions of nineteenth

century representations of black women, whether in fine art, popular media or fashion

and a clean break with it. It can be seen as an early work of fine art that deploys the

flattened modernizing style to portray a black woman as a specific individual in 1860s

Paris. The radical innovation of Manet’s departure from convention can be clearly seen

by viewing Laure in juxtaposition with major precedents by artists working within the

Salon system.

An early precedent, Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s 1800 painting La Negresse,

underscores the implication of academy-sanctioned painting methods in the

representation of a black woman whose life circumstances in pre-abolition Paris were

markedly more circumscribed than that suggested by Manet’s Laure in the early post-

abolition years. (Image 14) The woman who posed Benoist’s Negresse was a servant of

the artist’s brother-in-law, a French Navy officer, who brought the model to Paris during

a visit from his base in the Antilles.96 Benoist, a former student of David, exhibited the

painting at the Salon of 1800, after painting the portrait in honor of the first French

abolition of slavery in its territories in 1794 (which was overturned in 1801). Benoist’s

portrayal of the young woman featured a graceful rendering of the seated woman’s slim

96
See Sylvain Bellanger’s detailed account of the factors that brought this young woman to Paris,
the conditions of her employment, and the details of her attire; the Benoist painting is discussed
in the context of Girodet’s portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley. In Girodet: Romantic Rebel. Exh.
cat. Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2006: 331. Hugh Honour identifies the models’ employer and
surmises her possible attitude about the bared breast, in The Image of the Black in Western Art,
v.3. Houston: Menil Foundation, 1989: 7-8. James Smalls describes the status of enslaved
individuals brought by their owners to Paris, both in legal terms and in often contradictory social
practice, in “Slavery is a Woman: “Race,” Gender and Visuality in Marie Benoist’s Portrait
d’une négresse.” In Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of nineteenth-century visual
culture. Online edition, Vol. 4, Issue 1 2004.

64
figure, deep brown skin tones, and poised facial expression seen in half view. The

surface of the painting is smooth, the figure is painted with meticulous use of half tones,

light and shadow to achieve fully molded naturalism of academically sanctioned

painting. While Benoist was attentive to the specificity of her model’s facial features –

the irregular hairline and somber, slightly guarded expression–her overriding concern

was to portray her as a symbol, more than as an individual; the artist, in contrast to

Manet’s notes on Laure, appears to have never recorded her model’s name. The liberty

theme is echoed in the blue shawl and red ribbon accentuating the white dress; her white

headwrap, likely a madras plaid in actual life, maintained the symbolic tri-color theme.

The model’s stylish French clothing signified the anticipated new role of freed slaves

within French society. Some reviewers focused on the issue of slavery, rather than the

painting’s formal qualities, and praised the Salon’s display of the painting as a salute to

liberty. Virtually all art critics, however, revealed deep-rooted racist attitudes in

denouncements of Benoist’s choice of subject matter, stating that the image, especially

its deep brown skin tones, was an “affront to the art of painting.97

The front of her white Empire-style gown, in a style then at the height of fashion,

is folded down to expose her left breast. This had been the pose for Raphael’s widely

admired Renaissance painting, La Fornarina; and since then, when used in depictions of

female allegorical figures, the bared breast had been emblematic of liberty or divinity. By

1800, however, the nude breast was considered too erotically charged to be acceptable in

portraits of known living subjects. Critics also described their revulsion at the

juxtaposition of black skin and luxurious white fabrics, especially given the presumed

97
Honour, 1989, Ibid.

65
contact between the white female painter and the sitter necessary to drape the fabrics,

which carried strong connotations of illicit eroticism.98

Perhaps for the subject herself, the bared breast was reminiscent of the slave

markets that had just been abolished within her lifetime; while the color of her headwrap

might relate to the white clothing worn by worshippers at religious services, a reference

that could only deepen objections to the pose. The painting thus manifests an assumed

audience of Europeans for whom slavery was an abstract moral issue; the model’s own

subjectivity was presumably not taken into account.

This context makes it clear just how transgressive it was for Manet to formulate

his portrait of Laure as a black member of the French proletariat, with her breasts

covered. This constitutes a clear break with her dramatically articulated and exotically

attired predecessors, whose attributes clearly establish them as residents of colonies or

as emblems of political ideals. This and Manet’s depiction of the maid in Olympia are

therefore among the first images in an important painting in which an image of a black

woman is de-Orientalized, and portrayed not as an exoticized foreigner but as part of the

working class of Paris.

While the Benoist model was technically not a slave while in Paris, her options

for autonomy were limited –many Parisians had family and other personal ties to French

Caribbean slaveowners, and regardless of their own views, few seemed willing to openly

challenge known claims of ownership; thus hiring opportunities were limited. Bellanger

suggests that the model may have expressed some resistance to the semi-nudity of her

pose, but may also have felt constrained by a financially driven need to please her

98
Bellanger (2006: 331) also summarizes critical reception during the painting’s showing at the
1800 Salon.

66
employer. This continued even after abolition, such women more clearly free agents, free

to make whatever life they could for themselves. In 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery

in France, setting off a decades-long anti-slavery movement until slavery was abolished

again in 1848. Many French activists continued to support the American abolitionist

movement through the 1865 Civil War; thus many fine art images of black women

during this period, often in sculpture, served abolitionist themes. These women were

invariably represented as exotically costumed Others who, as slaves or colonials, were

completely outside French society.

The 1872 bust Why Born a Slave?, by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, typifies the

continuity of this iconography into and beyond the time of Manet’s Laure. (Image 24)

Produced in terracotta for sale in an edition, the busts were adapted from the allegorical

figure for Africa in Carpeaux’s monumental Luxembourg Gardens fountain, Four Parts

of the World Sustaining the Globe. The bust reflects the artist’s political beliefs

through its title and in his idealized, theatrical rendering of the Africa figure. But as with

Benoist, this representation repeats the bared breast, which though based in notions of

liberty, still continue to signify unbridled eroticism when used in depictions of black

women.99 Despite its allegorical purpose, the figure carries the stereotype of the black

woman’s sexuality as revealed, available and presumably excessive. The effect of this

imagery was to establish a racial difference and otherness existing apart from the French

social structure. Thus, even though the Carpeaux bust’s face is recognizable as that of a

popular black Parisian model, such images of black women no longer drew public

99
See Chapter Two for a discussion of the origins of these attitudes as delineated by Reff (1997:
92-93.

67
outrage.100 The unyielding fixity of this iconography had over the decades become an

accepted, even reassuring, emblem of French class stability due to its firm placement of

these figures completely outside modern life.

The formulaic display of the single bare breast, combined with the gold hoop

earrings and elaborate headwrap that already signified blacks’ exoticism, typified the

established trope for a racially differenced artistic representation of black females that

endured through much of the nineteenth century, including during and well after

Manet’s 1860s depictions of Laure. Given its assumptions about the presumed viewer, as

well as its disregard for the likely self-presentation preferences of its subject, this mode

of representation amounts to a representation of empire. It is, arguably, only when works

of fine art depict the black female figure in modes consistent with the model’s own

subject position as a free person of color, that these works can be seen as modern.

This transition was clearly made in Manet’s images of Laure, in a radical

iconographic turn that is perhaps most clearly shown in a direct comparison of Laure

with Delacroix’s portraits of the model Aspasie, one of its most direct precedents.

(Image 25) Both artists depicted a free black woman who was resident in France, not a

visitor from a distant land. But while Delacroix’s images of Aspasie straddle the pictorial

values of empire and republic, and ultimately undermine the former, Manet’s images of

Laure consistently project republican humanism.

As detailed by Grigsby, Delacroix’s studio journals make clear his intention, in

painting Aspasie, to challenge prevailing conventions of female portraiture, by using a

mulatto model to achieve an image that merged the completely disparate modes of

100
Honour (1989: 166) notes that the model, though her name has not been retained for today’s
audiences, was sought-after among artists; she posed regularly for Carpeaux and other artists.

68
representing black and white women. 101 His choice to represent a woman of color as

the subject of a portrait, as someone other than an exoticized symbol or servant, was

transgressive at a time when a black woman was considered to be an unworthy subject of

fine art portraiture. The virulent racism underlying this presumption was manifest in the

popular culture of the era, including the harrowing saga of Saartjie Baartman, a South

African woman who, due to her unusually full-hipped physiognomy, was displayed in a

degrading and dehumanizing manner, naked in animal cages, and billed “the Hottentot

Venus” in traveling vaudeville shows (in England and France from 1810-1815. 102

(Image 26) Baartman was perhaps the single most egregious example of pseudo-

scientific assertions of black woman’s immutable inferiority to European standards of

female beauty. This presumption was not only a key component of Europe’s socio-

political justification of imperial conquest and the slave trade in Africa; it was also

manifest in fine art’s rigid black-white representational modes.

But Delacroix’s images of Aspasie, while refusing those aspects of visualizing

empire, remain implicated with imperial visual agendas; in the end, these works leave the

stereotypes intact, but express them in the tropes of fine art. Delacroix eschews the

carnivalesque public display and depraved exploitation used to define Saartjie in popular

culture as the hypersexed yet grotesque black woman. He instead invokes the fine art

101
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby provides a detailed analysis of Delacroix’s three portraits of Aspasie
as a visualization of empire, writing that “the mulatta incarnated empire; she was its sign because
she was its product… because a person of mixed-race confused the rational categories of black or
white, each with its own set of representational norms.” In Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-
Revolutionary France, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) 2002: 266-272.
102
Kellie Jones provides a full account of the Saartjie Baartmans episode, and of its resonances in
the art and exhibition options of contemporary black women today, in her essay “A.K.A. Saartjie
“The Hottentot Venus,” in Context (Some Reflections and a Dialogue) 1998/2004” In
Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, (Durham: Duke University Press), 2011: 44-
67.

69
trope of the courtesan to express hypersexuality as unchecked sensuality. In the first two

portraits, the model’s upswept hair and quiet facial expression at first glance portray a

modest, ordinary persona. But the pale-toned blouse, though simple and modest in style,

is draped to display an expanse of bare breasts that becomes more pronounced with each

successive version of the portrait –in all three images, there is the suggestion of ready

sexual availability. This suggestion is made explicit in the third portrait, in which she is

essentially barebreasted, the blouse now a mere drape arranged to enhance the display of

a prostitute’s body available for hire.103 His serial portraits serve to intensify the

stereotypical significations, by suggesting that for a black woman, modest attire can

never connote respectability; it is but a thin veneer of culture, a temporary masking of an

excessively sensuous nature, a nature that must be suppressed and subordinated within

European culture, or situated in exotic or symbolic venues wholly outside European

culture.

It is within this contextual precedent that Manet’s representations of Laure as

fully clothed, her garb off-the-shoulder but revealing no cleavage, can be seen as a break

with the representation of empire, and a turn to a more unambiguous representation of the

everyday life around him. The radical aspect of this turn is underscored when Manet’s

Laure is compared not just to the Delacroix precedent, but to works by artists of Manet’s

own time. Nadar, a friend of Manet’s, and a regular at the Manet’s Friday salons at Café

Guerbois, was an early supporter of the Batignolles artists whose first Impressionist

103
Honour’s interpretation, based like Grigsby’s on the artist’s notes in his 1821 carnet and later
in his 1824 Journal, notes Delacroix’s intentionality to transcend notions of an ideal beauty, but
also his implication in imperial agendas through his sexual objectification of black female
models, (in L’Image du Noir dans l’Art Occidental: De la Révolution Americaine a la Première
Guerre Mondiale, Tome 2, 1989: 36-37). Both also suggest that the two earlier portraits may have
been posed by a different model.

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exhibition was held in his studios. But even though Nadar worked in photography, the

medium then most emphatically linked to modernity, he repeated the Delacroix approach

to black female representation in his portraits Marie, L’Antillaise.104 (Images 28-29)

Two of these three images pair an image of the model fully clothed, in elegant attire

combining a European artist’s model’s drape with an Antilles headwrap style, with a

view of the model with drape pulled back, like that of Delacroix’s Aspasie, in a bare

breasted pose suggesting sex for hire. The Nadar images are reminders of the continuity

of this stereotypical trope in art in Manet’s time and beyond.

Yet the Nadar Marias reveal, on the other hand, a commonality with the evolving

modernism of Manet’s Laure in that both Laure and Maria are shown in attire that

appears to be a blend of French and Antilles influences. The artist’s model drape worn by

Maria is a European-style garment with no racial signifiers –it was used by Nadar in

many portraits of women, whether black or white, anonymous or famous, including that

of Sarah Bernhardt, one of the most famous French actresses of the day. The drape seems

intended to provide a neutral background allowing Nadar to focus on capturing his

subject’s individuality, as revealed by facial expression and pose. This approach was

Nadar’s own modernizing gesture, like Manet’s pictorial flatness, supplanting past

portraiture which defined its subjects largely by distinctive and meticulously rendered

attributes, interiors and fashions. Yet Maria’s headwrap, and possibly her floral print

skirt, are Antillean in style. Likewise, Laure wears a headwrap, though rendered in

104
Deborah Willis ad Carla Williams offer a similar reading of Nadar’s paired portraits of Maria,
placing them within the iconography of colonial conquest, as a conflation of art portraiture with
ethnographic photography and popular stereotypes of the exotic, in The Black Female Body: A
Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 2002: 25-28.

71
loosely brushed bands of color that minimalize pattern, together with a European-style

dress or blouse.

This sartorial hybridity is worthy of scrutiny as a signifier in its own right of the

artist’s intended characterization of the model –does she represent an actual individual,

presented as she appears in every day life? Or is she a symbol, a visualization of a type,

an idea, even a fantasy –more than a manifestation of a lived reality?

The Nadar portraits seem to be a fairly overt “performance” of a type –the black

woman from the Caribbean islands. Even though made in Paris, this model seems to be

exoticized, her portrayal heavily invested in the instantly recognizable signifiers evoked

by the portrait’s title. The richly patterned skirt and the turn of the head for maximum

display of the back-tied headwrap (known in the Antilles as a foulard) invite the question

of whether she is depicted as she actually appears, or is she the staging of an idea? The

preponderance of her representational details, together with the paired clothed vs nude

images, suggest that Nadar, despite the modernity of his medium, has sustained a

representation of the black woman, even if one resident in Paris, as the exoticized other.

In his attempt to paint modern life as he sees it, Manet seems to puzzle with the

evolving modes of self-representation he might have observed in the sartorial choices of

Laure and other blacks he encountered. To a much greater extent than Nadar’s Maria, he

depicts a hybridity, a blend of French and Antillaise influences, A comparison of

Manet’s Laure with images from popular culture and fashions of the day can help

evaluate the assumption that Laure is a representation, albeit an abstracted and

intermediated one, of a modern black woman who is presented as she might appear in

the daily life of 1860s Paris.

72
 One body of contextual images for Manet’s Laure comprises contemporaneous

ethnographic portraits made in multiple mediums, but especially in sculpture and

photography. These images can perhaps help ascertain what Laure was not intended to

represent. When we look at Cordier’s 1861 Capresse des Colonies, or at photographs

presented as images of women from the Antilles, we see stark differences in attire and

presentational style. By the time of the mid-century rise of the Orientalist style,

epitomized in sculpture by Cordier’s Capresse, the representational norms for the black

Other had became part of establishment art. (Image 31) With the meticulous detailing

of her ornate metallic armbands, voluptuously draped shawl and allegorical flowers

sprouting from her thickly wrapped curls, this figure illustrates the documentary hyper-

realism used in Orientalist pictorial values to construct images of the Other that had little

to do with contemporary urban reality.105 This figure was part of a series made to depict

various ethnic groups, and female busts were often made and sold in pairs with either a

male counterpart or a female of a different ethnicity –the Metropolitan Museum currently

displays this bust with one titled Jewish Woman of Algiers.

Laure’s minimized foulard, in the characteristic Antilles colors, but no discernible

pattern, her understated jewelry and off-the-shoulder white dress contrast sharply with

the elaborately patterned and wrapped foulard, dress with all-over patterning in the

madras plaids characteristic of the islands, and copious amount of jewelry displayed in an

unknown photographer’s La Guadeloupe Historique: Costume porté par la plupart des

femmes du pays. (Image 31) This photograph has far more in common with the similarly

prominent headdress, braided coiffure and metal armband of Cordier’s North African

105
For a discussion of this sculpture as an exemplification of Cordier’s ethnograpically informed
imagery, see Facing the Other by Laure de Margerie et al, 2004: 54-80.

73
goatherder. Manet seems to respectfully evoke Laure’s ethnicity and cultural origins, but

to de-emphasize the strongest signifiers of this background.

A set of photographic portraits by anthropologist Jacques-Philippe Potteau

provides images of black women said to be residents of Paris. (Image 17, 32) The paired

images, posed in profile and frontally, of women like Louise Kuhling suggest the

ethnographic roots of Nadar’s paired Maries. Kuhling’s impassive expression and rigid

posture imply that the purpose was to display the clothing, the hairstyle, the physiognomy

of the sitter, but not to reveal a specific personality. Although she gazes toward the

viewer, it is from a distance, unlike Laure, that is too great to allow an immediacy of

connection. She is an ethnographic type.106 On the other hand, Potteau’s portraits of the

young Marie Lassus, a 19-year-old student in Paris from New Orleans, captures the

young woman’s youthful curiosity, well-groomed coiffure and fashionable attire in a less

wooden manner. Her simple two-tiered earrings and jewelry are very similar to those

worn by Manet’s Laure.107

The fact that the women in each of Potteau’s portraits are bareheaded suggests

that black women in 1860s Paris did not necessarily wear the foulard when wearing

ordinary daywear. A well-known ship-boarding song , Adieu foulard, adieu madras,

106
Blanchard’s La France Noire asserts Potteau’s anthropological approach, which documenta
appearance but does not attempt the portraitist’s objective of capturing the defining essence of an
individual. (2012: 49)
107
Selected images of Potteau’s 1860-69 Collection anthropologique appear on the Musee
d’Orsay website with images from BNF’s Gallica Bibliothéque Numerique, with a note that “A
choice of ethnographic photographs and daguerreotypes by the photographers Louis Rousseau,
Jacques-Philippe Potteau and Henri Jacquart, exactly contemporary with Cordier's work and from
the collections of the photographic library of the Musée de l'Homme, establishes a parallel
between sculpture and photography, both used as tools at the service of nascent ethnology.”
Louise Kuling is described on the BNF site as a “35 ans. négresse, née à Norfolk, de parents
venant du Congo. Amenée en France par Mr le Commandant Louvet. Amérique du Nord.
Créoles” while Marie Lassus is identified as “19 ans. Née à la Nouvelle-Orléans. Père parisien et
mère noire Amérique du Nord. Créoles.”

74
sung at departure celebrations for migrants leaving the Antilles for Paris, seems to

celebrate an end to wearing the foulard upon embarkment.108 (Image 33) However, the

foulard may well have been, as earlier discussed, part of a workplace “ uniform, ”

required by affluent employers of domestic workers in order to flaunt their ability to

afford presumably more expensive staff from distant lands. A domestic worker wearing a

foulard would thus project the same significations as a household maid wearing a crisp

white apron over a black dress would connote today. This uniform could also be an asset

for stage actresses (like Jeanne Duval) or to draw customers and extract higher prices in

the sex and entertainment industries. It is possible, therefore, that Manet minimized

Laure’s foulard after observing such dualities of preference and practice, perhaps in

recognition that the model donned it specifically for the pose.

While there is no sign that Manet looked to popular culture as a point of

reference, it is useful to understand that Manet’s matter-of-fact, depictions of Laure had

little in common with the stereotypes prevalent in popular culture. Black woman were

invariably depicted in the mass media wearing an elaborate foulard –which was

sometimes slightly askew when the intended connotation was laziness on the job, or

stealing time from employers for personal pursuits –together with hoop earrings and

simple low-cut dresses. (Images 34-36) In one example of this stereotype, a series of ads

for La Silenceuse sewing machine in 1863 includes a cartoon showing Cora the

seamstress –who borrows her mistress’s sewing machine to make herself a dress for the

domestic workers’ ball; in the same year, a witty comic-book-like story of the pre-marital

amorous conquests of a young aristocrat includes a black maid wearing exotic pantaloons

108
From Les Antillais d’Ici: Les métro-caraibéens” by Samia Messaoudi and Mehdi Lallaoui,
revised by Céline Bonneau (Ile de France: Au Nom de la Mémoire, Bezons, 2009)

75
with her blouse, above a caption “Aime bon blanc, lui pas aime bonne noire.”109 The

facial expression of these characters is often frozen in a sly grin, underscoring the idea

that they are somehow engaged in an illicit activity.

It is finally through a comparative analysis of fashion plates and costume

history that we can most securely situate Manet’s depiction of Laure in the space of a

modern black Parisian woman, working as an entertainer or servant, who adopts a

culturally hybrid mix of personal attire that may retain the foulard, but minimizes it to

bands of color without fetishizing its ethnic specificity. A series of visual comparisons

allows us to place Manet’s Laure as more an individual, a figure of still-evolving

modernity, than a symbolic type; she is an individual who is observed from daily life in

Manet’s 1860s Paris. We can then turn to costume analysis to situate her more

specifically within that milieu and gain more insight into the observed reality that Laure

might represent.

An attempt to stylistically place the delicate upright neck ruffle, off-the-

shoulder neckline and loosely fitted full sleeves of Laure’s dress/blouse is especially

engaging.110 (Images 37-38) The specific style of the neckline ruffle, which is bordered

at the seam with a thin satin ribbon, is almost identical to one reconstituted by Harran.
109
From archival copies of the Paris revue La Vie Parisienne. A manual review of a complete set
of this periodical for the year 1863 revealed several such stereotypical depictions of blacks; this
satirical journal also included caricatures of numerous other “types” from across the spectrum of
Paris social classes. Also see Hanson (1977: 99).
110
I found no histories of Second Empire costume that specifically addressed Antilles styles,
although depictions of attire worn by working class vs affluent women were available, as was a
delineation of daytime and evening wear. Antilles-based publications focused mainly on the 20th
century. Nathalie Harran was the costume historian who seemed to give the most detailed
treatment to working-class women’s styles, but mainly in photographed reconstitutions of
dresses, in La Femme sous le Second Empire (Editions Errance, Paris, 2010). Harran describes
the crinoline, for which democratized access was a product of the Industrial Revolution, as a
symbol of modernity during this period. I reviewed relatively few fashion plates, assuming that
this would not be fruitful given their couture orientation.

76
But the latter is the bodice of a ballgown whose fitted bouffant sleeve treatment is quite

different from Laure’s more loosely structured one, and whose diaphanous fabric is

fancier than Laure’s linen-like textures. Laure clearly does not wear the more tailored

day dress styles, with kerchief or neck ribbon, seen in Baudelaire’s sketch of Duval, in

the Potteau ethnographic portraits, or even in her own depiction as a nursemaid in

Children in the Tuileries. Neither does she wear the picturesque floral prints of Nadar’s

overtly exoticized Maria.

Stand-alone Portrait or Study for Olympia?

A closer similarity with Laure’s attire is evident in the fashions of Parisian

grisettes, who were extensively sketched by Constantin Guys, the flaneur artist who

inspired Baudelaire’s Painter of Modern Life. (Image 38) There is a similar matte finish

and linen-like consistency of the fabric, and similarly monochromatic color tones,

including a match with the creamy hues of Laure’s dress. Her bodice is a close match

with the grisette’s lightly ruffled, off-the-shoulder bodice, which attractively displays the

arms but covers the bosom. The grisette held moderate ranking within the hierarchy of

Parisian demimondaines –elevated above the streetwalker, sometimes maintained in

intermittently comfortable style by a handful of loyal male patrons, sometimes working

as a shop girl or café waitress, but not yet the grand courtesan who lived luxuriously, held

opulent balls and hosted respected salons.111

111
Brombert (1997: 114) describes grisettes’ day and evening fashions and occupations in close
detail, writing that, as “a girl of working class or lower middle class origins, without the
vulgarity of the urban underclass or the coarseness of the proletariat. The term came from the
cheap cloth of her dress, tinted in a drab gray. She gave herself generously to artists and students
in long-term relationships and became the melodramatic heroine of fictional and operatic
renderings of romantic life. Eventually abandoned, often tubercular, she rarely reached the age of

77
 We can conclude from this comparative analysis that Laure’s dress is a

conflation of Antillean references and a creamier toned version of the grisette attire

found within the Paris demimonde. This style, combined with her foulard, would be

consistent with the “uniform” of a woman employed in the entertainment or sex industry,

part of whose job, perhaps, is to perform the erotic connotations of women of Antillaise

origin. All of this could be seen to underscore the idea that this portrait is a study for

Manet’s Olympia.

But other formal aspects mark it as a portrait in its own right.112 The figure’s

frontal placement differs from the profile view of the maid in Olympia. It remains

unclear whether she’s a servant, entertainer or prostitute. Beyond the grisette styling,

there is nothing suggestive about her dress –not only are her breasts covered, but there is

no exposed cleavage –it is a modest neckline that draws attention upwards to her face.

Finally, in the facial features, Laure engages the viewer with a close-up immediacy and

direct gaze atypical of a preparatory sketch, or of the more distanced portrayals of

ethnographic subjects. For these reasons, we might conclude that this is a standalone

portrait.

A final set of comparisons bolsters this stand-alone portrait conclusion. During

the same period, Manet made a portrait of Victorine Meurent, the intended model for the

prostitute in Olympia, that manifests an uncanny stylistic equivalence with the Laure

30, and even more rarely escaped from her miserable garret to the opulence enjoyed by the well-
kept cocotte.”
112
The title La Négresse is consistently used for this paintng throughout the literature, from the
Leenhoff cahiers assembled shortly after Manet’s 1883 death to his archivist Tabarant in 1947
and virtually all modern writers. Two writers who, in addition to Pollock, have to my knowledge
used the title Portrait of Laure are Anne Coffin Hanson, in Manet and the Modern Tradition
(1977: 99 and Figure 73) and Hugh Honour, who uses Portrait de la Négresse Laure in Image of
the Black in Western Art (1989: 204).

78
portrait. (Images 39-41) If Laure is a deep brown form set against a lighter background,

Victorine’s pale flesh tones are set against a background of browns matching Laure’s

skin tones. The thinner paler tonalities of Laure’s shoulders, sometimes seen to mark the

painting as unfinished, are in fact a characteristic of Manet’s flattened painting style that

can also be seen in Victorine’s hair (as well as in the treatment of hands and garments in

many other Manet portraits.) And while Laure wears the attire of the grisette circulating

around the entertainment or sex industries, Victorine’s string-colored dress, in more true-

to-life gray tones, is that of the grisette working in a shop, perhaps as a milliner or glove-

maker. Artists like Delacroix or Nadar, more engaged with visualizing empire, created

pairs of paintings of the same model that implied her ready sexual availability. Manet

appears to have created a pair of paintings that portray two versions of the Parisian

grisette who earns her living in spaces of modern life. Focused resolutely on depicting

modern life in all its variations, he nevertheless gives individuality to his types. This

practice was apparent toward the end of Manet’s career, as he again portraitized the

model Suzon, a barmaid he recruited to re-enact her role in his studio for Bar at the

Folies Bergere. (Image 41)

We thus see the portrait of Laure, despite the significations of her ethnic

specificity, as fully equivalent to Manet’s portraits of other models for his most famous

paintings, and withn the context of Manet’s other 1862 portraits of outsiders. The

portraits of Victorine and Suzon are universally acknowledged as such, in titles that

immortalize their names. The formal equivalence of the Laure and Victorine portraits,

and Manet’s recording of Laure’s name, make a compelling case for ending the

marginalizing conventions of the La Négresse title. These facts suggest that this painting

79
should be named Portrait of Laure, as a standalone portrait of comparable rank with

those of Manet’s other important models.

This analysis has attempted to situate Manet’s portrait of Laure within a

broader lineage of representations of black women in the single figure format, not just in

the fine art paintings made for the Salon, but in images from popular culture and the soi-

disant scientific observation of anthropology. It is a de-Orientalized, or de-exoticized,

image, with the hybridity of its Antilles and French stylistic influences placing her as a

black woman in modern 1860s Paris. The indistinct treatment of the body, produced by

Manet’s loose brushstrokes, revises the revealing display of breasts seen in the Benoist,

Delacroix, Carpeaux and Cordier precedents, and in popular media caricatures. The sitter

engages with the viewer with a slightly quizzical affect that projects a specific and

modestly engaging personality that could not be more different than the vacant smirk that

is a fixture on the stereotyped faces of black women depicted in popular culture. Unlike

all of these precedents except Delacroix, the artist made a point of recording the model’s

name for posterity. Unlike Delacroix, Manet was able to dissociate his model’s “beauty”

from her sexual attributes, and to present her as a distinct personality. Laure is therefore

depicted with understated realism as an individual, a presence in working class Paris,

rather than as a symbolic other, existing wholly outside modern French society. The

radicalism of her representation is first evident in the formal simplicity of her

representation, and second in its singular iconography in the face of depictions of black

women in Salon precedent and the popular media. Like its companion portrait of

Victorine, it is a standalone work of art. It is a prelude to, but much more than a mere

study for, Laure’s next pose in the dual-figured painting Olympia.

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CHAPTER TWO

Laure of Olympia : Metonymy and Hybridity in an Emergent Black Paris

In early 1863, Manet resumed his work with the two models Victorine Meurent

and Laure, but this time transforming their images from the mode of portraiture to that of

performance. In the painting later known as Olympia, each model posed a role

emblematic of modern life -- Victorine as the unsentimental prostitute who was rapidly

replacing the deferential Renaissance-style courtesan and Laure as a representation of the

changing racial composition of the Parisian working class. (Image 42) While Manet’s

Portrait of Laure was a clearly empathetic portrayal, Manet positioned her as Olympia’s

maid with seeming ambivalence. In rhis pose, Laure is again clad in de-Orientalized

attire reflecting hybrid French and Antillaise influences. Yet the overall effect, on first

impression, is very different.

One the one hand, Laure in Olympia has a centered placement on the pictorial

plane, well-positioned to be a focal point of interest. But other details conspire to exactly

the opposite effect, and the figure’s modernizing features are all but obliterated for many

viewers. Still, with sustained attention, the figure of Laure in Olympia reveals a

metonymy, a duality of overt tradition and sublimated innovation. The figure evokes

stock types, yet remains apart from then-prevalent modes of stereotyping, while being

wholly consistent with the formal devices of modernist painting.

The Maid as Modernity: A Revision of Precedent

During the mid-nineteenth century, Manet’s friend the writer Charles Baudelaire

equated social change with modern life in Paris, and exhorted artists to make this their

81
subject. 113 The art histories covering the period have generally echoed this theme

through to the present day. T. J. Clark stated that a defining characteristic of modernity

in 1860s Paris was the breakdown of long-established bourgeois behavioral norms,

including a shift of recreational activities from private to public venues and a more overt

presence of prostitution within society.114 Manet’s representation of the prostitute figure

of Olympia has long been understood to be the crux of this discontinuity. Clark provides

a comprehensive iconographic lineage for the prostitute and documents the extensive

critical and artistic commentary about this figure, which he concluded was “the main

representation of modernity in 1860s Paris;” but he asserted that the maid figure, while

“modern,” ultimately meant “nothing.115

Yet a close formal analysis of the painting, as well as a broader examination of

the multiple contexts within which Olympia was created, titled and displayed, combine

to strongly suggest that Manet depicted the black maid to be a second focal point of

disruptive modernity. This doubled lack of fixity in pictorial style and content, and the

113
As previously discussed, Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life” articulates the
necessity that the artist chronicle changes in socio-economic structures present in the society of
his own time rather than looking to the past for inspiration. T. J. Clark characterizes Manet as the
prototypical modernist painter precisely because his oeuvre insistently maintained such a focus.
In “Olympia’s Choice” in The Painter of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His
Followers (Revised Edition, Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1984.
114
Clark, ibid., 1984: 105-107.
115
Clark’s discussion of Olympia focused almost exclusively on an exegesis of the figure and
social context of the prostitute, whom he considered to be the single focal point of interest. Ibid.,
Clark 1984: 69, 93, 146. See the Introduction to this dissertation for an extended excerpt of his
subsequent comments about that approach. As also summarized in my Introduction, few art
historians have discussed the Laure figure to any significant degree. Still, as cited in this chapter,
texts by writers including Griselda Pollock, Françoise Cachin and Jennifer DeVere Brody,
together with t works of art and commentary by generations of modern and contemporary artists,
provide insightful interpretations of this figure. This work is central to the analysis that I develop
herein. I also consider the preceding interpretation of the Portrait of Laure to be part of the
analysis of Olympia, since the discussion of the formation of a hybrid culture among free blacks
in Manet’s Paris, and its manifestations in attire, are integral to this analysis of Olympia.

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resulting instability of their claim on viewer attention, was crucial to both the modernity

of Manet’s Olympia and the negative initial response it provoked on its first showing at

the 1865 Salon. Manet’s work manifests his preference to depict contemporary life in a

manner influenced by realism, rather than in the classicizing style of Orientalist history

paintings. He thus maintains, even intensifies, the same de-Orientalized cultural hybridity

of Laure’s depiction as seen in his Portrait of Laure, sartorially defining her in Olympia

not as an exoticized foreigner but as a working class Parisian. Manet’s continuing feality

to truths observed during his routine encounters with women of color, whether as

passersby in the park (Children of the Tuileries) or in social contacts (his portrait of

Jeanne Duval), can be seen as an early modern artistic representation of the emerging

cultural hybridity, defined by Maryse Condé a century and a half later, of the free black

community then staking out a place in his northern Paris neighborhood.116 The root of

Olympia’s unstable reception can thus be seen as a discontinuity, not just with pictorial

and iconographic traditions of academic painting, but also a rupture with the rigid

divisions of ethnic representation found in precedents of academic painting as well as in

popular culture. As Jennifer DeVere Brody points out, “how we see is determined by

conventions of translation… one’s “theory” of the ways in which art performs directly

impacts how art is read.”117 Manet’s modernity can thus be located within a modern

mode of artistic spectacle that, as Crary says, “takes us outside of a stable circuit of

116
In her 1995 essay “Chercher nos verities,” Maryse Condé analyzes the increasing cultural
hybridity of the Paris-based Antillean community during the late 20th century, but asserts that
such hybridity dated back at least to Aimé Césaire, who 50 years earlier, in his seminal Cahier
d’un retour au pays natale, asserted that he did not fully belong to any single nationality specified
by the world’s governments. In Penser la Creolité (Thinking Creoleness) edited by Maryse
Condé and Madeleine Cottentot-Hage (Paris: Karthala), 1995: 305-310.
117
Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Black Cat Fever: Manifestations of Manet’s Olympia.” In Theatre
Journal Vol. 53, No. 1, March 2001: 97.

83
visuality to an arrangement where neither the eye nor objects…can be understood in

terms of fixed positions and identities.”118

The rupture is evident in even a superficial pictorial comparison of Olympia with

Titian’s 1538 Venus of Urbino, a painting invariably cited as the source for Olympia.119

(Image 42) Manet produces a flattening of spatial depth that refuses the perspectival

visual system evident in the Titian work, as he forecloses the view into the room with a

heavily draped curtain and shadowy tonalities. The scene presented to the observer is

that of two figures pushed into the foreground of a shallow two-dimensional space, rather

than of a window through which the eye is drawn into an illusion of interior space. This

closing off of a view into depth would normally deflect viewer attention from content to

surface; it is the materiality of the support that is of compelling interest.

But Manet simultaneously invites viewer interest in Olympia through radical

revisions of expected stock figure tropes. The depiction of the prostitute transforms

one standard by converting Titian’s invitingly diffident courtesan into a confrontational

sex-for-pay worker. Olympia meets the viewer’s gaze with an assertive stare in place of

the demure glance of Venus; her gray-white flesh and thin flattened physiognomy

replace the naturalistic tones and voluptuous curves of her Renaissance precedent.

Manet’s depiction of the prostitute laid bare the modern reality that prostitution as a sex-

for-cash commodity enterprise was supplanting the tradition of the cosseted and

118
Crary delineates between traditional (close and sustained) and modern (superficial and
distracted) modes of viewing, and their impact on the communion between the subject matter and
the viewer, in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge:
MIT Press), 1999: 3, 87. His comments on the necessity of pictorial novelty for sustained
attention, but also the thwarting of attention caused by pictorial blankness, are especially relevant
to this discussion of Olympia.
119
Clark, “Olympia’s Choice,” 1984: 93 and Rubin (1999:65) are among the writers who make
this attribution; Juliet Wilson Bareau (1986: 44) includes an image of an early Manet copy of the
Titian.

84
discreet courtesan who existed outside the money economy–and therefore was a key

factor disrupting the fixity of the social classes in modern Paris life.

The maid figure is also presented in a revisionary manner. While the Urbino

maid is hieratically much smaller than the courtesan, the Olympia maid assumes a spatial

dimension nearly equivalent to that of the prostitute. And while clearly positioned

behind and subordinate to the prostitute, Manet’s maid is also placed frontally, and more

in the foreground of the picture plane, in contrast to her Titian counterpart’s placement

well into background depth. The greater equivalence between the two figures in

Olympia sets up a counterbalancing relationship between them on purely formal terms–

the maid’s blackness is heightened by the prostitute’s whiteness and vice versa—with the

effect, for many critics, of transferring a racist connotation of uncleanliness and illicit

sexuality from the black maid to the white prostitute: beginning with Manet’s friend

Emile Zola’s review of Olympia at the Salon, this is the primary context in which the

maid has been historicized, if mentioned at all. 120 Still, the maid’s forward placement

may also suggest an intentionality by Manet that his figuring of the maid is to be an

object of viewer attention in its own right.

This impression is heightened by Manet’s second revision, centered on the style

of the maid figure’s attire, aspects of which extend the sharp break, seen in the earlier

Portrait of Laure, with conventional images of black women in nineteenth century

120
See Stephane Guégan’s exposition, exceptionally in some length, of Zola’s formalism, and a
rejection of its failure to take content into account, in the Musée d’Orsay’s catalog for its
exhibition Manet: The Man Who Invented Modernity (2011: 136-137). One of the most
extensive treatments of this formalist binary can be found in the riveting Griselda Pollock essay
discussing Manet’s images of Laure, Jeanne Duval and Berthe Morisot – see “A Tale of Three
Women: Seeing in the dark, seeing double, at least with Manet,” in Differencing the Canon:
Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London and New York: Routledge), 1999.

85
French art. The maid wears a bulky white dress of a vaguely European style, not the

brightly patterned, seductively draped and exotically styled garment typically seen in

precedent paintings depicting a black woman within a space of sex labor, such as

Delacroix’s Orientalist icon Women of Algiers. (Image 46) This European garment, in

combination with the Antillean headscarf, or foulard, here even smaller and more

sketchily painted than that in Laure’s portrait, captures a creolité that is defined in direct

opposition to the elaborately wrapped and boldly patterned turban of the Delacroix

painting. This simple headwrap disrupts one of the most consistent attributes of the black

female’s exoticization in nineteenth century French art. The highly defined scarf is

visible in precedent paintings whether the black woman is posed as a maid in a harem by

Delacroix or by Benoist as an emblem of liberty after the first (and soon aborted)

emancipation of French slavery in 1800. But as with the Portrait of Laure, Manet depicts

republican modernity in Olympia, not the Romanticized exoticism of empire. Its blend

of European and Antillean influences in the garb of a black woman is an early

representation of the créolité of the black woman resident in Paris.

It is of even greater importance to this figure’s revisionary depiction that the

breasts of Olympia’s maid are fully covered and only vaguely detailed. As with the

portrait, this treatment supercedes the bared breast and suggestively delineated curves

that were a standard aspect of images of black women in 19th century French art. As seen

in the work of Benoist, Nadar, Delacroix, Cordier and Carpeaux, this iconography was

deployed regardless of the work’s style, medium or intended meaning.

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Abolitionist Aesthetics and Republican Sentiment

This context makes clear the extent of Manet’s transgressive formulation of the

maid figure as a black member of the French proletariat. This, like the portrait,

constitutes a clear break with her dramatically articulated and exotically attired

predecessors, whose attributes clearly establish them as residents of remote colonies or

as emblems of political ideals. Manet’s depiction of the maid in Olympia is therefore

among the early images in Salon painting in which an image of a black woman is de-

Orientalized, and portrayed not as an exoticized foreigner but in a modern way, as part of

the working class of Paris.

Whether intentional or not, Manet’s sartorial choice for Laure in Olympia perhaps

has stronger affinities with abolitionist works by contemporaneous artists of color than

with his Paris colleagues. This is visible when Manet’s Laure is compared to a very

different visualization of abolitionist sentiment, in Forever Free by the African-American

sculptor Edmonia Lewis. (Image 47) By 1864, Lewis had settled in Rome, where she

maintained a studio for decades, and was known to do commissioned work for

abolitionists both in the US and in Europe. Lewis spent extended periods in Paris,

including a visit to research the 1867 Exposition Universelle’s display of Egyptian

artifacts.121 The young woman depicted in Forever Free blends the dramatic gesture and

pose of traditionally rendered figures like the Carpeaux Why Born a Slave? together

with modestly covered Western attire similar to that of Manet’s Laure. While there is

121
 Kirsten Pai Buick discusses Lewis’ interest in Egyptian art in relation to her sculpture Death of
Cleopatra, finished in 1875 after several years’ work, in Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis
and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham: Duke University Press),
2010. In the 1890s, Lewis was a friend of the African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, a
Paris-based expatriate who showed at the Salon.  

87
no known contact between Lewis and Manet’s artistic circle, Manet’s approach to the

attire of his black model is more akin to the subject position of this expatriate American

artist of black and Native American ancestry than to the imagery of Carpeaux, a fellow

Frenchman working in an academically sanctioned style. This affinity can perhaps best

be attributed to their shared abolitionist sentiment–Lewis’ in the context of the

antislavery movement, Manet’s a more abstract belief embedded in his strong

republicanism.122

This contrarian practice of covered European attire for black female subjects also

resonates with artistic depictions of events leading to the liberation and abolition in the

French colonies. The best-known freedom-themed painting by a French artist of color

was the monumental Oath of Our Ancestors, by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, who was

born in Guadeloupe to a French colonial officer and his enslaved mistress.123 (Image 48)

Painted in 1822, the work captures a scene from the 1804 revolution that led to Haiti’s

independence, in which the mulatto leader Alexandre Pétion and his black counterpart

Jean-Jacques Dessalines unite forces to defeat the French. This scene of unity and

liberation features several vague figures in the background, including a black woman in a

headwrap to the right, who is fully clothed.

122
Philip Nord, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century, (New
York: Routledge), 2000: 31-34.
123
Journalistic accounts in the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and the
American Historical Society’s February 2012 on-line feature, note that this painting, lost until it
was rediscovered in the cathedral of Port-au-Prince in 1991, had been restored by French museum
conservators in 1998, then exhibited at the Louvre before returning to Haiti. It hung in the
Presidential Palace, where it was seriously damaged during the earthquake; restoration is again
being handled by French conservators but the two governments agreed that this time it was to be
carried out on location in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.

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 This idea is far more elaborated in French artist Francois Auguste Biard’s 1849

painting, Proclamation de l’Abolition des Esclavages dans les colonies Françaises (27

avril 1848). (Image 47) This history painting, with presumably unintended irony, is

problematic in that it deploys the stock pictorial elements of pre-modernist

representations of empire –generic figures, sweeping gestures –to depict a scene of

colonial liberation. It also, in keeping with the programmatic norms of the genre,

represents abolition as a magnanimous gesture by Europe, personified by the man at

center lifting his top hat, proclamation in hand, before Antilleans swooning in presumed

gratitude. There is no allusion to the importance of colonial subjects’ own actions –from

the Haitian revolution to repeated Martiniquaise revolts --in securing their freedom.

Biard’s attention to details of attire, perhaps rooted in the period’s ethnographic impulses,

depicts almost all black women with the foulard, but those posed as slaves being freed on

the left are barebreasted, while those newly freed on the right are fully covered. The

painting’s sartorial distinction between enslaved and free black women documents a

reality that Biard could have observed during his two-year residency in Brazil.

Manet noted the attire of enslaved black women based on his own first-hand

observations, during a trip to Brazil as a 16-year-old rebelling against his father’s

pressure to attend law school. Manet’s father, a prominent jurist, consented to the voyage,

in which Manet joined a group of other well-born boys for a merchant ship ocean

crossing in preparation for a naval career, in the ultimately futile hope of deterring

Manet’s aspirations to become an artist. 124

Although Manet traveled in 1848, the year of the second and final abolition in

French territories, slavery did not end in Brazil until 1850. Manet described his
124
Brombert, Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat, 1996: 15-16.

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encounters with various aspects of the institution in letters sent back to Paris, mainly to

his mother, during the ocean crossing and while in Brazil.125 The neutral racial tone of

these notes first becomes apparent in letters sent from aboard the ship on the voyage to

Brazil, in which he noted that the shipmate charged with both tutoring and disciplining

the ship’s servant boys was a black man. Manet simply notes that the man is black as he

recounts various aspects of shipboard life, without further comment about that fact. He

focuses instead on describing the man’s responsibilities:

“Nous avons 26 hommes à bord dont un cuisiniér et un maître d’hôtel nègre….Nous

avons pour nous servir quatre pauvres petits mousses et deux novices….Notre maître
d’hôtel, qui est nègre, comme je te l’ai dit, et qui est chargé de leur education, leur
flanque de fameuses roulées quand…” 126

These comments are an indication that, from early on, Manet when confronted

with racial difference, remained in his typical mode of close and objective observation.

His interest was to understand and depict what he saw, without the casual, reflexive

racially based disparagement that typified the era, as revealed in Alexandre Dumas

pere’s accounts of his personal experiences in Paris salons. Manet’s comments show a

mix of curiosity, empathy and negative attitudes toward blacks that are fully reflective of

republican thinking during the era. At one point he remarks, when describing the black

women he encountered in the streets of Rio:

125
Complete texts of all extant letters from this trip are included in Edouard Manet Lettres de
Jeunesse: 1848-1849 Voyage à Rio, (Paris: Louis Rouart et Fils), 1928. All excerpts from
Manet’s letters during the Brazil trip are based on this source.
126
“We have 26 men on board, including a chef and a Negro maître d’hotel. We’re looked after
by four poor little ship’s boys and two apprentices….Our maître d’hotel, who is a Negro as I told
you, and is responsible for their training, gives them a terrible licking if [they don’t behave].” As
translated in Manet by Himself: correspondence and conversation, paintings, pastels, prints &
drawings, edited by Juliet Wilson Bareau. (Boston: Little, Brown), 1991: 15-16.

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“La population est au trois quarts nègre, ou mulâtre, cette partie est generalement affreuse
sauf quelques exceptions parmi les négresses et les mulâtres; ces dernières sont presques
toutes jolies.” 127

Present-day readers may well note with rue the continuity of these views in some veins of

current attitudes about race and beauty.

Yet Manet in the same passage goes on to state his disgust upon witnessing a

slave market: “j’ai vu un marché d’esclaves, c’est un spectacle assez revoltant pour

nous.” (“I saw a slave market, and it’s a rather revolting sight for us’); he then expresses

his general antipathy for slavery in commenting that “ in this country, all the black people

are slaves; they all look downtrodden and the whites have power over them that is truly

extraordinary to us.”

The young Manet again reveals his penchant for discerning observation with his

detailed description of what he saw at the slave markets, noting that the men being sold

wore pantaloons and a light jacket but were denied shoes. The young Manet is especially

detailed in his close descriptions of the details of the enslaved women’s attire: 128

“…les negresses sont….pour la plupart nues jusqu’a la ceinture, quleques-unes ont un

foulard attaché au cou et tombant sur la poitrine…elles se mettent avec beaucoup de
recherché. Les unes se font des turbans, les autres arrangent très artistement leur cheveux
crepus et elles portent presques toutes des jupons ornés de monstrueux volants.”

127
Manet, Lettres à Jeunesse, 1928: 58. I translate this passage as: “The population [of Rio] is
three-quarters black or mulatto; they are generally ugly, except for some exceptions among the
black and mulatto women, the latter of whom are almost always pretty.”
128
Edouard Manet, Lettres à Jeunesse: 1848-1849 Voyage à Rio. (Paris: Louis Rouart et Fils),
1928: 52. As translated,with my additions to passages from Wilson Bareau (1991: 22): “The
Negresses are generally naked to the waist; some with a scarf tied at the neck and falling over
their breasts….They dress with a great deal of care. Some wear turbans, others do their frizzy
hair in very artistic styles and almost all wear petticoats adorned with monstrous flounces.”

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 The straightforwardness, on balance, of Manet’s teenage descriptions of black

Brazilians suggests that even at the age of 16, Manet displayed an innate respect for the

humanity, and at times creativity, of individual enslaved blacks whom he encountered.

Manet, though an avid republican, was no activist challenging the social order. Yet he

respected individuals’ personal dignity regardless of their station in life. These teenage

letters foretold an empathy also seen in his portrayals decades later of downtrodden

Parisian figures such as the model for Absinthe Drinker as a street philosopher.

Manet’s letters from Rio can only serve to reinforce a sense that Manet’s decision

to present Laure as fully clothed was a turn to modernity. He was fully aware of exactly

how to depict a slave woman –she would have to be bare-breasted, as he had seen in

Brazil. In choosing not to disrobe Laure, and to de-emphasize or omit the elaborate hair,

jewelry and full skirt, he is doing so not out of derision –he described the slaves’ attire in

a respectful, even admiring manner. He makes these choices because he intends to

represent Laure not in a distant scenario of empire, subjugation and slavery, but as a free

participant in the everyday life of modern Paris.

Thus the Laure of Olympia can in the first instance be seen as a still more evolved

manifestation of Manet’s republican sentiments than the Portrait of Laure. We saw

earlier in Carpeaux a lingering fidelity to the representation of black women in terms of

hypersensuality and exoticism, a residual representation of empire, even in abolitionist

artworks. Manet, to the contrary, pulls back from those tropes –with minimized

headscarf and jewelry, with French rather than ‘exotic” garb. Manet represents Laure,

even in the context of a brothel maid, more as a worker than as an exoticized fantasy.

Her loose, full-sleeved, pinkish cream attire seems to place her in the space of a sex

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worker, like the women seen in extant photographs made at brothels in the decades

surrounding Manet’s time. (Image 50) A simple fact of life in the first fifteen years after

slavery is that brothels were one of the few employment options for young black women

in Paris, and extant photos indicate that they worked both as servants and as prostitutes.

Laure, in Olympia, is on the job. But the pared down creamy tones, and the barely

discernible foulard, also place her in the realm of cultural hybridity, the sartorial space of

blending Antillaise and European influences as a free black in Paris; it is an image of

pragmatic realism, not of an exotic fantasy sex object.

Costume comparisons bear this out. Laure’s attire is on the one hand similar to

that in available images of brothel attire; it is also not unlike the nightrobe styles of a

respectable French woman in her boudoir. (Image 51) Manet was surely aware of the

commonplace erotic connotations projected onto the black female figure, yet he does not

sexualize Laure.129 As Pollock writes, “Manet does not, at least, inflict the wound of

exposure on Laure. When we look at this painting, we do not have to ignore the sitter’s

feelings in order to be able to bear looking at her at all.” 130

129
Ted Reff provides a succinct account of the history of this racist stereotype in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century European commentary, ranging from the Abbé Raynal’s supposition in 1775
of “an ardor of temperament which gives them a power to arouse and experience the most
burning raptures” and J.J. Virey’s pseudo-scientific assertion, in his widely read 1824 Histoire
Naturelle du genre humain that “Negresses carry voluptuousness to a degree of lascivity
unknown in our climate [because] their sexual organs are much more developed than those of
whites” to Gustave Flaubert’s entry “negresses. More passionate than white women…”, in his
Dictionnaire des idées réçus, posthumously published in 1911. Reff notes that at least Flaubert
made clear “how ridiculous he thought such comparisons were.” In Manet: Olympia (New
York: Viking Press), 1977: 92-93. Reff makes the useful point that the figure of the white
prostitute herself also drew widespread derisive descriptions of “primitive barbarity and ritual
animality;” while the maid is clearly subordinate to the prostitute, she underscores the
misogynistic connotations already associated with the prostitute. This underscores my suggestion
that Manet intended a certain pictorial equivalence between the two figures in Olympia, rather
than a focus solely on the prostitute.
130
Pollock, Differencing the Canon (2001: 301)

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 The inverse of this seemingly respectful treatment, however, is the fact that

Manet, despite modernizing Laure, appears to also embrace pictorial devices that for

many viewers obliterate her. On the one hand, Manet describes Laure as “ trés belle

négresse,” and renders her as such in her portrait. On the other hand, in Olympia, he

appears to place the figure squarely within agendas of marginalization, servitude and

sexual undesirability. As Lorraine O’Grady writes, pictorial conventions then were that:

“[the non-white woman is] castrata and whore…her place exists outside of what can be
conceived of as woman. She is the chaos that must be excised and it is her excision that
stabilizes the West’s construct of the female body….Thus, only the white body remains
as the object of a voyeuristic, fetishizing, male gaze. The nonwhite body has been made
opaque by a blank stare.”131

This critique clearly reflects the widespread audience reception of the Laure figure in

Olympia across generations—from the racist stereotyping in 1865 Salon reviews to the

late 1900s postmodernist “recoil” that Anne Higonnet describes, as discussed earlier, in

reviewing O’Grady’s work on Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval. In order to unpack the

perceived marginalization of Olympia’s Laure, it is useful to attempt to examine

indications of Manet’s intentionality for the figure, as well as the ways in which varying

modes of viewing Olympia, during and after the 1865 Salon, may have impacted various

observers’ perspectives.

Manet’s Intentionality: The Duality of the Baudelairean Muse

Manet remained enigmatic about his intentionality for Olympia; he wrote very

little about it. The most commonly cited indicator is an excerpt of a poem written by his

friend, Zacharie Astruc, that Manet submitted to the 1865 Salon as the only

131
Lorraine O’Grady, “Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity” " in Grant
Kester, ed, Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, (Durham
and London: Duke University Press), 1998: 3.

94
descriptive text to be included with the exhibition catalog’s listing of Olympia:132

“When weary of dreaming, Olympia awakes,

Spring enters in the arms of a gentle black messenger
It is the slave, like the amorous night,
Who comes to make the day bloom, delicious to see:
The august young girl in whom the fire burns.”

These words themselves, however, lack any fixed meaning. They may seem to

offer validation for negating the maid by the poem’s equation of the “gentle black

messenger” with “slave.” But the irony of Olympia’s description as “august,” when

Manet pictures her as anything but, can also extend to the use of the term “slave”

fifteen years after abolition. As we have seen, Manet, who clearly knew from his time in

Brazil how to depict the attire of an enslaved black woman, just as clearly did not choose

to present Laure in such attire. 133

It is moreover unclear that Manet himself actually named the painting Olympia, as

evidence suggests that it was Astruc who named it just before the 1865 Salon opening.

Sandblad cites an 1865 letter in which Baudelaire refers to the painting by describing it,

as “the painting representing the woman with the négresse and the cat,” without

mentioning the name Olympia. 134 This suggests that, even though the painting was

132
Clark, “Olympia’s Choice,” 1984: 83, 283.
133
The Pinacoteca Agnelli catalog entry for the Portrait of Laure suggests that the model may
have been evocative for Manet of during his youthful trip to Brazil. (2002: 68) The fact that he
had described in detail the enslaved Brazilian women’s enforced nudity, and stated his dismay as
a republican over slavery, suggests that his choice to depict Laure fully clothed indicates that he
did not intend to portray her as a slave.
134
Nils Sandblad notes that Baudelaire had left Paris for Brussels in 1864; given his friendship
with Manet and regular visits to the artist’s studio, the description in his letter seems to imply that
the painting remained unnamed for at least a year after it was painted. In Manet: Three Studies in
Artistic Conception, (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup) 1954: 97-98. Phyllis Floyd suggests that the
flower in Olympia’s hair, described as an orchid by Reff and others, is in fact a single-flower

95
completed in 1863, and remained in Manet’s studio until the 1865 Salon -- a two-year

period during which Baudelaire regularly visited Manet – Baudelaire did not think of the

painting by the name Olympia. Baudelaire’s quote, which gives nearly equal weight to

the prostitute, maid and cat, also supports an intended formal equivalence of the maid and

the prostitute. This is despite the fact that, as earlier discussed, Manet made the painting

soon after the opening of his friend Alexandre Dumas fils’ play La Dame aux Camelias,

in which the rival of the tragic courtesan heroine is named Olympia. It is possible that,

just as Dumas’ Olympia was not the lead character, but still central to the narrative,

Manet also intended to have Olympia’s Laure, even as Olympia’s maid, be a figure of

more than passing interest.

The painting’s potential links to Dumas fils, who was of partial African heritage,

may also relate to Manet’s decision to render the maid as a black woman. The two

attendants in Titian’s Renaissance-era Venus of Urbino, who are sometimes described as

gypsies, are transformed as a single black woman, a presence in nineteenth-century

French brothels alluded to in some of the poems of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.

Cachin makes the singular observation that “the importance accorded to the bouquet and

its bearer, as essential to the subject as the nude figure, clarifies the enigma of Manet’s

thought: Olympia is first and foremost a grand painting, and it was meant as such.”135

camellia, in linking the painting to the Dumas fils play La Dame aux Camelias, in an online
version of her 2004 essay “The Puzzle of Manet.”
135
Françoise Cachin is one of the few critics to offer a considered, if cryptic, reading of Manet’s
portrayal of Laure as Olympia’s maid, including her important suggestion of its Baudelairean
influences, in the exhibition catalogue Manet (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art),
1983:175, 179. Ted Reff also relates the Laure figure to the Baudelaire poem A Une
Malabaraise, and more tangentially to his other poems A une dame creole, Bien loin d’ici and La
Belle Dorothee. (In Manet: Olympia, 1977: 91-92). Cachin and other writers point to the black

96
She goes on to suggest a correspondence between Manet’s “superb” rendering of Laure,

as a brothel maid whose carefully painted “elegant” hand rests on her bouquet of flowers,

and the “flower-adorned” woman described in a Fleurs poem titled A Une Malabaraise

(To a Woman from Malabar); yet she is more a “nursemaid-procuress,… not a harem

slave.” 136 As with the young Manet’s descriptions of black women in Brazil, today’s

reader may note with ambivalence that while the poet retreads highly offensive

stereotypes of the day, he is also uncannily accurate in some of his description of some of

the life options faced by the period’s women of color.137

Still, as a possible personification of the Malabaraise, she becomes a version of

the muslim-draped grisette seen in the watercolors of Constantin Guys, Baudelaire’s

prototypical painter of modern life.

cat as the painting’s most obvious Baudelairean reference, given its widely known connotations
of promiscuity and illicit sex.
136
Cachin, Manet, ibid., 1983: 179-180.
137
Deborah Cherry summarizes commentary by critics including Gaytri Spivak, Griselda Pollock
and Christopher Miller, who warns that “the representation of an exoticised, eroticized black
femininity in Baudelaire’s modernist poems recycles and renews a longstanding trope of western
racism.” Still, artists Maud Sulter and Lorraine O’Grady, in their work on Jeanne Duval, point out
the equally racist (and sexist) basis for the historicization of Duval as “bestialized, stupefied,
hated, ugly” and overall a negative influence on Baudelaire—a characterization that contradicts
much of the fragmented information still extant about the relationship. See Cherry’s discussion
of Maud Sulter’s work in the Conclusion. Maryse Condé discussed with me her view that
Manet’s depictions of Laure and Jeanne Duval may be related to different stereotypes found
in nineteenth century literature for mulatto women (said to mirror all the weaknesses of both
races) in contrast to black women (said to be virtuous and pure); these too are mixed metaphors
which can elide negatively with primitivist stereotypes. She mentioned the 1882 novel La Misère
de Paris, by Louise Michel, as one manifestation of this dichotomy of stereotypes. In a different
vein, Anne Coffin Hanson argues that “there is little reason to think that the depiction of Laure in
the Olympia is “a symbol of primitive passion,” in Manet and the Modern Tradition (1977: 99).
Hanson suggests that Laure’s modest uniform is intended to keep her out of the visualization of
illicit sex, although she also argues that this is because the focus is on Olympia, and to eroticize
Laure would detract from that.

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To a Malabar Woman (bold fonts added)

Your feet are as slender as your hands and your hips

Are broad; they’d make the fairest white woman jealous;
To the pensive artist your body’s sweet and dear;
Your wide, velvety eyes are darker than your skin.

In the hot blue country where your God had you born
It is your task to light the pipe of your master,
To keep the flasks filled with cool water and perfumes,
To drive far from his bed the roving mosquitoes,
And as soon as morning makes the plane-trees sing, to
Buy pineapples and bananas at the bazaar.
All day long your bare feet follow your whims,
And, very low, you hum old, unknown melodies;
And when evening in his scarlet cloak descends,
You stretch out quietly upon a mat and there
Your drifting dreams are full of humming-birds and are
Like you, always pleasant and adorned with flowers.

Why, happy child, do you wish to see France,

That over-peopled country which suffering mows down,
And entrusting your life to the strong arms of sailors,
Bid a last farewell to your dear tamarinds?
You, half-dressed in filmy muslins,
Shivering over there in the snow and the hail,
How you would weep for your free, pleasant leisure, if,
With a brutal corset imprisoning your flanks,
You had to glean your supper in our muddy streets
And sell the fragrance of your exotic charms,
With pensive eye, following in our dirty fogs
The sprawling phantoms of the absent coco palms!

—Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857), translated by William Aggeler (Fresno: Academy

Library Guild, 1954)

98
 Olympia herself, nude except for her jewelry and neck ribbon, is likewise

depicted in ways linked to Fleurs poems including Les Bijoux (The Jewels):138 The text’s

reference to a Moorish harem supports her pictorial equivalency with Laure:

The Jewels

Knowing my heart, my dearest one was nude,

Her resonating jewelry all she wore,
Which rich array gave her the attitude
Of a darling in the harem of a Moor….

(translation by James McGowan, Oxford University Press)

Here again, as with Baudelaire’s epistolary description of Olympia, we see a degree of

equivalence between the prostitute and the maid in the poet’s words that Manet seems to

recreate pictorially in Olympia. As a Baudelairean painter of modern life, Manet strives

to render archetypal scenes modern. He presents a brothel scene as he sees it in the daily

life of Paris, rather than as an exoticized or Renaissance fantasy scene. This was the path,

he and Baudelaire believed, to joining the pantheon of great French painters.

This dual motivation, to be in the vanguard yet achieve popular acclaim, could

help to explain Manet’s profound surprise and dismay at the intensely hostile public

reaction to Olympia. Manet’s ambivalence derived from the impossibility of synthesizing

his republicanist recognition of his subjects’ equal humanity regardless of social standing

with his desire to be an acclaimed painter. This ambivalence, like that seen in

Baudelaire’s poetry, and in the lived experiences of their friends Dumas fils and Jeanne

Duval, can be seen as a zeitgeist, a condition of early modernity in the creative

expression of 1860s Paris.

138
Cachin, Manet, 1983: 180.

99
 Michael Fried notes this ambivalence in subsequent Manet works, such as On the

Balcony in 1868-69, stressing that despite repeated Salon ridicule and rejection

throughout his career, it was never Manet’s intention to shock, and that he in fact wanted

his work to be recognized as quintessentially French to such an extent that he sometimes

sublimated aesthetic influences and cultural affinities derived from outside French

culture.139 Higonnet reinforces the idea of Manet’s cross-cultural references by noting

the equivalence with which Manet places Japanese and Goya prints on the wall in a

portrait of his friend the writer Emile Zola.140 Fried maintains that Manet reveals

admiration for Japanese pictorial values in this painting—the center figure of a standing

woman with a parasol displays a Japanese-derived pose and facial detailing, while also

masking it with her European-style attire. (Image 44)

Manet’s ambivalence could also explain why, after centering Laure as a

working Parisian in culturally hybrid everyday attire, an advance from Orientalized

exoticism, he then tonally negates this modernizing gesture. This ambivalence can be

one explanation for Manet’s republican instinct to have Laure personify the modern black

woman in Paris, central to everyday life and to the poetry of his friend Baudelaire; but to

then overlay her with tropes of racist typcasting given his quest to show at the Salon and

be recognized as a great French painter.

139
Michael Fried suggests, for example, that the artist highlighted the Dutch inspiration for the
male figure in On the Balcony, due to critics’ links of the Dutch and French styles, but that this
Dutch influence would have been less evident if not contrasted with the two other figures who are
derived from Japanese and Spanish influences. These latter influences, especially the allusions to
Japanese style, are therefore sublimated, since they were then more avant-garde than
academically sanctioned. (“Manet’s Sources” in Artforum, March 1969: 24, 32, 33.)
140
Higonnet also discusses Fried’s efforts, together with Reff, to lead “a generation away from
formalist interpretations of Manet’s work toward a vision of Manet as an artist who positioned
himself in the history of art by citing it profusely.” See Anne Higonnet, “Manet and the
Multiple,” in The Grey Room, No. 48, Summer 2012: 104.

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 Ironically, these conflicted objectives would suggest a metononymy around the

figure of Laure that only heightens its interpretive richness. Laure is both an

exemplification of a radically modernized black persona while simultaneously

constructed to denote the old stereotypes. Laure’s indeterminate modernity would

simultaneously evade detection by the public Salon exhibition’s bourgeois audience, and

thus avoid controversy, while meriting admiration from more sophisticated artists and

critics.

Modernity and Composition: Laure Constructed and Unbound

While Manet’s conflicted motivations present one possible resolution of the

conundrum of Laure in Olympia --the duality of her modernity but obliteration --there

remains the formal materiality of the painted composition. Much of the perception of

Laure as a stereotype is rooted in the painting’s tonality –Laure is somewhat difficult to

discern from the background, especially in print reproductions of Olympia, and instead

seems blended into it. An analysis of the formal structure of Olympia, at different stages

of Manet’s creative process, reveals a second manifestation of the importance of the draft

to the understanding of any finished painting. DeVere-Brody warns, as a theatrical critic,

against the fallacy of calling the opening night of a theatrical play the “premiere,” given

the extent of rehearsals. She notes a similar incompleteness in any history of art which

“obscures the process of artmaking in favor of…an artwork’s debut. Olympia’s drafts, or

rehearsals, make plural its origins although we think of it as a singular event.”141 This

points to the importance of examining the multiple stages of the making of Olympia, and

of its title, as well as the varying circumstances of its viewership across time.

141
DeVere Brody, “Black Cat Fever,” 2001: 3.

101
 We see, for example, that in a preliminary watercolor drawing, Laure is far more

firmly represented than in the completed painting, her skin tones more differentiated from

the murky wall behind her. (Image 49) This distinctiveness from the background is

retained, to a slightly lesser extent, in an 1867 etching in which the darker background

tones close off the view into a pictorial depth still visible in the earlier, lighter tones of

the wall behind Laure. 142 (Image 49) Its graphic qualities suggest that Manet darkened

the space around Laure primarily as part of his flattening of the picture plane, as a

modernizing device. The more muted the tonalities of the Laure figure in relation to the

background, the flatter the pictorial plane. We also learn from x-ray studies that the scale

of Laure’s body was reduced from more ample volumes which, like that of Titian’s

gypsy maid, was closer to Old Master prototypes.143 All of this suggests that Manet was

not necessarily thinking of stereotyping Laure in blending her in tonally, but instead,to

enhance the modernist pictorial style of the image.

Cachin further notes that some of what viewers see in the Olympia paintng today

may also be due simply to a darkening of the painting’s tonality with the passage of

time.144 This darkening may contribute to the murky background seen in the plethora of

bad reproductive images of Olympia that are widely circulated today.

142
Cachin et al, Manet (1983: 185-186). The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that this etching
of Olympia, which is in its collection and described as the sixth and final state, was made to
illustrate Emile Zola’s defense of the painting in a brochure released for Manet’s private
exhibition in 1867. See Introduction to Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol. 6 No.1,
Summer 1988: 4.
143
As described by Juliet Wilson Bareau in comparing the earlier and later states of the painting
of Olympia. In The Hidden Face of Manet: an investigation of the artist’s working processes,
(London: The Burlington Magazine), 1986:45.
144
Cachin, Manet (1983: 186)

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 Still, it is undeniable that, just as with the prostitute’s body, Manet uses a

minimum of half-tones and naturalistic molding for Laure, instead shaping faces from a

series of loose, flat, slightly impastoed slashes of paint. He does not strive for the

contours and shade gradations of the more conventional genre painter Feyen, whose Le

baiser enfantin, as noted earlier, may also have been posed by Laure in the same year.

(Image 53)

Direct, in-person viewing of Olympia, however, quite easily reveals a degree of

facial expressiveness less discernible in reproductions. We see that Laure’s features are

set in a quizzical, but not unkind, gaze, as if in concern for the consequences of the

prostitute’s curt disregard for her admirer’s flowers.145 Direct viewing also allows the

viewr to observe other details, often blurred in reproductions. We see Laure’s elegantly

elongated coral red earrings and the delicately turned hand on the proffered bouquet. We

note the subtly contrasting cream and pink tonalities of her dress, as well as its lightly

ruffled sleeves and neckline.

Many reproductions, in contrast, obscure the subtle animation of Laure’s facial

expression and project mainly its color tones, leaving many viewers to discern only the

blank stare perceived by O’Grady. As Crary discusses, a novel representation must be

binding, or fixed, in order to hold the attention it draws; and any unbinding, or lack, of

clarity -- as with Laure’s seemingly blank affect-- has the effect of deflecting attention.146

145
Based on my observations from repeat viewings of the painting Olympia at the Musée d’Orsay
from 2010-2012. It is striking to me that, when I began this project, working from reproductions,
I described Laure’s features as barely discernible, with no trace of expressive affect, but that view
has evolved with direct observation.
146
Crary, in Suspensions of Perception (1999:92), refers to Manet’s awareness of the “volatility”
of the blank face in the perception of the viewer, of its capacity to destabilize attention. Bataille
also cites this type of “messy” brushwork as evidence of Manet’s “indifference” to constructing

103
In this case, all but the most careful attention then dissipates into boredom; the viewer

lacks interest in what appears to be merely an expected, and thus already known, stock

figure. The overall impression, at least to the present-day casual viewer, is that the maid

for the most part conflated the stock obese and asexually unattractive black maid figure

from art history with racist stereotypes from popular culture; thus producing a figure

that was familiar, derogatory, and therefore dismissed.

This impression is only heightened by the figural profile produced by the

particular angle of Laure’s pose. Despite Manet’s 1862 description of Laure as trés

belle, she now projects, for some viewers, an obesity not indicated in her portrait; she is

slender from the waist up but appears to balloon into corpulence below, covered by loose,

bulky skirts. This is not just an allusion to the seductively broad hips of Baudelaire’s

Woman from Malabar. Manet’s “trés belle négresse” Laure is often perceived as a

stereotypically obese figure, and this is how she was frequently depicted in the many

satirical cartoons of Olympia that appeared in the popular press at the time. 147 (Image 52)

This impression of obesity is not, however, the only possible reading of this

figure, however, especially when the attire is placed within the context of the period’s

fashions. Manet may simply have tried to capture the look of the full-sleeved dress over

an effect of beauty; thus allowing a split between figural facts and the materiality of the painting
almost to the point of formlessness. In Manet: Biographical and Critical Study (New York:
Skira) 1955: 70-74.
147
The Bertall and other derisive caricatures are summarized in Clark, “Olympia’s Choice,”
(1984: 92, 97) and Alan Krell, Manet and the Painters of Modern Life (1996: 56-61). Carol
Armstrong in Manet/Manette (2002: 44-45) points out that Bertall names his caricature Manette,
suggesting that the figure is not just a prostitute but ametaphorical allusion to Manet himself, as
an artist who, like the prostitute, requires public display. This idea is borne out by recent research
summarized in Rubin, Impressionism (1999: 67), which matches the prostitute’s bracelet to one
still extant from Manet’s mother’s estate, which contains a locket of Manet’s hair. Armstrong
also notes that the cartoons satirized the prostitute with a derogatory intensity comparable to that
for the maid, creating another level of equivalence between the maid and prostitute figures.

104
wide crinolines that was considered to be very stylish at the time. Laure’s sleeve in

particular, with its close fit above the elbow and voluminous flare to the wrist, is a quite

accurate match with silhouettes seen in fashion plates and re-enacted fashions, even

though it contributes to the impression of obesity. (Image 51) This perceived obesity was

likely a surprise for Manet who, we have seen from x-rays, actually reduced the volumes

of Laure’s figure in the interest of flatness.148

The Dissipation of Attention: Modern Modes of Viewing Olympia Across Time

Despite the ambiguity produced by close observation, the stereotype of the

obliterated black female dominated viewers’ perceptions, and critical commentary was

correspondingly derogatory. Salon reviewers almost uniformly described the maid figure

as “hideous,” and limited their remarks about her to no more than a single phrase.149

As the expected stereotype, rather than a novelty, the maid did not merit serious attention.

Yet, even in Manet’s own time, at least one critic, and his protégé the artist Frédéric

Bazille, were substantively engaged by the Laure of Olympia. So were successive

generations of artists through to the present moment. Much of this disparate reception

can be examined in the context of differing modes of viewing.

In the 1860s scientific and other investigations led to the belief that vision was

not a fixed mental process, as postulated by traditional theory, but in fact involved a

degree of uncertainty due to new assumptions that it was based in the unstable physiology

148
Juliet Wilson Bareau, The Hidden Face of Manet (1986: 45).
149
Clark, 1984: 96.

105
of the body.150 A variation of Crary’s framework for analyzing traditional and modern

modes of viewing art, when combined with Clark’s social history of viewer response to

Olympia, can be particularly relevant for understanding the modes of attention available

to viewers of Manet’s representation of Laure in the setting of Olympia’s Salon 1865

exhibition. Crary suggests that Manet could well have been aware of the new studies, and

viewing conditions at the Salon were in some aspects consistent with the newly

formulated modern mode of viewer attention.

The new mid-1800s theory of the materiality of visual perception contradicted

the well-established classical model of vision, grounded in Kant, whose modernist

variations existed in the formalism of Greenberg and Fried. The traditional thinking

assumed that perception was a mental process, fixed in the domain of the cognitive.

The classical model embraced the Kantian notion of the a priori capacity for cognitive

synthesis based on a fixed mental unity. It characterized the perceiving mind as a

passive receiver of sensation, and implied that this process was objective and universal.

Every human mind was assumed to perceive a given object in the same way.

The modern conception, in stark contrast, was that cognition, or understanding,

was temporal, achieved over time. It was not a priori, but contingent on unpredictable

material aspects of the body such as discomfort or movement. It was this modern idea of

a material basis for vision that led to the even more radical focus on attention, a

dimension of perception that had been of little interest until the 1870s. In rejecting the

notion of a priori cognition, the idea of attention as subjective materiality was

established.

150
Unless otherwise noted, this discussion of modern vs traditional modes of attention in the
viewing of art is based on Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press), 1999: 3-55, 87 and 92.

106
 Walter Benjamin characterized modern subjectivity as “reception in a state of

distraction” with the resulting experience of perceptive fragmentation and...dispersal.”151

Benjamin linked modern subjectivity most famously to the viewing of mechanized

images such as photography, and while Crary extended this critique to images on movie

screens in public theaters, there are remarkable parallels between the Salon and such

venues, even though the images on view at the Salon were original paintings.

The Salon, like the early cinema, was a public exhibition space which constructed

a collective viewing experience for large audiences which, if not as mass as cinema

audiences, certainly catered to the growing Parisian petit bourgeoisie. Clark describes

Salon viewings as social outings for these viewers who, as social life shifted to public

venues from its traditional base in private residences, now visited cafes-concerts and

other public spaces, such as the Salon, as a way to spend time with friends. He noted

accounts of noisy discussions in front of the painting, and of gossip about its media

controversy, along with outbursts of laughter, among viewers in Room M, where

Olympia was on view; the gallery was often so crowded that many viewers stood packed

in rows seven or eight people away from the wall, unable to clearly see the painting. 152

The viewers’ experience thus became essentially that of the immobilized body that

Crary asserts is essential to the distracted quality of modern attention.

If one reason for the failure of Salon viewers to “see” the revisionary nature of the

maid figure is the ambivalence of Manet’s representational choices, which themselves

deflected attention, the other major reason was that the public, crowded nature of the

151
In Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company),
1976: 252-253.
152
See T. J. Clark’s account of Salon viewing conditions in “Olympia’s Choice, 1984: 83, 89 and
93).

107
Salon viewing experience rendered many viewers so thoroughly distracted that they were

all but incapable of close study of the painting. Faced with growing controversy, the

Salon took steps that further reduced the paining’s visibility, soon moving Olympia

from Room M to another gallery, where its placement high on the wall rendered it

impossible to see in detail.153

The highly distracted nature of the public viewing experience helped to define the

Salon as modern. It was a definitive break with the private contemplation that Crary

characterized as pre-modern, exemplified by Riegl’s formulation of viewer subjectivity in

his essay on 17th century Dutch group portrait paintings. 154 Riegl had hypothesized a

coherence, in artworks such as Rembrandt’s The Staalmeesters, of two kinds: one

created by the painter in balancing the individuality of each individual depicted in the

portrait with his subordination to the overall group, and a second created by the spectator

and his relationship with the painting’s content. As Crary summarized, “these portraits

provided…a utopian figuration of an imaginary harmony of individual and community...

the representation of attention as an…element through which individual psyches were

forged together as a whole in the consciousness of the beholding subject.”155 An aspect

of Olympia’s modernity was that even though Manet ‘s compositional devices disrupt

viewer communion with its subject and instead play on their anxieties about it,

communion was further blocked by its public display in a venue of modern spectacular

culture that denies close study to its viewers.

153
Clark, ”Olympia’s Choice,” 1984, ibid.
154
Alois Riegl, “Excerpts from The Dutch Group Portrait” Translated by Benjamin Binstock.
In October 74, (Fall 1999: 15, 19).
155
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 1999.

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 The physical inability and cultural indisposition of the bourgeois audience to view

Olympia in a contemplative manner contributed to their reliance on the influence of the

more than seventy mostly scathing reviews published in Paris periodicals in shaping the

view of the painting and its maid figure. The inability even among professional observers

to detect Laure’s revisionary nature suggests the relevance of other aspects of modern

theories of attention. Not only did these theories suggest that attention was a physical

behavior subject to distraction; they also placed attention, as Crary points out, within

historical structures, including the experience of memory, will and desire.156 This

aspect of the critics’ motivations can further be framed within Crary’s use of Marxist

discourse, in which he links class-based theories of labor and education with the quality

of viewer attention to the painting. Crary identifies a concentrated attentiveness seen in

viewers motivated by productive and consumption requirements--who focus on an object

just enough to be able to do their jobs-- and contrasts it with his ideal, the sustained

attentiveness that is key to creative and free subjectivity” “In fact,” he writes,

“modernity makes doing more prevalent than thinking.”157

Clark characterizes most of the publications for which the critics were writing as

daily newspapers and monthly magazines.158 He noted that the critics lacked artistic

training and overlooked many key aspects of Manet’s work; almost none of them, for

example, discussed its sources in Titian and other precedent.159 They can therefore be

seen not as art experts but as journalists, who deployed a hyperbolic and sensational

156
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 1999:27, 29, 43.
157
Crary, ibid., 1999: 112.
158
Clark, “Olympia’s Choice,” 1984: 89.
159
Clark, ibid., 1984: 89, 93.

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writing style, with little formal analysis, to generate the controversy and interest that

drove mass circulation objectives. As Marx theorized, such novelty and entertainment

value drove the boom and bust cycles necessary to maintain and expand profits in all

capitalist enterprises.160 In this context, the critics can be seen as commodity workers,

producing reviews to generate revenues for their publications; their mode of attention was

therefore that of the wage-earning laborer, attentive only to the extent necessary to

complete the task of writing a review of the Salon in exchange for pay. 161

The unknowledgeable critics, the distracted public viewers, and the Salon’s own

actions in removing Olympia from close view, all suggest that at the Salon, viewing and

writing about the paintings was not primarily about the aesthetics or the content; it was

mainly about selling commodity publications (and perhaps paintings too, due to the

Salon’s impact on painters’ reputations). The subjectivity of these viewers was thus

constructed around modern cultural and economic forces that negated the sustained

attention required for these audiences to “see” Laure. The Salon exhibition therefore

exemplified a modern spectacular culture in which the image itself was all but irrelevant

in comparison with its function serving modern social practices in the expanding

commodity culture.

A Fragmented Audience and Differentiated Modes of Attention

Despite the near unanimous critical rejection of Olympia, there were exceptions to

this critical response. As noted, modern theories of attention accommodated the

experience of memory, will and desire. And this would seem to imply that, just as

160
Karl Marx, “The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall,” in Capital, Volume III, Part III.
Edited by Frederick Engels. (New York: International Publishing Co. Inc.), 1967: 250.
161
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 1999: 29-34.

110
varying levels of attention arose from its material embodiment in the viewer, there could

also be different levels of attention by individuals with different experiences and

intentionalities, even if they all view a work in the same modern spectacular venue.

This idea reveals a fragmentation in the body of the collective modern viewer that

Crary did not address, as he only posits that a single response--a superficial level of

attention due to distraction and economic factors--is common to all individuals in modern

viewing conditions. This fragmentation of the viewer base for the Laure figure in

Olympia can be glimpsed in Clark’s social history of the range of the painting’s critical

response. But it becomes even more apparent with the recognition that there was also a

small but important legacy of accomplished paintings made in response to Manet’s

representation of this figure.

Clark cited one Salon critic, Alfred Sensier, writing under the pseudonym Jean

Ravenel, who in contrast to his peers was knowledgeable of art history and wrote

seriously about form, content and sources in Olympia.162 This critic, perhaps informed by

his friendships with artists including Millet, seems to have discerned the potential that

the Laure figure might represent a more nuanced meaning than is apparent at first glance.

In an 1865 essay for the republican-leaning journal L’Epoque, writing under the

Ravenel name, Sensier refers to the painting as a whole as a “nightmare full of unknown

things,” and said that “the Negress and flowers (are) insufficient in execution, but with a

real harmony to them, the shoulder and arm solidly established in a clean and pure

light….(the painting Olympia ) is hideous but all the same it is something. A painter is in

evidence and the strange group is bathed in light;” in a later article, Sensier suggested that

“a nude Olympia and a Negress presenting her some flowers…a trifle daring in their
162
Clark,”Olympia’s Choice,” ibid., 1984: 99, 140.

111
poses…but too visibly the offspring of Goya for anyone to be disturbed by their

misdeeds.” 163 Sensier’s commentary, more analytical than sensational, referenced the

Laure figure as a point of interest in its own right, and perhaps even with a degree of

equivalence to the prostitute. He was discerning enough to intuit a transgressive quality to

the maid figure, even as he acknowledges a lack of clarity which deflects his further

consideration. It would fall to Manet’s artist colleagues to give the work the full

contemplation required to unlock the possibilities of its veiled significations.

Bazille’s Homage to Manet: The Iconographic Legacy of Laure Begins

The artistic response to Olympia’s Laure figure in Manet’s own time represents an

additional iteration of the notion that, as suggested by theories of vision, attention varies

by individual viewers’ experiences of history, memory, will and desire. The existence of

these artworks was not addressed by Clark; while he constructed an extensive lineage for

the painting’s prostitute figure, citing sources for the prostitute as well as images inspired

by her, he made no such effort for the maid figure.164 But Olympia influenced at least

two contemporaneous works of art that appear to be the result of sustained attention for

the Laure figure.

Frédéric Bazille, the scion of a wealthy family from Montpellier in Provence, met

Manet after moving in 1862 to Paris, where he abandoned his medical studies to become

163
Clark, ibid., 1984: 140, 143.
164
As previously discussed, Pollock (1999: 287-297) and Cachin (1983: 179-180) are among the
few writers who outline precedent and comparable figures images for the maid; Pollock briefly
discusses the Nationl Gallery version of the Bazille Peonies paintings, suggesting that the
juxtaposition of the black woman and flowers is more re-Orietnalizing than modern (1999: 295)

112
a painter.165 After studying with the Orientalist painter Gerome, Bazille joined the circle

of artists surrounding Manet in order to pursue his preference for the new modern style in

painting scenes from contemporary life.166 In his 1868 painting, Atelier de la Rue de la

Condamine, Bazille depicts a visit to his studio by his friends Renoir, Sisley, Astruc,

Monet (a former studio mate) and Manet. The tall, lanky figure of Bazille was painted

into the scene, as a gesture of admiration, by Manet.167 (Image 54)

In 1870, Bazille made two paintings, both titled Négresse aux Pivoines, that are

invariably described as an homage to his friend Manet, figured as a direct reference to the

flower-bearing black woman in Olympia.168 (Image 56) Some scholars suggest that

165
In addition to the monographic studies cited herein by Bajou, Jourdan, Marandel and Pittman,
François-Bernard Michel chronicles the artist’s life from his perspective as a fellow
Montpelliérain trained as a physician, in Bazille 1841-1870. (Mesnil-sur-l’Estrée: Editions
Grasset), 1992.
166
Dianne Pittman describes Bazille’s stated preference for simple subjects based on modern life,
even it he risked rejection by the Salon, quoting his comment, in a March 1866 letter that “I have
chosen the modern epoch because it is what I understand best and find to be most alive for living
people, and this is what will cause me to be refused. If I had done Romans or Greeks, I would be
quite at ease….” in Bazille: Purity, Pose, and Painting in the1860s (University Park: The
Pennsylvania State University Press), 1998: 58.
167
Pittman, ibid., points out that the loose brushwork of Manet’s hand, for the painted figure of
Bazille, is also a subtle reference to the way that the scene depicted might actually play out; it
would be normal for Manet, revered by the artists, if not the public, as a modern master, to take
up the brush and demonstrate a correction or suggested stylefor an acolyte. (1978: 185).
168
As invariably stated by Bazille scholars, and by the National Gallery of Art Washington on its
website, www.nga.org, It is unclear how Bazille and Manet first met; it was likely through their
shared upper middle class social connections; Bazille’s mother’s cousins the Lejosnes were
friends of Manet and Baudelaire and they, like Bazille, were regularly invited to the Lejosnes;’
weekly socials. (Pittman, 1998:54) Joseph Rishel describes the artists’ friendship and Bazille’s
frequent visits to Manet’s studio during this perioed, noting that at this time both Bazille and
Manet were posing for Fantin-Latour’s 1870 Studio at Batignolles, a group portrait painting of
Manet and his circle of artists, in The Second Empire, 1852-1870 : Art in France under
Napoleon III, exh. cat., Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1978: 252.

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Bazille’s black model may be the same person, Laure, who posed for Manet.169 This can

be questioned due to a difference in skin tones and, more subtly, in features. The model

does, however, appear to be the same woman who posed for Thomas Eakin’s 1867 study

Negress, painted while he was in Paris, while wearing an identical headscarf. 170 (Image

63) The same model had previously posed for Bazille in the sole Orientalist painting he

submitted to the Salon, a sketch of which is visible in Atelier.171 With the Peonies

paintings, Bazille appears to not only resume Manet’s de-Orientalizing project, but he

asserts it with a clarity that supercedes Manet’s ambiguity. Bazille establishes a fixity -

an image that rivets the viewer’s eye and invites contemplation - for his tribute to Manet,.

The model, inspired by Laure, is even more precisely placed as a member of the black

Paris working class.

169
See Hugh Honour, Image of the Black in Western Art (1989: 206). I believe that Laure is more
likely the same model who posed for Feyen’s Le baiser enfantin (Image 23) which was shown at
the Salon in 1865, the same year as Olympia. I found this image in the Image of the Black in
Western Art archives at Harvard’s W.E.B. Dubois Institute, but the Institute does not suggest such
a linkage.
170
The DeYoung Museum of San Francisco, owner of this painting, renamed it in 2002 as
Female Model (formerly Negress) citing evolving usage of racial terminology, as described in a
curatorial memo included in the museum’s object files for the painting. ( I have used the Eakins
spelling “Negress.”) The National Gallery in Washington similarly renamed its Peonies painting
as Young Woman with Peonies, as described in its archives, after concluding that it was
unnecessary to reference the model’s ethnicity. The Musée Fabre in Montpellier continues to use
the Negresse aux Pivoines title. As seen in the DeYoung archives, discussion of the Eakins
painting of this model is most often framed in analyses of exoticism in American art; one
comprehensive account in this vein is a Henry Louis Gates essay for Facing History: The Black
Image in American Art 1710-1940 for an eponymous exhibition: (The Brooklyn Museum and the
Corcoran Gallery of Art), 1990. The Eakins study has seldom been the subject of scholarly
commentary, although it receives brief mention in the catalog for the De Young’s 1996 survey
exhibition The Exoticized Woman and her Allure in American Art 1865-1917.
171
La Toilette can be seen as Bazille’s one attempt, as an ambitious young painter, to gain
acceptance at the Salon despite his reservations about painting works so rooted in the subject
matter and style of Romanticism and Delacroix, whom Bazille initially deeply admired. Marandel
summarizes the debate among Bazille and his fellow art students Monet and Renoir over the
competing influences of Delacroix and their ultimate preference for the realism of Courbet, a turn
that led to their gravitation toward Manet’s circle, in Frédéric Bazille: Prophet of Impressionism
(Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum), 1992: 71-75.

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 One de-inhibiting factor for Bazille’s clarity may have been the paintings’

intended ownership. If Manet was motivated by his ambition to show publicly,

Bazille’s paintings were typically sold privately, and were held primarily by his family

and friends. At least one of the peonies paintings was promised in advance to his sister-

in-law Suzanne, wife of his brother Marc.172

This representational choice also relates directly to the way in which Bazille’s

experiences and interests, derived from his position as an acolyte of Manet, shaped the

obviously sustained mode of attention that he gave to Manet’s painting. It was

established practice for young artists to visit the Louvre and the Salon and sketch

paintings they admired, and Bazille is known to have done from 1863-1870.173 Thus,

even though they worked in venues of modern spectacular culture, these artists gave the

work the sustained attention associated with creativity, as a necessary aspect of their

artistitic training. This mode of viewing would also have produced the benefits of

temporality, which Crary describes as an important component of sustained attention.174

The repeat viewings required for sketching would have forced Bazille to deconstruct the

layers of form, stance, attire and physical attributes with which Manet composed

Olympia; presumably Bazille also had opportunities to speak directly with his mentor

Manet about the painting, although no records of such discussions appear to be extant.

172
Bajou describes the the National Gallery Peonies painting as one of two that Bazille promised
to make for Suzanne Bazille in an 1869 letter; in a second letter, in January 1870, Bazille
apologizes for his delay and says he would soon start them. (1993: 175).
173
Pittman discusses Bazille’s visits to the Salons and his reactions, as expressed in letters to his
parents (1998:15, 59, 55).
174
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 1999: 55.

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Bazille, much more than the typical Salon viewer of Manet’s time, would have been able

to decipher the veiled de-Orientalization of the Manet figure.

It is conceivable that Bazille’s decision to portray the maid figure, rather than the

prostitute, in his tribute to Manet resulted from an intense emotional response to the

evidence of the conflicting impulses that seemed to inform his mentor’s painting. As

David Freedberg writes in The Power of Images, “attentiveness (is not just)… channeling

the mind to the image, but…the intimate experience of the beholder. The

beholder…(doesn’t) just concentrate on the image but directs his mediation to aspects

most likely to arouse a strong sense of fragility or tragedy.”175 Like many young artists,

Bazille may have sought to pay homage to his mentor by resolving the tenuous and

ultimately sublimated nature of Manet’s revision of the Laure figure; indeed the

meticulous care with which he reworked even the smallest details of her portrayal suggest

an intensely emotional commitment to completing this revision.

The homage paintings comprise two versions of a flowers with figure scene.

Bazille describes in correspondence with his family how he painted them back-to-back in

the spring of 1870.176 The version in the National Gallery was presumably painted first,

because the woman’s enormous bouquet includes early-blooming tulips and semi-open

peonies, while the Musée Fabre version (“ the Fabre Peonies”), for which a preliminary

study is extant, displays mainly peonies in luxuriant full bloom. 177 (Image 59)

175
David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1989: 166-167.
176
See Marandel’s translations of Bazille’s letters in an appendix to the exhibition catalog
Frederic Bazille and Early Impressionism.: Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1978.
177
Pittman (1998:179) suggests this sequence, and while the preliminary sketch of the Fabre
version, now in Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, may suggest the reverse order, it is possible

116
 Bazille’s figuring of the black model in his Peonies paintings retains key

modernizing elements of Manet’s representation of Olympia’s maid, while adding new

types of imagery that seem to advance his de-Orientalizing objectives. 178

The most important of Bazille’s revisions, one that greatly strengthens the revisionary

representation of the woman, is that she is the single figure in the image, and her

occupational status remains unclear. She is overtly a member of the Parisian working

class—her proffer of peonies from a wicker basket in the National Gallery version

suggests that she poses a flower vendor, while her flower-arranging task in the Fabre

version suggests that she depicts a maid. In both cases, however, as the sole figure

shown, she is the focal point of interest together with the flowers. No mistresses hover

to marginalize or diminish her status.

The figure not only retains the de-Orientalized attire of Olympia’s maid; her

clothing, featuring smart, stylish details, is perhaps even more modern; she is emblematic

of a culturally blended sartorial style. Her off-white dress--which does not bare her

breasts-- is crisply tailored and well-fitted. Bazille carefully details a high-buttoned,

form-fitting bodice that is cinched to reveal a slim waistline—very unlike the Manet

maid’s voluminous frock. Like the Olympia maid, she wears none of the stereotypical

black woman’s heavy gold jewelry; each model wears coral-hued earrings whose color

reflects the pinks in her bouquet but while Manet merely sketches them as pendulant

slashes, Bazille carefully crafts them, in the National Gallery version, to reveal their

that there was a second study that is now lost. Schulman, in a 2006 supplement to his Bazille
catalog raisonné, reproduces the sketch and notes that Bazille habitually made preliminary
sketches.
178
Pittman also cites Courbet’s The Trellis, an 1862 depiction of a young woman picking flowers,
as possible influence for the figure with flowers composition. (1998: 180-182).

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distinctive flower shapes, which are also seen in the Eakins study. While the earrings

may suggest Baudelairean references, Bazille maintains Manet’s representation of

cultural hybridity; the model repeats the combination of Antillaise headscarf and

European dress, in a style consistent with the fashions of the day. Bazille clearly does not

seek to present this model as “exotic,” as a comparison with precedent paintings and

popular imagery, earlier discussed, can attest.

Overall, the model is figured by Bazille with far more specificity, if less

modernist technique, than seen in Manet’s Laure, and with a level of careful detailing that

is more unambivalently portrait-like.179 Part of this is due to the greater clarity of

Bazille’s realist painting style, with a tighter brushstroke than Manet’s. Bazille’s

treatment of the black woman’s figure may signal a deliberate attempt to represent her

differently from Manet, and in his own style. Thus her headscarf pattern is clearly

delineated, her brown skin tones are blended and modeled to be distinct from the gray

background; the smallest details of her dress buttons and crenellated neck ruffle are

carefully articulated. The acolyte artist’s tribute to his mentor may also be a retort, an

assertion of his own individual style.

179
Valerie Bajou describes the young Bazille’s delight at having engaged the model, first as one
of the three who posed for his earlier La Toilette, and then continuing as the sole model for the
two Peonies paintings. He wrote to his mother that “J’ai eu de la chance, il y a trois femmes dans
mon tableau et j’ai trouvé trois modèles charmants, dont une négresse superbe.” One motivation
for his meticulous work may have been the cost of modeling fees –in the same letter he requests
money to pay them, noting that “if me faut absolument un peu d’argent, je suis ruiné par mes
modèles, cent francs de plus me sont indispensables.” Perhaps for this reason, he maintained an
intensive studio schedule. While working alone with the model for the Peonies paintings, he
writes in late February 1870 that “Je viens de finir ma journée, ma négresse sort de l’atelier, et je
me dispose à aller diner….” He notes that he is working “tout le jour, et tous les jours.” Bajou
quotes these excerpts in her monograph Frédéric Bazille (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud), 1993: 176.
See also Patrice Marandel’s previously cited 1978 English translations. Since Bazille did not
always date his letters, there are differences of attribution among the various publications of
them. Pittman provides a concordance of the differing versions (1998: 223-229)

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 Bazille’s Peonies paintings therefore mark the beginning of an Olympia-inspired

lineage of naturalistic portrayals of the black Parisian proletariat. This figure is quiet,

industrious, even unremarkable. She is simply part of the daily life of the city. It appears,

at first glance, that the artist has inscribed his black figure with none of the racial

stereotypes—immorality, uncleanliness, marginalization-- that are evoked in Manet’s

Olympia. Still., Bazille’s model, while displaying little of the ambivalence of Laure, is

an enigma, a representation of ambiguity,. Her facial expression is calm, without overt

emotion; she is attentive to her handling of the flowers. She is surrounded not by murky

shadows, a tensed black cat, a prostitute, but by beauty--a brilliantly colored array of lush

flowers.

But the presence of these flowers signals that, while Bazille has not repeated

Manet’s stereotypical tropes, he has set up allusions to them in a visually different way.

The profusion of the flowers, and their placement relative to the figure, make clear that

the Peonies paintings are not intended to be just portraits. In both the title and the image,

the black woman and the flowers are nearly equivalent, though she is named first, in

their appeal as focal points of interest. It is, therefore, the direct juxtaposition of these

dual pictorial elements, rather than either of them separately, that is the true subject of the

painting. And it is this juxtaposition that evokes racial and gender stereotypes, albeit in

inverse proportion to Manet’s Olympia. If Manet submerged his modernizing revision so

that the first impression is the stereotype, Bazille presents the de-Orientalized figure as

the first impression and sublimates stereotypical elements.180 If Manet’s Laure can be

seen as syntactically dense, but more diagrammatic in its ambiguity, Bazille’s Laure is

180
Pittman notes the absence of exoticizing objects in comparing the Peonies paintings with
precedent images of black women (1998: 183).

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syntactically replete, due to its more precise representation; yet the Bazille manifests its

own ambiguities and, therefore, aesthetic richness.181

Paintings of women with flowers are a well-established genre of European art,

and flowers have long symbolized beauty, luxury, romance and sensuality. Bazille’s

friend Degas’ 1865 Woman with Chrysanthemums is in this tradition in its depiction of a

bourgeois woman with a vase of flowers.182 (Image 59) As with Bazille’s peonies, the

flowers are of at least equivalent interest in both the title and the image, and the woman’s

facial expression is enigmatic.

What is new in Peonies is that the figure in the painting is a black woman, a

figure newly present in modern Paris, but whose image as an allegorical or Orientalist

Other has historically evoked very different connotations -- exoticism, foreign origins,

and the excessive carnal aspect of sensuality. For this reason, it can be argued that Bazille

does not de-Orientalize his black model, but instead re-Orientalizes her. This logic would

suggest that by juxtaposing the model with the flowers, and giving the flowers equal

spatial importance with her, Bazille equates her with the flowers, and with related ideas

of nature, the earth and primitivism. In the National Gallery of Art version, this is made

explicit, the flowers held beside the woman’s face functioning as an index, pointing to

her to establish this equivalence. She is thus, arguably, exoticized and relegated from

culture to nature by her proximity with the flowers in the same way that Olympia’s maid

is marginalized by the presence of the prostitute.

181
As discussed by Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art, 1976: 252-253.
182
Rishel notes the Bazille-Degas friendship (1978: 252) but was unsure if Bazille was aware of
this Degas painting; he also notes that Monet had first introduced Bazille to the “pleasure of
painting flowers,” and that Bazille painted several still lifes in the late 1860s but then decided to
include a figure in the Peonies paintings.

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 However, direct juxtapositions are often based on the premise that each element

helps to define the other. If Manet established a formal synchronicity between the

prostitute and the maid, Bazille does so between the woman and the flowers. Therefore,

the meanings of the flowers as well as the figure must be understood in order to deduce

Bazille’s intended characterization of the woman. There are many accounts of

widespread interest in the literary and symbolic references of flowers in late nineteenth

century Paris, which extended to Manet, Baudelaire and their circle of artists. 183 In

1860, Manet’s friend Baudelaire wrote to his friend the engraver Bracquemonde, who

was also a friend of Manet, stressing “the necessity to consult the books on analogies, the

symbolic language of flowers.” while designing a frontispiece depicting the Garden of

Eden for one of his books.184 Zola wrote of Manet’s portrait of his friend Berthe

Morisot, noting that she was shown wearing a corsage of violets because they

represented the modesty and reserve of her personality.185

Reff points out that romantic scenes in popular plays and novels often depicted

suitors offering bouquets to their lovers and flattering them with detailed explanations of

each flower’s meaning.186 Historian Beverly Seaton and other writers observe that as

183
Beth Brombert notes that strong interest in flower symbology cut across all social classes,
from demimondaines and artists to the conservative bourgeoisie, and that knowledge of the
meanings of specific flowers was so widespread that a bouquet of flowers was “as eloquent as a
love letter or poem.”(Brombert, 1997: 165). Reff provides a detailed account of the “vogue” for
flower symbology in France. In Manet, Olympia (New York: Viking Press), 1977: 105-111.
184
Reff, ibid., 1977: 103.
185
Reff, ibid., 1977: 106-107.
186
Reff, ibid., 1977:105. In relating flower symbology to the bouquet in Olympia, Reff discusses
specific popular plays, including productions staged by friends of Baudelaire and Manet. The
title of Manet friend Dumas fils’ play,La Dame aux Camelias, references common knowledge
that the camellia was an emblem of demimondaines like the play’s tragic heroine; when her maid

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early as 1809, numerous manuals describing the meanings of individual flowers and their

combinations in bouquets were printed, and that between 1830 and 1880, these texts

frequently went into multiple reprints to meet popular demand in France.187 Seaton notes

that the development of a European language of flowers is sometimes attributed to

French and British travelers in Turkey, and that much Western symbology is of Eastern

origin. 188 She reveals that British manuals were popular throughout the Victorian era.

Some blended adaptations from French manuals, but longstanding Francophobia led to

specifically English symbolism as well; however, the first flower manual published in

the United States was by a French-American author. While tracing the origins of specific

meanings is therefore difficult, France is considered to be the most extensive source.

Thus, in analyzing Bazille’s most direct juxtaposition of figure with flowers,

when the model holds up lush peonies beside her face in the National Gallery version, it

is useful to note that there have been literary associations of peonies with the healing

powers of physicians to the gods, and with tributes to the gods; the word’s etymology

derives from the Latin paeon, which means hymn of praise to a helping god. 189 Given

brings her a bouquet that does not include camellias, she rejects it. He suggests that this scene
was an inspiration for Olympia.
187
Seaton chronicles the initial publication of these books by minor or almanac publishers such
as Audot and Janet; as interest spread among the upper classes, the publisher Latour released a
flower symbology manual in 1840 that went into multiple reprints. In The Language of Flowers:
A History (Charlottesville and London: The University of Virginia Press), 1995: 78.
188
Ibid., 1995: 62, 80-84. Seaton provides histories by countries of the interest in and sources of
flower symbology. Reff concurs on the partially Eastern origins of the craze, which he says was
at its height in the 1860s, linking it to “the oriental practice of sending bouquets, or Selams, as
discreet messages of love and the Romantic habit of investing natural forms with human
significance.” (1977: 105).
189
Diana Wells traces the word’s origin to the name of Paeon, who was a pre-Apollonian
physician to the gods and was mentioned in the Iliad. It has also been the name of a song of
praise sung to the god Apollo. In 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names. (Chapel Hill, N.

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Bazille’s earlier medical studies and acolyte relationship with Manet, this meaning

supports the idea of the painting as a tribute to Manet, although it remains unclear

whether Bazille was known to have consulted flower manuals.190 The peony is also

associated with the moon goddess Selena, and therefore is supposed to be picked only at

night.191 This allusion could reinforce the reasons why Bazille chose the black model, as

a reference to Olympia’s maid, to figure in his tribute to Manet.

Other symbolic meanings of peonies, however, may project less conventional

associations onto the figure, since the peony can also symbolize shame, shyness and

uncondoned relationships; according to a Chinese legend repeated in Victorian manuals,

a young scholar who grows peonies falls in love with a servant girl who wills herself to

assume the flower’s form in order to remain with him because of societal censure of the

affair. 192

C.: Algonquin Press), 1997. Bobby J. West notes that Paeon, a son of Endymion, was said to be
the first to understand the peony’s medicinal powers, thus his name was used to mean healer;
Homer cites Paeon’s healing of Hades after Heracles wounded him in the Trojan War. In A
Contemplation Upon Flowers: Garden Plants in Myth and Literature (Portland: Timber Press),
1999: 279- 280.
190
Manet was known to keep a garden of peonies, his favorite flower, and white lilacs, at his
family’s Gennevilliers estate; he also made two series of paintings of peony still lifes, in 1864 and
1882 (Brombert 1997: 164-165). Bazille’s silence about possible knowledge of flower
symbology, despite in his extensive correspondence with his parents, should not be seen as a
conclusive indication that he did not consult them. Pittman notes that Bazille frequently did not
mention important aspects of his life in his letters; for example, although he and Manet clearly
moved in the same close circles, his letters give no indication of how they met or any details of
their ongoing friendship. (Pittman, 1998: 55-56).
191
West also notes that due to its significations of the moon, the peony is mentioned I in books
dating back to at least 1591 as a remedy for nervousness and insanity; in nineteenth century
England peony root beads were worn as amulets to of illness and evil spirits. See West, 1999:
282.
192
West, ibid., 1999: 353.

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 It is interesting to consider this allusion together with the literary meanings of

tulips, whose name, significantly, is a Latin translation of the Turkish word for turban. 193

Tulips are invariably cited, in French, English and American manuals, as symbols of

declarations of love.194 Seaton points out that this meaning is differentiated by the

specific colors seen in the National Gallery bouquet—red tulips symbolize a declaration

of love, while yellow tulips signal a hopeless love. 195 In his 1853 poem L’invitation au

voyage, Baudelaire wrote of a tulipe noire as an idealized woman with whom the dreamer

would travel to a country “ou tout vous ressemble.”196

This analysis of the literary symbolism of the flowers present in the Bazille

Peonies paintings suggests that Bazille’s Peonies paintings may not only be tributes to

Manet, but also a commentary referencing what is represented by the black female

whom both artists figured in their paintings. As Manet’s friend, he would probably have

been aware of Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress, as well as of the Baudelairean references

attributed to Olympia.

More important, however, is that these significations open up the suggestion that

the image of the black woman by the 1870s no longer carried a single signification, but

could project potential new meanings in modern Paris society. As the eroticized black

woman is transformed from the Other who exists wholly outside French society to a free

193
West, ibid, 1999: 281. West notes that tulips are native to Turkey, and European travelers
there perceived a resemblance to local headwear.
194
These meanings are consistently cited in flower symbology texts. See West (1999: 354) and
Seaton (1995: 196).
195
Seaton, ibid., (1995: 196-197).
196
Philip Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon Press),
1986: 115.

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working woman within the metropolis, art begins to represent this new figure in differing

roles comparable to her European counterparts. She may be a maid or flower vendor

working for a wage. Or she may become the next iteration of ethnic artist’s models who

often became artists’ long-term lovers —a role well established by the Belle Juive and

Italian artist’s models during the 1830s-1840s.197 She may be someone of foreign birth

who is secreted and indulged, but ultimately discarded, like the young painter’s mistress

in Balzac’s story, The Unknown Masterpiece. Or she may become a publicly

acknowledged long-time mistress of a prominent man, like Jeanne Duval.

She is simply a representation of a new racial reality within French society.

Cezanne’s Scipio, from a few years earlier, is another index; so are Toulouse Lautrec’s

images of the dancer Chocolat. (Image 64) Within the decade, Bazille’s friend Degas

painted Miss La-La at the Cirque Fernando, depicting a black French-German circus

entertainer at work in Paris. (Image 64) While Miss La-La’s brown skin is clearly

denoted, it seems by then to be merely physical description, with a still greater

sublimation, even an absence-- save for her work with animals-- of the old connotations.

Degas has rendered her with a grace and intelligence completely lacking in the popular

culture images, including posters and advertisements, for Miss La-La’s acts. (image 65)

She is just one of the many working women that Degas portrayed throughout his career.

Miss La-La therefore can be seen as an end bracket for a groundbreaking lineage of

iconographic representations that, beginning with Manet’s images of Laure, broke with

197
Susan Waller provides an extensive discussion of the changing fashions among artists for
models of varying ethnic types, in The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830-
1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate) 2006: 39. Bazille himself comments about the debate among family
and artist friends over the changing status of “Italian types” as models, in correspondence
translated by Marandel (1978: 178).

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the romanticization of empire and, in the spirit of painting modern life, immortalized the

formation of a new culturally hybrid black female working class and demimondaine

presence in late nineteenth century Paris. (Image 66)

126
CHAPTER THREE

Matisse at the Villa Le Rêve: Toward a New Baudelairean Muse

Introduction

If Frédéric Bazille’s Peonies paintings clarified Manet’s foundational imagery of

Laure as part of a free black presence in 1860s Paris, it was in the late work of Henri

Matisse (1869 -1954) that the legacy of Manet’s Laure was extended to reflect the

cosmopolitan modernity of 1940s France. It is a testament to the cross-generational

continuity of this legacy that the two artists, despite sharply contrasting artistic visions,

produced work linked by the same iconographic lineage.

This seemingly unlikely resonance between the urbane Manet and eden-seeking

Matisse is rooted in each artist’s profound engagement with different aspects of Charles

Baudelaire’s vision for the artist’s role in modern life. Manet exemplified Baudelairean

artist as flaneur, a member of Parisian café society who tirelessly roamed the city’s

streets observing life high and low. Matisse embraced the poet’s invitation to the voyage,

to a perpetual quest, by turns actual and imaginary, for the remote idyll-by-the-sea and a

life where all is “luxe, calme et volupté.”198

The evolution of Matisse’s imagery from nineteenth to twentieth century modes

of modernism is often chronicled primarily by monographic reviews of his paintings.

However, Matisse himself repeatedly insisted that he “did not distinguish between the

198
Baudelaire sets forth his beliefs about the ideal lifestyle and subject matter of modern artists in
The Painter of Modern Life (1863), while the longing for an escspe from the city to “luxe, calme
et volupté” is captured in his poem Invitation au Voyage, from the poetry collection Les Fleurs du
Mal (1857). Matisse engaged with Baudelaire’s poetry early in his career, most directly with his
1904 painting, named Luxe, Calme et Volupté in direct evocation of Invitation au Voyage.

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construction of a book and that of a painting.” 199 This chapter will trace this formal and

thematic evolution primarily through an examination of Matisse’s late graphic works,

specifically those posed by the Haitian model Carmen; it will also review parallel

developments in his work with a second black model, of Congolese-Belgian origin, in his

final series of paintings.

In the late 1930, Matisse accepted a commission to create illustrations for what

became a new edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal.200 This was during the same

year that Matisse traveled extensively, making three trips to New York, the first en route

to Tahiti. During each New York vistit, he met with major American collectors, including

Alfred Barnes, who commissioned Matisse to create the monumental Dancers murals for

installation at the Barnes Foundation. Although the Baudelaire project was delayed for

years by the Barnes murals and other major commitments, Matisse returned to the Fleurs

in 1943. From 1943-1946, Matisse made dozens of images of a New York –based Haitian

dancer, Carmen Helouis, during sessions at his Villa Le Rêve home and studio in the hills

above Nice. Matisse engaged Carmen to pose nine of his thirty-three Fleurs illustrations,

as well as the frontispiece; she also sat for stand-alone drawings as well as illustrations

199
Alfred Barr quotes from Matisse’s 1946 note “How I Made My Books” in Matisse: His Art
and His Public (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1951: 563.
200
The commission was from a Lyonnais group of bibliophiles known as Les XXX; they
requested that Matisse create an “edition de luxe” on a topic of his choice. Matisse decided to
illustrate the Baudelaire poems after several years of fitful deliberation, and did not begin work
on the illustrations until 1943. See Dominique Szymusiak’s account of the commission, as part
of her comprehensive essay about the project, in the essay “Poésie et Regard: Le Baudelaire de
Matisse” for the Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis Matisse et Baudelaire exhibition catalog
(1992: 35-36) and in the Claude Duthuit catalog raisonné (1988:130).

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for other book projects.201 This was the first time in his career when Matisse worked

with a black model on a sustained basis over a period of several years.

Some of Matisse’s images of Carmen, including for the Fleurs poem “À Une

Malabaraise,” appear to directly evoke the iconography of Manet’s depiction of Laure in

Olympia, itself a figure that, as discussed in Chapter Two, has been described as a

personification of the poem’s subject. (Images 72, 73) Other Carmen illustrations veer

decidedly toward wholly new and modern modes of portraying the black female figure –

a subject which Matisse had episodically depicted in his earlier Orientalizing and

primitivist periods. (Image 77)

This chapter therefore suggests that, through his Fleurs illustration work, Matisse

both evoked and moved beyond nineteenth-century imagery and re-presented the black

female subject as fully present within the modern world of his own mid-twentieth

century. In doing so, he advanced the modernizing flatness of his pictorial style through

his signature single-line drawing technique. Matisse’s Fleurs work is significant not only

in itself, but because it may have also informed both the subject and style of his

subsequent work in cut paper–including Jazz and Creole Dancer, and his final series of

easel paintings.

Like Manet, Matisse did not express an overt socio-political agenda specifically

with regard to the black female figure. His imagery appears instead to have emerged

largely from an artistic vision centered on a capacity to see and represent beauty without

201
Baseed on agendas detailing Matisse’s Villa le Rêve studio sessions provided by Wanda de
Guébriant, director of the Archives Matisse in Issy-les-Moulineaux, as well as dates of drawings
and other works separate from the Baudelaire project as recorded in the Duthuit catalogs
raisonneés and the Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis Matisse et Baudelaire exhibition
catalog, Matisse had studio sessions with Carmen in 1943, 1945, and during several separate
periods in 1946, including for sessions with the specific purpose of creating the Fleurs du Mal
frontispiece.

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regard to ethnicity, just as Manet had earlier represented urban modernity in all its

aspects.202 In this way, the iconographic legacy of Manet’s Laure can be seen as a

precedent for Matisse’s serially inventive late figural style, as he evolved an increasing

abstraction of the female figure into a non-naturalistic system of signs. This was a turn

that had no readily apparent influences or parallels within Matisse’s School of Paris

cohort. Matisse, in his 1940s work with black models, moved beyond primitivism in a

manner that Picasso never did.

This chapter reviews evidence suggesting that one influence for his expansive

realm of modernity may well have been Matisse’s encounters with leading figures of the

Harlem Renaissance during his four 1930s visits to New York. During these visits,

Matisse sat for a portrait by Carl van Vechten, a photographer and journalist who hosted

Harlem Renaissance salons, and who also knew and made portraits of many leading

Harlem Renaissance figures. (Image 81) The chapter suggests formal affinities between

the modernizing images among Matisse’s Baudelaire illustrations and the aesthetics of

Harlem Renaissance portraits that Matisse may have become aware of through Van

Vechten. It additionally presents evidence of visits by Matisse to black theater and

Harlem jazz performances while in New York, as opportunities for further exposure to

202
Matisse’s choice to work with models of diverse national origins may well have taken shape
due to his extensive travel, not only within Europe but also in North Africa, the United States,
Tahiti and the Caribbean. During his return voyage from Tahiti in 1930, Matisse made stops in
Panama, Martinique and Guadeloupe, as delineated in the chronology of the 1992 Museum of
Modern Art Matisse retrospective (Elderfield, 1992: 197). There is scant historical reference to
Matisse’s activities while in the Caribbean. But on May 30, 1946, during the period of his final
studio sessions with Carmen, Matisse wrote to his friend Aragon expressing reluctance to leave
the Villa le Rêve for an impending return to Paris because it reminded him of Tahiti and
Martinique: ”Je pars d’ici avec regret, lorsque je vois la nature si belle…. Je me retrouve à Tahiti
ou à la Martinique.” (Source: Wanda de Guébriant, director of the Archives Matisse in Issy-les-
Moulineaux)

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modern modes of representing women of color. It should be noted that this discussion of

Matisse’s engagement with artists of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz and the Haitian and

Congolese models is based in large part on documents –family correspondence,

photographs and personal travel and studio agendas –that have never been previously

published or historicized; this analysis therefore contains relatively few citations of

previous literature.

The chapter finally examines Matisse’s work, simultaneous to his later sessions

with Carmen, with a second black model, a biracial Congolese-Belgian woman whom

Matisse addressed in correspondence as Mme Van Hyfte, to create at least three 1946

paintings including Young Woman in White Dress, Red Background and l’Asie (Asia).

(Images 106, 115, 117) The depictions of the model in these paintings parallel the lack of

traditional modes of signifying ethnicity also seen in some of the Fleurs illustrations.

The chapter concludes that, through an evolution from the primitivist aesthetics

that informed his early drawing and painting style, and seemingly informed by travel and

his personal engagement with modern black culture, Matisse created portraits that

transformed archaic modes of representing black women. He thus participated in the

gradual modernization of black female imagery that became central to modernist art. He

thus can be seen as a mid-twentiteth century manifestation of an artistic vision, similar to

that of Manet, that assumes an equal humanity and capacity to figure beauty regardless of

ethnicity.

Among the several significant implications of this evolution, the dissertation

concludes that Matisse was unique among School of Paris painters, in that, motivated not

by overt social concerns but by his core artistic vision, Matisse transcended primitivism.

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Matisse moved beyond working with the aesthetic ideas of traditional African and

Oceanic sculpture, and embraced modernist modes of portraying black women to a

degree that was unique among his School of Paris cohort. Matisse is therefore, arguably,

the early twentieth-century French modernist most anticipatory of the subsequent work

by contemporary artists imbuing the black female figure with a restored subjectivity and

iconic stature that is increasingly less ethnically singular and more globally resonant.

Matisse’s Modernism: From Primitivism to the Cusp of Modernity

Matisse agreed to illustrate what became a new edition of Les Fleurs du Mal

during a period immediately after beginning his first sustained engagement with book

illustration, for a volume of poems by the nineteenth century poet Stéphane Mallarmé

(1842-1898).203 In many aspects, the drawing methods developed for these and his other

1930s-1940s book illustrations can be seen as a reprise of ideas that had led the young

Matisse to transcend his nineteenth century instruction and formulate a signature visual

style fully of twentieth century modernism.

In order to contextualize the innovative nature of Matisse’s 1940s images of

Carmen, it is important to understand that Matisse was, at the outset of his career, an

artist formed by the nineteenth century; his early depictions of the black female figure

were consistent with an Orientalizing approach to representations of non-western subject

matter. Matisse was born in 1869 in the northern France fabric-weaving town of Le

Cateau-Cambrésis. He later abandoned a fledgling law career and came to Paris in 1891

to train as an artist under Gustave Moreau and then Signac. This was a time when, for a

major contingent of Paris’ artistic avant-garde, the depiction of modern life in Paris had
203
As described by Barr, 1951: 244, 563.

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given way to a retreat from modernity. The fresh discoveries, by Manet and the

Impressionists, of an emergent modern way of life along Haussman’s broad new

boulevards was now decades old. Their marvel at life around them had congealed,

among Matisse’s cohort, to a disgust with the effects of the industrial revolution-–

congestion, pollution, social alienation. 204 The vivid colors of post-Impressionist

painting styles seemed overly optimistic in their representations of city life, and artists

increasingly depicted scenes from the smaller, less urban locales that appealed to those in

search of a simpler way of life, whether in the French provinces or farther afield. A key

concern of the avant-garde of Matisse’s formative years was a quest for a world apart

from the metropole, and for pictorial styles and subject matter reflecting these concerns

and lifestyles.

Based on ideas later theorized by Marcuse, this artistic retreat can be seen as a

form of ideology, in which social or man-made viewpoints are naturalized, and taken as

givens; as art becomes more separate from society and, like religion, becomes an

ideology.205 Vanguard artists admired by the young Matisse included Cezanne and Van

Gogh, who by the late nineteenth century were working principally in the South of

France, and Gauguin, who had spent time observing peasant religious practices in rural

204
See Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Baudelaire’s fascination yet disillusionment with modern
urban spaces in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939, translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken), 1968: 186-191.
205
See Marcuse’s argument that, in the avant-gardes, art took over the ideological function of
religion, in his 1937 ‘Affirmative Character of Culture,’ in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory.
(London: Free Association Books) 1988: 88-133. Peter Burger’s 1974 Theory of the Avant-
Garde articulates the refutation of art as ideology that can be seen to frame the twentieth century
modernist attempt to show that art is not autonomous, its meaning not determined by anything
inherent to the work, but by the framing elements –function, production and reception-that
comprise art as institution.

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Brittany, then traveled to Panama and Martinique, and left Paris for Tahiti in 1891.206

These artists’ work comprised primarily landscapes and figural groupings intended to

represent their perspectives on these locales. Van Gogh and Gauguin attempted to evoke

local forms of art and cultural expression, with vivid colors applied to sometimes

impastoed surfaces in rough, gestural brushstrokes; this helped forge a now-problematic

perspective that became known as avant-garde primitivism. On the one hand, the attempt

was to depict these locales, and the people who populated them, as pure, serene, apart

from the corruption of Europe; on the other hand, the sense of such domains as outside

civilization sustained the racialized hierarchies of culture used to justify empire.207

In this context, much of Matisse’s early work seeks to embrace these ideas in

order to establish himself as an artist, even as he moves beyond them. Matisse, by the

early 1900s a leader of the Fauvist (wild beast) move to work in vivid, nonnaturalistic

“colors of the jungle,” first came to wide attention with his 1904 painting, Luxe, calme et

volupté. (Imge 74) Here Matisse displays fidelity to the new content but also his move

beyond it. Luxe, calme et volupté comprises an idyllic depiction of a remote (and in part

imagined) locale. But it escapes the specific representations of individuals that Gauguin

specialized in, and depicts generic types instead. It is the idea of an idyll that is evoked by

the scene, rather than a pseudo-realistic depiction of it, that is of interest to Matisse.

206
John Elderfield discusses Matisse’s early admiration for these artists, whose work he viewed at
exhibitions and sometimes purchased, as well as his visual evocations of Baudelaire’s poem Luxe,
Calme et Volupté, in Henri Matisse: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art),
1992:32-36.
207
See discussion by Abigail Solomon Godeau of the philosophical contradictions of primitivism
-- Gauguin wrote that by going to Tahiti, Panama or Martinique, “civilization was falling away
from him” -- in her essay “Going Native: Paul Gauguin and the Invention of Primitivist
Modernism, “ in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Expanding Discourse:
Feminism and Art History, New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

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 This pictorial strategy represents Matisse’s early engagement with the poetry of

Baudelaire –taking its title from his Fleurs du Mal poem l’Invitation au voyage. Even as

Baudelaire had rhapsodized about the life of the flaneur artist out and about in modern

Paris, he had also, though dead by 1865, presaged 1890s concerns in discussing the

potentially destructive consequences of modernity. In his 1857 poem The Swan,“ he

suggests that “old Paris is no more,” and that modern life will ruin the past and create

hopelessness and alienation for the future.208 Moreover, Luxe represents an early effort

by Matisse, who first began to read poetry during an extended adolescent recuperation

from appendicitis, to render this Baudelairean scene as a visualization of the ideas of

Mallarmé –specifically his belief that artistic expression is based on suggestion, not

illusionism. Referring, during an interview, to a nearby table, Matisse asserts that he does

not want to paint the table, but to capture the emotion it evokes.209 In depicting

Baudelaire’s dreamlike scene, Matisse seeks to represent Mallarmé’s view that to suggest

an object is the dream of the artist; that it is the effect that an object produces, not its

actual appearance, that the artist seeks to capture. Thus, Matisse uses nonspecific figural

and facial types to suggest the idea of a sea-side idyll; he uses pastel colors to create non-

naturalistic flesh and landscape tones. He intends to conjure the idea of a reverie, a place

apart that is as much a creation of the mind as it is an actual locale. With this pictorial

symbolism, Matisse thus formulates his own approach to a nineteenth century subject in a

way that escapes nineteenth century ideology.

208
See Walter Benjamin’s further discussion of Baudelaire’s prescient sense of alienation, and of
an increasing inability to authentically experience life in the modern city due to the myriad
consequences of industrialization, in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939: 192-193.
209
Jack Flam excerpts Matisse’s 1908 discussion of his efforts to visualize Mallarmé’s textual
ideas in “Matisse, “Notes of a Painter,” in Matisse on Art (Berkeley: University of California
Press), 1995: 30-43.

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 By the turn of the twentieth century, with an influx of sculpture from the French

colonies, and in particular Africa, Matisse also became a leading figure for the Fauvists, a

group of artists who developed a synthesis of the Orientalizing nineteenth century

content with mask aesthetics. Through their use of an unusually bright or “wild” color

palette was based on an imagined affinity with the aesthetics of tribal art, the Fauves

became one of the two main branches of primitivism within the School of Paris. One arm

comprised a cohort led by Picasso and Braque as the inventors of the Cubist faceting

treatment of images, while Matisse and the Fauves sought to meld western and African

influences in the use of color and line. 210

Matisse’s early works of sculpture mirror this synthesis, as well as a continuity o

his semiotic approach to image-making, focused on the evocation of a reality more than

on the reality itself. Matisse’s first known depiction of women of color , his 1906 Two

Women, was from a photograph, not the live model. (Image 76) The motives behind

Matisse’s reimagining of the photograph are revealed by an account of his visit, in 1900,

to the Paris studio of the then legendary sculptor Rodin. 211 When Matisse showed him

some of his sculptural drawings, Rodin disliked them and suggested that Matisse add

detail to more fully capture the figures –advice Matisse ignored. Thus in Two Women,

Matisse omitted details of jewelry and hairstyle, and did not attempt to mimic the natural

molding of the women’s nude bodies. For this work, his only sculpture of a figural group,

210
James Clifford, in commentary on MoMA’s “Primitivism” exhibition, which heavily relied on
notions of affinities in African and Western art, delineates the problematic aspects of suggesting
such a common essence between the tribal and the modern and dismissing the practice as merely
a “way of appropriating otherness…for constituting non-western arts in its (the west’s) own
image” in “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,” in Art in America, April 1985:165-166.
211
As recounted by Alfred Barr in Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museum of
Modern Art), 1951: 52, 531.

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he seemed instead drawn by the formal structure of mirroring images, with the objective

of making a work that would draw the viewer into a circumnavigation around the object,

a break with the primarily frontal work of Rodin.212 Likewise, with The Back, a 1909-

1931 series inspired by the proportions of African sculpture, he again removes detail, abd

with a flattening objective, blurs the distinction between the modeling of the back and the

treatment of the background.

Contemporaneous works of painting revealed a second break with the past. When

Matisse traveled in 1906 to North Africa, he, like Gauguin, followed the primitivist

impulse to seek out “local” women of color as models to create “exotic” scenes. But

Matisse appears not to have overtly engaged in Gauguin’s sexualization of primitivism;

his interest was more to extend his formal visual language to new and varied subject

matter. 213

Likewise with Matisse’s most famous Fauvist painting influenced by African art,

the 1907 Blue Nude: Souvenir of Biskra, the nude body is angular and pictorially

flattened. (Image 73, 74) Even with the strong Fauvist color palette, Matisse again

privileges formal innovation over explicit sexualization of this primitivized nude,

drawing the eye to the masklike face and the alternation between the flattening of flesh

tones and the distortion of bodily proportions, in particular at the hip.

212
Alfred Barr, who referred to this sculpture as Two Negresses, suggests affinities with, or
perhaps influences from direct observation of, sculptural styles from Cameroon and Ivory Coast,
in Matisse: His Art and His Public, (New York: Museum of Modern Art), 1951: 138-140.
213
Solomon-Godeau (1992:310, writes of Gauguin’s work as implicated with an “explicit linkage
of the natural and the Edenic culture of the tropics to the sensual and carnal –nature’s plenitude
reflected in the desirability and compliance of “savage women,” and suggests that the move away
from this was a dividing line between nineteenth and twentieth century modernists.

137
 There was clearly some vacillation in Matisse’s synthesis of Mallarmé-inspired

evocation with Orientalizing depiction, as in his rarely seen 1912 painting Portrait de la

Mulatresse Fatma, his only known painting of a black female subject before the 1940s.
214
(Image 74) While clearly rendering the model’s face with the flattening of a mask, he

depicts her North African attire and cross-legged seated position with the hyper-detail

often used in mid-nineteenth century Orientalist painting to project an “accurate”

representation for what might well be a partially imagined scene.215

We thus see, even in this work as one Matisse’s early representations of

exoticized women in scenes of empire, the emergence of a revisionary artistic vision that

engaged with the values and ideas of both Mallarmé and Baudelaire. The work is a

manifestation of his nineteenth-century artistic training and heritage, but principally in

twentieth-century formalist terms, rather than in Orientalist thematics and scenarios.

Alastaire Wight suggests that, for Matisse, the very notion of modernity was implicated

with a sense of a need to represent an ethnic hybridity that, for many scholars of the

period, was perceived as a break with the ethnic separation of the previous era.216 The

214
Research staffers at the Archives Matisse in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in showing me this image,
spoke of Matisse’s comments in correspondence from North Africa that he went to a brothel to
retain Fatma as a model, and that at the behest of both the model and the brothel owner, he
worked in a back room well away from the view of customers.
215
Linda Nochlin discusses this practice, and its artificially contrived construction of colonial
settings to falsely imply that traditional cultures were, in the absence of European oversight,
immutably resistant to modernity. in “The Imaginary Orient” in The Nineteenth-Century Visual
Culture Reader, Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds., (New York: Routledge)
2004: 289-299.
216
Alastair Wright discusses, for example, the negative commentary on Matisse’s Blue Nude in
the context of theories in some French intellectual circles at the time that racial mixing “was
“what made the modern period modern.” He notes that, while many writers expressed dismay at
this seemingly irreversible development in European culture, there was no evidence that Matisse
himself shared this dismay; in a 1915 letter, “Matisse himself would note, though without any
apparent distaste, the mingling of the races –English, Moroccans, Senegalese and the Maori of

138
modernity of Matisse can also be found in his striving for an apartness between the

subject and its representation; an effort to engage with the subject in order to render

effect and emotion, including his own response to the subject, rather than attempting

actual depiction. First seen in his early painting and sculpture, this impulse achieves its

fullest modernity when he returns to this subject matter in the 1940s.

Tradition and Modernity: The Fleurs du Mal Illustrations

For much of the 1920s, Matisse focused primarily on paintings, very often of

single female figures posed as odalisques or costumed from his extensive collection of

clothing and fabrics from throughout the world.217 By the end of the decade, Matisse,

professing an exhaustion with painting, decided that he needed fresh content and, after a

period of travel, he turned to his first extensive engagement with illustrated books. Yet

his drawings and graphic work for these illustrations show a continuity of the artistic

vision that had shaped his earlier painting and sculpture, for both subject matter and

compositional values.

In particular, by the 1940s we see a return of the black female model, in

representations that initially recapitulate his blend of traditional content rendered in a

modern way, reflecting the artistic principles of Mallarmé. But then, just as Matisse

earlier transcended Gauguin and Rodin, he moves during this period beyond his twentieth

century cohort, Picasso and the School of Paris, in creating an extraordinary and singular

vision of an expansive realm of feminine beauty.

New Zealand --among the Allied troops on the quay in Marseilles during the First World War.”
In Matisse and the Subject of Modernism. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2004:183,
263.
217
For a groundbreaking exposition of Matisse’s use of fabrics to project tradition through
modern compositional devices, see the Matisse and His Fabrics catalog by Rebecca Rabinowitz
for a 2004 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibiton.

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 Matisse’s illustrations for Fleurs du Mal can be seen to constitute a graphic

version of the compositional and thematic values –the idea of the “place apart” -- first

explored in Luxe, calme, et volupté. The setting within which Matisse installed himself

to create these illustrations supports that assumption. The Villa Le Rêve, where Matisse

resided and worked from 1943-1949, sits in the hills above Nice, just outside the adjacent

village of Vence. Though compact, it is an idyllic location, surrounded by towering

century-old palm trees, and set within a garden full of cypresses, olive trees and flowers

that bloomed year-round. (Image 69)218 “I thought I was back in Tahiti or Martinique,”

Matisse wrote, as previously discussed, in a letter describing the villa to his friend

Aragon.219 Filling his studio with favorite chairs, vases and textiles that had served as

props for many previous paintings and graphic work, he hung the walls of his bedroom

with Polynesian tapas and Kasai textiles from the Belgian Congo.

It was here that Carmen Helouis, a New York –based Haitian dancer, came to

pose for dozens of drawings hat Matisse made in 1946 for the Fleurs lithographs.220

(Images 97-99) The villa’s subtropical ambience underscores the idea of resonances

218
Marie-France Boyer, Paris editor of the English magazine The World of Interiors, documented
Matisse’s life and work at the villa, as well as its interiors, in her lavishly illustrated book Matisse
à la Villa Le Rêve (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts and, in English, London: Thames and
Hudson), 2004. Matisse moved to the villa in June 1943, to escape Nice at a time during the war
when there was a risk of bombing. Aged 74 and in poor health in the aftermath of cancer surgery,
he settled in with his young studio assistant and frequent model, Lydia Delectorskaya, a Russian
refugee who was by all accounts an extremely dedicated personal aide to Matisse. Possibly in a
deft nod to Baudelaire, Matisse owned two cats at the villa, named Coussi and Minouche.
219
In Matisse’s May 30, 1946 letter to Aragon, text provided to me by the Archives Matisse.
220
I found just two publications, (Boyer, Duthuit) that mention Carmen by her first name. I have
never seen her surname published. I was given her full name, together with never-published
photographs of Carmen, during my September 7, 2012 research session at the Archives Matisse
in Issy-les-Moulineux, by Wanda de Guébriant. I separately noted her name on a U.S. Customs
department ship manifest.

140
between Matisse’s portrayal of Carmen in the Fleurs poem À Une Malabaraise and that

of Manet’s Laure of Olympia. In this poem, which captures both offensive exoticizing

stereotypes and Baudelaire’s observed reality of life in Paris, the poet laments the

departure of a woman from Malabar to Paris, predicting that her best hope for earning a

living there may be to ”sell your charms.” 221

To a Malabar Woman

Your feet are as slender as your hands and your hips

Are broad; they’d make the fairest white woman jealous;
To the pensive artist your body’s sweet and dear;
Your wide, velvety eyes are darker than your skin.

In the hot blue country where your God had you born
It is your task to light the pipe of your master,
To keep the flasks filled with cool water and perfumes,
To drive far from his bed the roving mosquitoes,
And as soon as morning makes the plane-trees sing, to
Buy pineapples and bananas at the bazaar.
All day long your bare feet follow your whims,
And, very low, you hum old, unknown melodies;
And when evening in his scarlet cloak descends,
You stretch out quietly upon a mat and there
Your drifting dreams are full of humming-birds and are
Like you, always pleasant and adorned with flowers.

Why, happy child, do you wish to see France,

That over-peopled country which suffering mows down,
And entrusting your life to the strong arms of sailors,
Bid a last farewell to your dear tamarinds?
You, half-dressed in filmy muslins,
Shivering over there in the snow and the hail,
How you would weep for your free, pleasant leisure, if,
With a brutal corset imprisoning your flanks,
You had to glean your supper in our muddy streets

221
The Introduction and Chapter Two of this dissertation include a discussion of the problematic
aspects of the this text including, on the one hand, some critics’ ambivalent or dismissive
treatment of this and other Baudelaire poems for their allusions to the stereotypical exoticized
black muse, and on the other, black female contemporary artists’ work with this material in
efforts to recuperate the subjectivity of Jeanne Duval. All quotations from the Fleurs text are
from my copy of a volume Les Fleurs du Mal with a “fac-simile” of the Matisse publication.

141
And sell the fragrance of your exotic charms,
With pensive eye, following in our dirty fogs
The sprawling phantoms of the absent coco palms!

—Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857), translated by William Aggeler (Fresno: Academy

Library Guild, 1954)

Françoise Cachin of the Musée d’Orsay (see Chapter Two) suggests that Manet

depicts Laure in Olympia to personify the Malabaraise, clad in “pale filmy muslin,” after

her arrival in Paris. (Image 72) Matisse, conversely, seems to depict her before she

departs for Paris –her hair is ornamented, but not covered by her headscarf, its natural

texture on view presumably less acceptable in Manet’s Paris, as it is rarely seen in that

period’s images of black women in the metropole. There are obvious representational

similarities –the headscarf, hoop earrings, jewelry –between Matisse’s Malabaraise, and

several other Carmen illustrations, and Laure of Manet’s Olympia. The fact that Matisse

placed most of the Carmen images opposite the Fleurs poems known to have been

inspired by Baudelaire’s mulatto mistress Jeanne Duval, thought to have introduced

Manet to Laure, further strengthens the implication of a continuity into the twentieth

century of associations between this poetry and Duval.222

222
Matisse’s choice of the poems posed by Carmen indicate that Matisse had an erudite
knowledge of Les Fleurs du Mal. Five of her nine poses (beyond the frontispiece) were for
poems from the so-called Jeanne Duval cycle, a cluster of eighteen poems extending from
Parfum exotique to Je te donne ces vers. Jacques Dupont describes this cycle in Baudelaire:
Les Fleurs du mal (Paris: GF Flammarion), 2004:13. Carmen’s other four poses were for Fleurs
poems outside that well-known group, though some still signified women of color. These
included Malabaraise and À une dame creole. But Carmen also posed the poem Bien loin d’ici,
whose connotations are less overt. All three poems are linked by Reff to Laure of Manet’s
Olympia. (Reff, 1977: 91-92). But it is a more obscure fact that, as Griselda Pollock points out,
some earlier scholars, including Claude Pichois, believed that Jeanne Duval was really called
Berthe. (Pollock, 1999: 262); Matisse poses Carmen for the poem Berthe’s Eyes. Yet Matisse
shows his penchant to avoid complete submission to predictable types; Carmen also sits for
Chanson d’après-midi and for the frontispiece of the entire Fleurs du Mal volume, and neither of
these connotes any specific ethnicity.

142
 Still, Matisse exerted his own artistic vision over the Baudelaire poems, on both

formal and thematic matters. If Manet may have darkened Laure’s background to the

point of nearly obscuring her, Matisse renders her primarily in white spaces, bound by a

minimum of black lines. A single curving line, definitive of Matisse’s distinctive

drawing style, frames her entire face. Her neck and shoulders are captured by just three

more lines. We also see, hen the drawing is juxtaposed with an actual photograph of

Carmen, the influence of Mallarm aesthetics emphasizing suggestion, instead of

depiction, a style previously displayed in Fauvist colors in Matisse’s Luxe, calme et

volupté, and now rendered in graphic black-and-white. There is no attempt to replicate

the model’s features; Matisse merely denotes them. Almond shapes formed from

unbroken lines denote the eyes, but they have no lids or lashes; the eyebrows are lines,

not a naturalistic arc of tiny, meticulously drawn-in hairs. The beads of the necklace are

suggested by a series of swirls, but no visible connecting thread holds them together. The

ruffled flowery pattern of the blouse shown in the photographs is suggested here with just

wispy squiggles.

Printmaking was Matisse’s primary means of “demonstrating his working

process, the character of his vision, and the way his drawing transformed what he

observed.223 Matisse himself wrote that, wheteher working on a paintin or a book, he

always chooses “to work from the simple to the complex, yet always ready at any

moment to reconceive in simplicity.” 224 The Fleurs book illustrations thus exemplify

223
Wiliam Lieberman provides a comprehensive overview of Matisse’s motivations and approach
to printmaking in his 1956 essay “Matisse: 50 Years of His Graphic Art, “ reprinted in Matisse as
Printmaker: Works from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, by Jay McKean Fisher, exh
cat, New York: American Federation of Arts, 2009:15-31.
224
Alfred Barr (1951:563) quotes from Matisse’s 1946 note “How I Made My Books.”

143
Matisse’s project of pictorially rendering the drawn image as autonomous from its

source. The graphic black and white, due to its absence of color, made this perhaps even

more starkly manifest than had the earlier paintings. Matisse discusses his admiration for

Mallarmé’s own use of white space, in favorite poems such as Le Hasard, likening his

placement of lines on a white page to the words on a page in a Baudelairean or Mallarmé

poem, using the black line to define and bound space much like words.225 Matisse

guides the eye, with carefully developed patterns of lines, to roam back and forth on the

page, a process of perception similar to reading a text, using bottom cropping to extend

the image beyond the confines of the page.

A second powerful motivation for Matisse’s devotion to book illustration was his

desire to work in series. Throughout the process of illustrating Fleurs, including during

multiple sessions with Carmen, Matisse routinely made several drawings before arriving

at a final version for the lithograph. 226 (Images 95-97)227 Matisse considered all of the

225
Matisse comments on his efforts to visualize Mallarmé’s approach to poetry in Flam, Matisse
on Art, 1995.
226
Carmen’s 1946 sessions with Matisse, including the different stages of his preparation of a
single drawing, were documented in twenty-two photos taken by Hélène Adant, whose archives
are in the Kandinsky Library at the Centre Pompidou. Several Adant photos appear in the book
Matisse à la Villa Le Rêve (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des Arts and London: Thames and
Hudson, 2004), by Marie-France Boyer, Paris editor of the English magazine The World of
Interiors; Boyer documented Matisse’s life and work at the villa, as well as its interiors.
227
The definitive source on the process of creating the Fleurs illustrations is the 1992 exhibition
catalogue for Matisse et Baudelaire, by the Musée Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambrésis. (1992: 29) It
notes that six drawings were completed before Les Yeux de Berthe was finalized; between three
and five were made for several other illustrations. The catalog includes a comprehensive account
of the genesis and development of Matisse’s illustrations for Les Fleurs du Mal, and as stated in
the acknowledgements, was based on the recollections of Matisse’s longtime studio assistant
Lydia Delectorskaya. While the catalog contains limited iconographic analysis of the works
themselves, it provides invaluable contextual information detailing the chronology from
commission to publication, the four principal models, and the technical difficulties that led
ultimately to the work being published based on photographs of the original drawings.

144
final drawings selected for the volume to collectively be a single work. As Fisher notes,

“What made Matisse so devoted to the illustrated book format was that it enabled him to

publish images in a sequence. He wanted them seen together…[and] would be

distressed that publishers and dealers have broken them up.”228

Despite these formal qualities, Matisse often pointed out that it is the intangible

factor of inspiration that, in the end, imbues works with the special quality of art; an

artwork must not only suggest its subject, but it must capture the emotional response of

the artist to the subject. Matisse describes this essential improvisatory gesture as an

“enriched accord –I almost wrote musical accord” with the other compositional elements

–black, white, color, typography.229 The need for inspiration best explains Matisse’s

intensive working sessions with the live model: “What interests me most is neither still

life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is that which permits me to express my so-to-

speak religious awe towards life.” He also points out that “They [the models]

communicate an immediacy in recording sensation and the process through which a

different conclusion –a new visual synthesis –is achieved.“ 230

One aspect of Matisse’s emotional engagement with Fleurs was his selection of

the specific poems for illustration, as well as the models he would pose for each. In both

matters, Matisse revealed a highly original vision for his project that disregarded previous

conventions –again a replay of his youthful rejection of Gauguin and Rodin as role

models. His choice of poems for illustration was a reversal of nearly 70 years of

228
Fisher, 2009:29.
229
Barr, 1951: 563. Matisse has made the analogy between artmaking and music elsewhere,
referring to the relations of color tonalities of his Dancers murals as “rhythms,” suggesting that
this relationship can change actual colors to other colors.
230
Fisher, ibid.

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tradition, during which several artists, including Odile Redon, Jacob Epstein, Gustave

Rodin and Georges Rouault have illustrated Fleurs. All of these artists’ illustrations

invariably relate to the sinister, even morbid aspects of the poems; Matisse took an

different approach.231

As his daughter Marguerite Duthuit wrote, “His Baudelaire selections confirm

that, in Les Fleurs du Mal, the painter excluded the mal in favor of the fleurs. We find

images of light, the beauty of the senses, aromas, flowers –in short, an atmosphere of

‘luxe, calme, et volupté’ reminiscent of Matisse’s 1904 painting.” 232 The enchantment of

the Villa Le Rêve setting may well have contributed to Matisse’s decision to select those

poems most referencing idyllic beauty. With a few exceptions, including Remords

posthume as modeled by Carmen, Matisse omitted the poems focused on disillusionment

and death. He included only one poem, Le lethé, from those banned after Baudelaire’s

prosecution at an 1857 obscenity trial. Instead, he was guided, as Duthuit put it, by the

evocations of beauty, passion and serenity that the selected poems elicited from him.

Matisse moreover did not precisely match the poems to models whose

physiognomies fit the female type generally assumed to be the poems’ subject –the

femme fatale, fully aware of the power of her beauty, seductive yet destructive. Carmen,

described by Boyer as always laughing, presents herself even in dance costume as a

231
These artists were identified by a listing on an unofficial Baudelaire website www.henri-
matisse.net/poetry; their illustrations were then reviewed on various museum and other sites.
232
Lydia Delectorskaya made a similar comment, in the 1992 Matisse et Baudelaire catalog,
noting that even for his drawings of the flower motifs, Matisse had no interest in the sinister,
exotic flowers found in other artists’ illustrations, but instead selected luxuriant local blooms.
Still, he abstracted the flowers in his drawings much as he did the human figure. Marguerite
Duthuit and her husband authored a definitive catalog raisonné for Matisse’s prints. In Henri
Matisse: Catalog raisonné de l’oeuvre grave gravé établi avec la collaboration de Françoise
Garnaud by Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse and Claude Duthuit et al (Paris: Imprimerie Union)
1983: 413.

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straightforward, unassuming personality. (Image 100) She was one of four principal

models the artist chose for Fleurs, including a Dutch war refugee Annelies, Menette

Palomarès from Spain, and his Russian assistant Lydia. Carmen’simages were the most

frequently used, with nine of the 33 illustrations plus the frontispiece. Even as he

matched almost all of Carmen’s illustrations to poems in the suite known to have been

inspired by Jeanne Duval, he assigned other Duval suite poems, for example, Dame

Creole to the blond Russian Lydia.233

The Modernizing Turn: Toward A New Baudelairean Muse

All of these factors of design and creative process combine to make the Matisse

Fleurs illustrations arguably the most extraordinary and original of all artists’ illustrations

for these poems. But perhaps its most remarkable iconographic development is the

evolving style with which Carmen is portrayed across her nine illustrations and the

frontispiece. It is here that we see the same type of breakthrough imagery in Matisse’s

illustrations that we saw at the start of his career with his move beyond of sexualized

imagery of Orientalist subjects. While the Malabaraise illustration can be argued to be a

direct extension of representational modes for black women dating back to Olympia,

other Carmen images manifest a veer away from it.

The poem Les Yeux de Berthe (Berthe’s Eyes) for example, is one of Baudelaire’s

very few pure paens to beauty, almost free of his more typical femme fatale insinuations:

Bertha's Eyes

You can hold in contempt the most famous eyes,

Beautiful eyes of my child, whence filters and flees

233
As discussed in the Musée Matisse Le Cateau –Cambrésis exhibition catalog 1992: 26.

147
A certain something as kind, as sweet as the Night!
Beautiful eyes pour your charming shadows upon me!

Urge eyes of my child, adored mysteries,

You greatly resemble those magical grottos
In which, behind the heap of lethargic shadows,
Unknown treasures sparkle indistinctly!

My child has eyes, dark, profound and immense

Like you, vast Night, lighted like you!
Their fires are those thoughts of Love mingled with Faith
Which sparkle in their depths, voluptuous or chaste.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Berthe is also a tribute to a beauty of no clearly specified ethnicity, unlike the

Malabaraise.234 Matisse seems to discern this nuance and to reflect it in his rendering of

Carmen for Berthe, which is very different from that of La Malabaraise in ways large

and small. (Image 77) Berthe, drawn in an even more sparsely detailed manner than La

Malabaraise, is a small masterpiece of single-line drawing. The entirety of the model’s

face, neck and shoulders is denoted by just three deftly drawn lines. The curly hair over

her forehead is depicted with just enough detail to be evocative of the underlying reality,

as seen in photographs of Carmen (Image 78). More obviously, the model does not wear

the ubiquitous headscarf or hoop earrings used to signify “black woman” in precedent

imagery. Her lips are full; for the discerning viewer this alone might suggest that she is

black, but this ethnicity is not as legible as with La Malabaraise. This style of imagery in

artistic depictions of black women is quite singular within Matisse’s Paris School cohort,

a rare portrayal of a black woman that sublimates her ethnicity instead of trumpeting it.

234
As previously noted, Griselda Pollock and others have surmised that Berthe was Jeanne
Duval’s stage name while she was working as an actress in Montparnasse at the time that
Baudelaire met her. See “A Tale of Three Women: Seeing in the dark, seeing double, at least
with Manet,” in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories
(London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

148
 Berthe is deceptive in its apparently effortless simplicity; Matisse made six

drawings of Carmen, more than for any other Fleurs poem, before arriving at this final

version.235 As Hanhloser writes, “the late graphic work consists almost exclusively of

faces, evoked with the minimum number of strokes… this looks like an obsession and

only becomes comprehensible when the faces are seen in conjunction –the observer must

examine the works in a series in order to understand Matisse’s aims and ways of working.

Only then does one begin to understand the complexity of these apparently simple line

sketches, seeing the infinite creative imagination that lies within them.“236

The sublimation is still more pronounced in Remords posthume, which illustrates

a poem with a more ambiguous message (Image 80):

Posthumous Remorse

When you will sleep, O dusky beauty mine,

Beneath a monument fashioned of black marble,
When you will have for bedroom and mansion
Only a rain-swept vault and a hollow grave,

When the slab of stone, oppressing your frightened breast

And your flanks now supple with charming nonchalance,
Will keep your heart from beating, from wishing,
And your feet from running their adventurous course,

The tomb, confidant of my infinite dreams

(For the tomb will always understand the poet)
Through those long nights from which all sleep is banned, will say:

"What does it profit you, imperfect courtesan,

Not to have known why the dead weep?"
— And like remorse the worm will gnaw your skin.

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

235
In Matisse et Baudelaire, exh.cat., Musée Matisse, le Cateau-Cambrésis, 1992:29.
236
In Matisse: The Graphic Work, New York: Rizzoli, 1989.

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 Like Berthe, the subject’s ethnicity is ambiguous, but still more so. The line along

her left cheek, over a hint of curls at the temple, is just the slightest suggestion of a

headscarf, or perhaps a strand of hair. The facial affect is of equal interest, the pensive

demeanor relevant to the poem, but also autonomous of it. This portrayal, on a

standalone basis, could simply be seen as a deftly drawn image of an elegant and poised

woman in 1940s Nice, who may, or may not, be of African descent, as she contemplates,

perhaps, something a friend has just said, or an object in a shop. She is a mid-twentieth

century iteration of the culturally hybrid modernity first seen emerging in 1860s Paris.237

Matisse thus appears to have conceived Fleurs with depictions of Carmen derived from

by-then formulaic representations of black women emanating from Manet’s Laure (and

earlier). But he then transformed this imagery, through the explorations of his single-line

drawing style, to create a fresh way of imaging this visage, as not just a beautiful woman

of color, but as a beautiful woman, period.

We therefore see a series of images by Matisse, in both graphic works and

paintings, in which Carmen is presented as emblematic of cosmopolitan modern

femininity, a sharp turn for an artist rooted in first Orientalism and then primitivism, and

apparently without precedent or peer within Matisse’s School of Paris cohort. This raises

the question of whether other stimuli or influences may have inspired Matisse’s

evolution from La Malabaraise to Berthe. One possibility requires a review of Matisse’s

little-known time spent in Harlem during his New York visits in the early 1930s, the

same period that he accepted the commission that led to his Fleurs illustrations.

237
Chapter One of this dissertation includes a discussion of the evolving cultural hybridity of
black populations in France, in the 1995 essay collection Penser la Creolité, edited by Maryse
Condé.

150
Matisse and the “New Negro” Aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance

In 1930, feeling the need to seek fresh ideas, Matisse set out for a five-month trip

around the world. His ultimate destination was Tahiti, which he had long dreamed of

visiting; in addition, he had many important American collectors and had been invited to

be a judge for the prestigious Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh, a

competition for which he had won first prize in 1927.238 His route would take him to the

United States for the first time before departing San Francisco for the Pacific crossing.

Matisse accepted invitations to visit several collectors in New York, the Cone Sisters in

Baltimore and Alfred Barnes in Merion, Pennsylvania, before traveling cross-country to

San Francisco and boarding a trans-Pacific ocean-liner for Tahiti.

While Matisse monographs focus on chronicling the artist’s dealings with

collectors, his biographer Hilary Spurling provides a more intimate glimpse into

Matisse’s personal reactions to his travels, especially in New York City, based on

Matisse’s letters to his wife and friends. She informs us that, on arrival for his first New

York visit, on the evening of March 4, 1930, he saw Manhattan, while sailing up the

Hudson, as “this block of black and gold mirrored by night on the water;” and was

“bewitched, electrified,” by the city.239 Spurling informs us that, between press

interviews and visiting private collections and the Metropolitan Museum (“the old

pictures are dubious or mediocre, the modern ones extremely good,” he wrote), Matisse

embraced a whirlwind schedule. He “rose at dawn to watch the sun rise over the

238
Alfred Barr recounts Matisse’s four visits to the United States, detailing the Carnegie jury,
Barnes Dancers commission, and New York collector visits. In Matisse: His Art and his Public,
1951:219-220.
239
As described in Spurling’s biography Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse –The
Conquest of Color 1909-1954, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005: 305.

151
skyscraper cityscape, enjoyed his first ice cream soda on Park Avenue, went up to the top

of the Woolworth Building, and saw a powerful black play in Harlem; apart from

Broadway (“absolutely infernal, hideous), he loved everything. “240 While there are

other detailed accounts of Matisse’s reactions to New York, Spurling provides the only

known published mention that Matisse had seen a black play.241

With those two lines of text, it was possible to seek a full transcript of the cited

letter, in order to learn more about Matisse’s visit to a black play. His description was

especially interesting given his antipathy to Broadway:242

7 mars : Lettre à Amélie « Ce soir je dîne chez Val avec Mad. Reed --- hier j’ai eu journée
chargée, le matin j’ai été au building Woolworth, 60 étage…. Ensuite dîné dans un nouveau
restaurant qu’on appelle Marigny… Ensuite j’ai été voir une pièce nègre très épatante.
Nègre sérieux. C’est l’histoire de l’ancien testament tel que se le représente un nègre. Très
bien joué, très bons décors. Epatant.243 (Image 91)

240
Spurling, Ibid., 2005:486. In a footnote, Spurling attributes the quote to a March 1930 letter
from Matisse to his wife Amélie.
241
John Cauman provides a detailed account of Matisse’s reactions, as expressed in his letters, to
his New York visit, as well as quotes from the extensive coverage Matisse’s visit received in the
New York art and news press. It is interesting to note that Cauman characterizes Matisse’s
impressions of Harlem as disparaging; he does not mention Matisse’s description of the black
play, but comments that “Matisse’s impressions of New York were not entirely favorable,” citing
his loathing of Broadway but also Matisse’s mention of Harlem as a “black hell where Americans
go in search of their paradise.” When this comment is placed in the context of Matisse’s
admiring reaction to the play, as well as the absence of distaste in his descriptions of his other
activities in Harlem, it is not clear whether Matisse was expressing in the cited comment a
personal negative reaction to Harlem or perhaps mimicking what he perceived as the view of
“Americans” (presumably white). See Cauman’s dissertation Matisse and America, 1905-1933,
(New York: City University of New York), 2000: 457-465. Cauman sources his quotes of
Matisse’s letters to Pierre Schneider’s monograph Matisse, translated by Michael Taylor and
Bridget Strevens Romer, (New York: Rizzoli), 1984.
242
As stated in the cited March 7, 1930 letter, made available to me by Wanda de Guébriant,
Director, Archives Matisse, Issy-les-Moulineux, who also provided the translation in an email
correspondence on October 13, 2011. I viewed this letter and other unpublished materials
onscreen at the Archives during several research visits from August 21- September 13, 2012.
While the Archives does not provide hard photocopies of Matisse’s letters, I received permission
to use a photocopy of this one for research purposes

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March 7:Letter to Amelie: “This evening I’m dining at Val’s with Mad.Reed. Yesterday I
had a busy day, in the morning I went up to the 60th floor of the Woolworth Building, then
dined at the new restaurant Marign. I then saw a splendid black play. Very well acted, very
good sets. Splendid.”

Separately, it became clear that, during a subsequent visit to New York, Matisse

sat for two May 20, 1933 portraits by Carl Van Vechten, who depicted Matisse against a

backdrop of textured fabric.244 (Image 80). Van Vechten, who had been been a friend

and advisor to early Matisse supporter Gertrude Stein in Paris, was now a New York

journalist, portrait photographer and close associate of many of the Harlem Renaissance

artists, writers and musicians whose portraits he made. 245 Leading Harlem

Renaissance figures, including its founding philosopher Alain Locke, embraced Van

Vechten’s enthusiasm for “uptown” black entertainment venues, and the steady stream

of “downtown” guests he brought with him, in the belief that whites’ embrace of black

music, and even primitivist engagement with African sculpture, would lead to more

respect for black Americans. But Van Vechten was despised by others, including W.E.B

Dubois, for his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, which captured the contradictions of a

primitivist view of Harlem and its nightlife as “exotic.” 246

244
See United States Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten
Collection online site for a listing of May 20, 1933 as the creation/publication date.
(http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004663297) Cauman notes that Matisse’s fourth and final
trip to New York took place May 16-25, 1933. (2000: 523-525)
245
Emily Bernard describes Van Vechten’s role as a white who was both controversial and an
important supporter of many Harlem Renaissance artists, in Carl van Vechten and the Harlem
Renaissance, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. The only detail about Van Vechten’s
portrait of Matisse comes from Bruce Kellner, who describes a version of it as “Matisse
recumbent on some Matisse-like fabrics,” in Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades, Univ
of Oklahoma, 1968:261. Van Vechten’s portrait subjects included Alain Locke, Langston
Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jacob Lawrence in addition to Matisse.
246
Bernard, 2012, ibid.

153
 Still, Van Vechten was a prolific photographer who became a close personal

friend of Locke and other Harlem luminaries, whose portraits he made throughout the

1930s and 1940s. It is striking that Van Vechten, despite his primitivist inclinations,

depicted his many subjects in a style that was exemplary of Harlem Renaissance values.

As Richard Powell explains, photography was a means of projecting a new racial identity

for black Americans.247 In the wake of Alain Locke’s 1925 essay, “The New Negro,”

Harlem Renaissance artists sought to defy then-prevalent stereotypes with images

depicting the new “city Negro.” The subjects’ demeanor was remarkably similar to that

of Matisse’s modernizing images of Carmen a decade later, with the head turned slightly

to the left, eyes downcast in contemplation, the understated but elegant coiffure, jewelry

and attire. (Images 82-85) As Powell writes, about Charles Alston’s Girl in a Red Dress,

(Image 84), the New Negro woman is “defiantly black, beautiful and feminine, yet also

unsettled, mysterious, and utterly modern.”248 These representations responded to

Locke’s warning that “art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and

caricature have overlaid.” Alston specifically sought to challenge stock characterizations

and “invest the modern black… not only with beauty, light-heartedness and urban

sophistication but with psychological depth.” Given Van Vechten’s close friendship with

Locke, it is possible that the consistency of Van Vechten’s portraiture poses may well

have been an explicit intention, one discussed and made known to subjects. Could

247
For an overview of the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, see Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the
Harlem Renaissance, by Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey et al., Los Angeles: University of
California Press and London: Haywood Gallery, exh. cat., 1997: 18-19. Chapter Four herein also
includes a detailed discussion of the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance for Romare Bearden, who
was a member of the generation of African American artists who came of age in its immediate
aftermath and embraced its philosophy.
248
Powell et al, ibid., 1997:19.

154
Matisse have heard of the importance of this philosophy to modern blacks as he was

being positioned for his own portrait?

In the course of locating Matisse’s 1930 letter about attending a black play, the

Archives Matisse in Issy-les-Moulineux made available a wealth of additional

unpublished materials –letters, photographs and agendas - about Matisse’s activities in

New York. While by no means complete, and in need of further research, this

information establishes that Matisse visits to Harlem were not isolated events, but part of

a broader network of interlocking personal contacts, based on sustained engagement with

Harlem-based artists and musicians, and with modern black culture, prior to, during and

after his three New York visits. (see chronologies in Images 81 and 90-95).

As Emily Bernard notes, for example, Van Vechten “single-handedly jumpstarted

the black singer Paul Robeson’s career” in 1925, arranging for the Robeson’s first public

concert in New York; he and Robeson’s wife Essie were close and she sat for portrait by

Van Vechten. (Image 86) Less than a year after that, a letter to Matisse from his son

Pierre, well before Matisse first traveled to New York, notes that Robeson and his wife

were guests at Matisse’s Issy home (which is on rue Clamart) and that Robeson gave a

private concert there. 249 We also see that, in 1929, Matisse is already a big jazz fan, as

described by his wife in a May 1929 letter.

The archives do not yet reveal who accompanied Matisse during his Harlem

visits. 250 Bernard also notes that “Van Vechten ushered numerous whites to Harlem—he

249
All unpublished Matisse correspondence discussed herein was made available courtesy of
Wanda de Guébriant, Director, Archives Matisse, Issy-les-Moulineux.
250
Wanda de Guébriant commented in September 2012 that the information she shared with me
cannot be considered to be complete. Not all of Matisse’s diaries and correspondence have been
reviewed for this content; he habitually wrote several letters each day.

155
called it his fate. His unofficial tours were famous and captured the attention of black

songwriter Andy Razaf, whose popular “Go Harlem!” urged listeners to “Go inspectin’

like Van Vechten.”251 While we don’t know if Matisse was escorted by Van Vechten, he

wrote of making several visits (or having to cancel plans to do so) to Harlem’s jazz clubs,

including the “Club Brewd,” Hot Rhythm and the famous Connie’s Inn. Matisse was

known to hate Broadway, but during his second New York visit, in September and

October 1930, he was in Harlem clubs on at least three days of his ten-day visit.

Matisse seemed to have a relaxed familiarity with Harlem, remarkable since he

did not speak English. In 1934, well after his final New York trip, he reminisces about

going shopping for a corncob pipe in the “quartier nègre de NY.” (Image 95)

Coincidentally, one of Romare Bearden’s best known jazz club paintings decades

later is of Connie’s Inn, a club which, as seen in Chapter Four, was directly opposite his

parents’ home. (Image 158) Van Vechten, and especially Razaf, were close to Romare

Bearden’s parents, and by the 1950s, to Bearden himself.

The Archives documents also reveal that, during Matisse’s visits with Alfred

Barnes in Merion, the two men attended a “bal nègre” together on the evening of signing

their 1930 contract for Matisse’s Dancers.

This anecdotal information does not make an undeniable case that Matisse may

have absorbed some of the New Negro aesthetic during his New York visits, and factored

it into his depictions of Carmen. It does suggest, however, that he was almost certainly

exposed to these ideas, and that he explored jazz and black dance on his own, rather than

251
Bernard discusses Van Vechten’s relationship with Paul and especially Essie Robeson and his
uptown tours for whites. (2012: 34, 53-54)

156
just as a tourist in Harlem, for decades. As late as March 1945, twelve years after his last

New York trip, a Paris concert of Negro spirituals was on his agenda. (Image 96)

It is within the context of Matisse’s ongoing exposure to and personal

investigation of black modernist aesthetics that we can now consider Matisse’s images of

a second black model, during his final series of easel paintings, in which she is portrayed

as an icon of international modernity. Matisse made this series at the same period, in

1946, that he was working with Carmen on Fleurs. 252

Modernity and Cosmopolitan Beauty: The Final Easel Paintings

Throughout his career, Matisse made series of images of the same scene, model or

theme, both in works on paper, as seen with Les Fleurs du Mal, and in paintings.253

Weakend after a serious illness in 1941, the artist had since then largely abandoned large-

scale easel paintings in favor of book illustrations, and had begun making cut paper

paintings while bedridden. In early 1946, however, he returned to the easel for what

would be his last series of oils on canvas. And he took up once again a subject that he had

treated in several previous versions, all titled Young Woman in White, Red Background.

The most recent iteration, from 1944, had an overall visual style not unlike his graphic

252
Wanda de Guébriant suggests the possibility that Matisse made no paintings of Carmen
because, as a New York-based dancer, she did not have time for the more extended periods of
studio sessions that were required. She clearly was in Nice for temporary reasons, perhaps to
visit family; although it appears that in 1947, she traveled there from New York specifically to
pose the frontispiece; the ship manifest shows that, after siitting for drawings for another book
project, based on Matisse friend Antoine Nau’s Poesies Antillaises, she returned to New York
within days of the final session.
253
For a recent survey of Matisse’s series of paintings, see Matisse: In Search of True Painting,
by Rebecca Rabinow and Dorthe Aagesen, exh. cat., New York: The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, 2012.

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work –with the figure in white, firmly drawn with still-visible black lines, set against

flattened planes of matte reds and yellows, patterning all but absent. (Image 107) It

seemed more a study than a final painting, given the absence of Matisse’s usual richly

saturated color, and although considered complete—and signed by Matisse -- he now

returned to portray the subject with his characteristic lushness of pattern and tone.

While the basic pictorial structure –woman in white dress, semi-reclining on a

fur-draped chair --remained the same, virtually everything else in the 1946 image

changed. The white dress is still long, but now strapless. The chair is an old favorite, a

striped Louis XV bergere that had been a prop for numerous previous paintings, now

draped by a Tibetan pelisse covered by a tiger skin from the Gobi desert.254 And the

model is not the French model Lucienne from 1944, but a young woman, Elvira van

Hyfte, who was separated from her Congolese mother at an early age when her Belgian

father, a colonial official, returned to Europe and took her with him. She received a

degree in journalism from the university at Louvain.255

Matisse agreed to have the making of this painting be the subject of a

documentary film by François Campaux. Stills of the film provide an intriguing glimpse

into Matisse’s painting process, as well as the interpersonal dynamics between the artist

and his model. (Image 108). We see the mixing of the paints to achieve light caramel

colored flesh tones that approximate, but do not attempt to match, those of the model

herself. What the film shows is the truth of Matisse’s lifelong artistic practice –inspired

by the presence of the model, he makes a representation, not of the woman herself, but of

his inspired response to her. We watch as he abstracts her neatly coiffed hair into a mass

254
See Boyer, 2004: 51, for a description and photograph of this chair.
255
Based on documents and photographs provided by the Archives Matisse.

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of squiggles. The natural curve of her face is gently flattened to a masklike angularity,

her arms, to mere elbow-less forms. With rapid, loose brushstrokes, sometimes

suspended as he considers the next gesture, he evokes the lush textures of the fur and the

filmy white dress. The surrounding planes of rich color denote the floor and walls not in

angular planes but in curving expanses that seem to fan out from a convergence behind

her for the widest possible view onto the scene.

And thus, we have a further iteration, in a painting, of Carmen’s pose as Berthe,

which was taking place at around the same time. The model is a woman of color, and

the painting indexes that –but this is not, in the context of art history, a portrayal of a

black woman –it carries none of the overt signifers –hyper- or a-sexuality, ornate pre-

modern attire. True, the fur might be a sublimated touchstone with old e blacks animals -

- but here it is as much emblematic of luxury here as well. It is simply a painting of an

elegant modern woman in a gorgeous dress.

Matisse simply did not, as a matter of artistic practice, observe racially based

hierarchies of beauty. His realm of beauty embraced multiplicity. Mme Van Hyfte is

rendered here as an icon of an international elegance. The revision is subtle, but

enormous. It is very hard to imagine what cohort Matisse might have had during the

1940s beyond the post-Harlem black artists, for depicting a black model as emblematic of

universal beauty.

Matisse made a second, more cropped painting of Mme. Van Hyfte, in a striped

sundress. (Image 118) But the final, and, many feel the greatest, in this final series of

easel paintings is the large, richly hued l’Asie/Asia, also posed by Mme Van Hyfte. 256

256
The Elderfield catalog notes that L’Asie is the work in this last series of easel paintings that
has been most widely received as a great painting but does not reference the model’s ethnicity.

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(Image 116) The artist and model appeared to have a friendly rapport. Indications are that

Mme. Van Hyfte was sometimes a companion for Matisse when Lydia had to go out;

they seemed to chat easily about a range of topics.257 In a 1947 letter to “Mme. Van

Hyfte” at a Paris address, evidently in response to one from her, Matisse apologizes for

taking three weeks to respond due to scheduling, says he would be delighted to see her

again whenever she is in Nice, and encloses an invitation to the opening of his upcoming

Paris show.

Formally, l’Asie manifests, in an opulently decorative manner, the stylization of

the source figure, in particular the alluring yet masklike face with its high bare forehead

and pulled back black curls as she appears to have slipped one arm from the voluminous

sleeve. That Madame van Hyfte is a personification of Asia despite the presence of a

Chinese model, with whom Matisse was also working around this time, (Image 118)

underscores Matisse’s disregard for conventions that limit models to any one ethnic type.

He drapes the Gobi desert tiger skin over a chair for an image that has nothing to do with

Asia; Asia herself is surrounded not by overtly Asian objects but by expanses of reds and

yellow. The appeal is in the color and patterning of the image, and in the artist’s ever-

present determination to do the unexpected rather than the formulaic. (Image 117)

The first half of 1946 was one of the busiest times for Matisse at la Villa le Rêve.

His three paintings modeled by Mme. Van Hyfte were completed in late spring, during

the same period as his work with Carmen on Fleurs. During these months, Matisse also

completed the text for Jazz, whose paper cutouts he had made in 1944. An analysis of the

(1992:413). A short label for l’Asie on the website of its owner the Kimbell Art Museum
mentions that, “while the golden ocher skin tones of the model are characteristic of Asian
peoples, the model apparently came from the Congo.”
257
Anecdotes from conversations with Wanda de Guébriant, Issy-le-Moulineux, September 2012.

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parallels between these three of these projects, in terms of Matisse’s working methods

and thematic interests, is a study waiting to be done. Matisse’s friend, the writer Aragon,

referred to these activities as the “comedie du modèle,” in perhaps the only critical

writing that references Matisse’s extensive work with black models during this period.258

In June 1946, Matisse left Vence for Paris, where he stayed until April of the

following year. He continued to engage with representations of the black female figure,

and his explorations of modern black culture. During his time in Paris, he attended at

least one concert of Negro spirituals, and engaged a Madagascaran model, Athenore, for

sittings in his Montparnasse studio. (Images 120 and 121) His assistant Lydia has

recounted that sometimes, when she and Matisse visited the Montparnasse cafés, he

would have her approach “exotic” women, to avoid sending the wrong signals if he

approached them himself, and ask them to pose for him.259 Matisse maintained contact

with the model Carmen, now based full-time in New York, long after her studio sessions

ended; she sent him photographs of her young family. (Image 122). During the 1950s,

among Matisse’s important cut paper paintings were Creole Dancer, said to be based on

Katharine Dunham, and La Negresse, based on Josephine Baker. (Images 121 and 123).

Matisse can thus be said to have made images of women of color from Europe, Africa

and the Americas.

Influences and Critical Reception of Les Fleurs du Mal

Aside from the Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis exhibition, Les Fleurs du

Mal has drawn little art-historical interest. William Lieberman captures the general view:

258
Aragon, Henri Matisse, roman, Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1998.
259
As described by Wanda de Guébriant.

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“A Baudelaire by Matisse should have been an important publishing event. It was not.

Dry weather unfortunately ruined the transfer paper on which Matisse had drawn. Finally

the illustrations, mostly female heads, were photographed and mechanically reproduced.

They bear little affinity to the passion of the poems.”260 This commenrary may not

reflect the artist’s own view, since, as explained in the Le Cateau catalog, Matisse had

fortunately had his illustrations photographed before sending them to the printer. After

extensive additional effort on his part, the final published version was mechanically

reproduced, but based on the original, undamaged Matisse illustrations. 261 Matisse’s

assistant Lydia spoke of the artist’s passion for the project, saying that “no other book

had been worked on as hard as Matisse worked on Fleurs, especially after the

printmaking difficulties;” that in order to save his eight months’ work on the project,

Matisse had overseen every small detail to ensure its publication, finally, in 1947.262

Thus, it can be said that there was no consensus on the artistic value of Matisse’s

seldom-studied Fleurs du Mal project. The argument herein is that Fleurs is of unique

art-historical importance in its exemplification of the development of Matisse’s single

line drawing technique and his interest in creating series as well as in its iconographic

advances in the representations of the black female subject.

Though technically flawed in final production, the Fleurs lithographs are small

masterpieces of Matisse’s commitment to the autonomy of the work of art as a

suggestion, rather than a representation, of its source material. Iconographically, Fleurs

appears to demonstrate a continuity of the pictorial resonances of Manet’s Laure.

260
From the 1956 essay by William Lieberman in Fisher, 2009: 26.
261
Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, 1992: 58, 62.
262
Musée Matisse Le Cateau- Cambrésis, 1992:80.

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Together with Matisse’s late paintings, it also led to a break with longstanding binaries

that ascribed iconic beauty solely to the white subject.

Like the Harlem Renaissance artists, Matisse was among the first to depict the

black female subject in modern terms. His images were based not on socio-political

agendas, but solely on an artistic vision that did not consign the representation of beauty

to then-prevalent racial hierarchies. Matisse traveled to the new world, engaged with

modern black culture there, and experienced firsthand the diversity of its cultures. In this

way, Matisse, alone among his School of Paris cohort, surpassed primitivism, and thus

anticipated the future, in a way that Picasso never did.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Bearden in Harlem and Paris: Collaging Cultural Hybridity

Romare Bearden, as an African American artist of the second half of the twentieth

century, sought to re-imagine modernist aesthetics in a way that centered African

American subject matter and cultural practices. It was through Bearden’s efforts to

manifest in art the “double consciousness,” that W.E.B. DuBois described as shaping the

African American psyche, that Bearden developed an oeuvre that became a definitive

representation of African life and culture during his time.263 As his friend the novelist

Ralph Ellison asserted that the mission of the artist is “to bring a new visual order into the

world, and though his art… reset society’s clock by imposing upon it his own method of

defining the times,” Bearden himself stated that his practice developed out of “a need to

to redefine the image of man in the terms of the Negro experience, I know best….What

I’ve attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro

experience could live and make its own logic.”264

263
W.E.B Dubois states, in his 1903 collection of essays The Souls of Black Folks that “the
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” noting the prevalence of a
“double consciousness among black Americans characterized by “this sense of always looking at
one's self through the eyes of others” and the necessity of reconciling one’s dual identity as an
American of African descent. This concept was central to the emerging modernity expressed by
artists and writers of the 1920s-30s Harlem Renaissance, a generation that shaped Bearden’s early
development as an artist. By the middle of the century, Bearden’s friend Ralph Ellison, author of
the seminal 1952 novel The Invisible Man, articulated the additional necessity for the black
American to escape the condition of invisibility within mainstream American culture, despite
being in plain view. These two texts provide a contextual framework for the creative expression
of many mid-century African American artists and writers of Bearden’s generation.
264
See Gail Gelburd’s discussion of Ellison’s commentary in Romare Bearden in Black- and –
White: Photomontage Projections (Whitney Museum of Art, 1964:17); Bearden’s remarks are
part of a Sharon Patton’s comprehensive overview of Bearden’s life and work in Memory and
Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden 1940-1987 (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem
and Oxford University Press, 1991: 38).

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 This chapter will suggest that Bearden’s 1970 collage Patchwork Quilt

exemplifies his quest for a synthesis of subject matter, creative process and artmaking

materials in order to represent this new worldview. It will propose that there is an

iconographic affinity between Patchwork Quilt and Manet’s Olympia that is rooted in

Bearden’s investigation of the pictorial and content values of Manet’s foundational

modernist painting, but equally in his reinvention of these tropes to represent a culturally

hybrid African American culture that draws on myriad sources in order to craft its own

unique identity.

It is in particular the revisionary impulse of Patchwork Quilt with which Bearden

displays an admiring yet critical engagement with the art of the past. By evoking yet re-

presenting its iconic tropes, he asserts the central presence of the African American

subject in the formation of Western modernity, as an intervention against its

marginalization to the point of invisibility in mainstream culture.

The cultural hybridity underlying the making and meaning of Patchwork Quilt

will finally be seen as not just emblematic of African American identity but of the

paradigmatic formation of cultural hybridity across the black Atlantic, including the

African diaspora of France, of which Manet’s modernized but fraught figuring of Laure

in Olympia, as discussed in the first half of this dissertation, was an early

manifestation.265 Bearden sought to reveal the universal through the specificities of

African diasporan culture.

265
Paul Gilroy writes of the synthesis of African, American, European and Caribbean cultural
ideas to shape unique new disasporan identities in the US and Europe in The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Conscious (1993), while Maryse Condé, as discussed in the Manet
chapters of this dissertation, examines the evolving cultural hybridity of Paris’ black populations
in the 1995 essay collection Penser la Creolité (Thinking Creoleness).

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 Bearden’s engagement with the art of Edouard Manet is best considered within

the broader context of Bearden’s decades-long artistic practice of viewing, analyzing,

copying and re-imagining the paintings of European masters. Bearden emerged as an

artist at a time when racial attitudes in the United States circumscribed black artists’

personal freedom and artistic opportunity at home. This socio-economic context,

especially in the decades before the 1960s civil rights movement, led many black artists

since the aftermath of World War I to travel and seek longterm expatriation in Europe,

and especially in Paris, a city then seen as both the capital of the art world and relatively

free of the racist constraints of American society.266 Bearden’s wholehearted embrace of

this tradition led to his nine-month sojourn in Paris in 1950, funded by the GI bill, when

he took in the life of the city, visited museums and studied the writings of artists he

admired.

It was his reading of Eugene Delacroix’ journal, detailing his study of past

masters that inspired Bearden, upon his return to New York, and enrolling in classes at

the Art Students League, to begin his own program of systematically copying

masterpieces of art in order to analyze their composition and find his own unique style.267

At the same time, Bearden participated in an uptown-downtown artistic exchange,

developing long friendships with both his fellow Harlem-based African American artists

as well as “downtown” artists including Stuart Davis, Miro and Mondrian. By the 1960s,

these artists, while sharing Bearden’s engagement with the European masters, were also

266
See essays by Kinshasha Holman Conwill and Michel Fabre in the Studio Museum in Harlem
exhibition catalog Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris 1945-
1965. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996: 6-7, 37.
267
Schwartzman, Myron. Romare Bearden: His Life and Art. New York: Charles Abrams &
Sons, 1990:30.

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extensively engaged with African art and jazz as part of the modernist project based on

infusing European and nonwestern, or fine art and popular culture traditions. All of these

exchanges and influences informed Bearden’s decision in the early 1960s to use collage

as his compositional method. Likening it to the improvisational style of jazz, he saw the

processes and materials of collage as metaphoric of his instinct to represent the

specificity and universality, the realities and aspirations, of African American culture, by

drawing from the multiplicity of sources that shaped it.268 Bearden pointed out that “the

dynamics of collage (are) especially relevant to the hyphenated character of diaspora

identities…the formal principle lies in the purposive selection of signifying elements

from disparate sources, combined in unexpected juxtapositions,” noting that once, when

his friend Max Roach was played on the radio, “ I just took the brush and painted the

sounds, the color rhythms, and the silences” for a work he called “Portrait of Max in

Sounds, Rhythms and Colors….”

The Reclining Nude: Continuity and Revision

Romare Bearden’s 1970 collage Patchwork Quilt exemplifies his view that art is

“an old tune that the artist plays with new variation. He attempts to see things with fresh

eyes yet he must determine his relation to his past history.”269 With Patchwork Quilt’s

highly stylized depiction of a female nude reclining on a bed, Bearden invokes one of the

268
Schwartzman, ibid, 1990:289, from his 1986 conversations with Bearden.
269
Museum of Modern Art. Artist’s Questionnaire, Object Record for Patchwork Quilt by
Romare Bearden in the Collection of Painting and Sculpture: New York, 1970: 4.

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most iconic images in the history of Western art since the Renaissance. (Image 134)270

But Bearden radically revises this trope by presenting his odalisque as a black female.

He thus supplants the erasure, stereotyping and marginalization of the black female

subject that permeates art history, and re-imagines her as the focal point of interest.

Bearden intensifies his revisionary agenda by contextualizing the figure, not

within the traditional European boudoir, but with attributes--attire, furnishings,

compositional materials--that signify the legacy and aesthetics of African American

culture. Patchwork Quilt thus extends the iconicity of the reclining nude from the

Renaissance and nineteenth century France into postwar American modernism. While

Bearden’s work can be seen as a manifestation of civil-rights era artistic initiatives to

establish the modern black woman within the lineage of women depicted as objects of

beauty and desire, it also presaged a subsequent feminist-motivated push for the de-

objectification of women through a shift of visual interest from their physical attributes

to their cultural context.271

Patchwork Quilt is a pivotal work in a project that was central to modernist art

from its inception: the representation of the issue of race, as personified by the black

female figure, as a defining factor of modern life in the West. Artistic engagement with
270
Images in the Bearden chapter have split numbers due to size-related technical difficulties with
a single powerpoint containing all of the dissertation’s images. The first number is the slide
number in the single entire document; the second number relates to a second standalone Bearden
powerpoint made as a backup. This will be corrected before deposit.
271
In defining black culture, as a context for art, Powell echoes Bearden’s comments about the
collaged nature of black culture, noting that this hybridity complicates efforts to essentialize race;
yet he defines it as a critical mass of individuals with shared beliefs and experiences; yet he
warns against a singular…all-inclusive black aesthetic. Yet, as Stuart Hall says, more simply, is
it is “the things that significant numbers of black people do.” See Black Art: A Cultural History,
New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002:11-15. Raiford (2011:197-198) discusses the use of
Bearden imagery in the development of symbols of black culture and power: See Cornelia
Butler‘s discussion of issues defining feminism in the exhibition catalog WACK! Art and the
Feminist Revolution, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007: 15.

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this project can be traced to Manet’s 1863 painting Olympia, a work often designated as

foundational to modern art. (Image 133) Bearden’s writings and archival materials

suggest that Manet’s representation in Olympia of Laure, a black model posed as a

brothel maid, is the “old tune” for which Patchwork Quilt offers a radical “new

variation.”

A cursory first viewing of Patchwork Quilt offers several reasons to look to

Olympia as a source for its imagery. (Image 134) The basic pictorial placement of

Bearden’s central image, a nude woman reclining on a bed, mirrors that of the prostitute

figure in Olympia. The figure lies close to the central horizontal axis of the image. She

supports herself on her bent right elbow, with pillows beneath her head and upper torso.

Bearden’s revised figure is black and alone, lies face down, and is composed in

modernist collage rather than traditional oil paint. But her basic placement mirrors that

not only of the Olympia prostitute, but of a lineage of reclining nudes by old masters on

which Olympia itself is based, including Titian’s 1563 Venus of Urbino (Image 135).

Bearden therefore places his figure within a central trope of Western art history, eve as he

radically revises it.

Other details suggest Patchwork Quilt’s engagement with Olympia, including a

pictorial structure for Patchwork Quilt that reflects the spatial and figural flatness that

marked Olympia as a radical break with Renaissance perspective and naturalism Both

paintings are situated in an interior space divided into three pictorial planes. An

expansive bed and a glimpse of floor occupy the lower half of each painting, while the

upper half is vertically divided into a tonally subdued green-black plane on the right and

slightly brighter-hued space to the left.

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 Bearden’s green-black background is very similar in color tone to that of Manet’s;

though Manet’s green is divided between a deep greenish-black behind the Laure figure

and a slightly brighter drapery over the prostitute’s head-- a detail which itself is a

somewhat lurid version of the deep green velvet curtain in the same location in the Titian

painting. (Image 135) Since this green tonality frames Manet’s Laure figure, it is also

worth noting the compositional similarities between Bearden’s reclining nude and

Manet’s black brothel maid. Both faces are seen in profile from the right; both wear

headscarfs and a single earring. If Manet’s Laure proffers a bouquet of flowers,

Bearden’s nude rests her head on a flowery pillow, evoking an idyllic place of dreams.

Both figures’ faces are rendered in a schematic, generalized manner, rather than as a

portraitized individual, signifying an intent to render these figures as archetypes. While

the Bearden nude’s skin tones are varying shades of brown and black, some expanses

closely match those of Manet’s Laure figure. Bearden’s evocation of Manet’s green-

black spatial background, and the similar brown figural tonalities, combine to suggest

Bearden’s intent to remove Manet’s maid figure, as an archetypal black woman, out of

the murky shadows of her obscured 19th century representation, and into the open-

horizons realm--signified by the rich blue expanse of color above the Patchwork Quilt

nude’s head-- of dreams and possibility.

On the basis of this formal analysis alone, Patchwork Quilt can therefore be seen

as a retrieval and transformation of Manet’s Laure figure. This was an intervention that

Bearden felt was invited by Manet’s working methods. Bearden admired what he saw as

an “unfinished” quality in Manet’s paintings, due to Manet’s constant reworking of the

surface, and sometimes blurred distinctions between figure and ground; he believed that

170
this left Manet’s paintings open for the viewer –or other artists --to complete or re-

interpret. 272 In Olympia, these techniques work to the detriment of the Laure figure,

who, though modernized, is blended into the shadows of the room and rendered all but

invisible. This obliteration diverted the attention of most viewers from the radically

modern attributes of her attire--including that unlike her exoticized Orientalist

precedents, her breasts are covered, her attire is that of a European working class woman,

and the sartorial markers of her Antillaise ethnicity –her headscarf and jewelry -are

abstracted and understated. With these modernizing attributes of cultural hybridity,

Manet places Laure outside the trope of an ethnically specific type, and places her at the

heart of the urban working class in 1860s Paris. She is perhaps the earliest

representation in Salon art of an emerging free black population in post-abolition Paris.

273
But the tonal obscuring of these modernizing revisions ultimately obliterate her

subjectivity, and thus allowed viewers to inscribe the Laure figure with the racist

stereotypes of the asexual, marginal black female who is subordinated to the white female

by the very nature of her race.274

The metonymy of this duality –modernized but obscured –led a subset of the

observing public to be more perceptive of her problematic modernity, and to see it as a

turn, as the beginning of something new, but in the end left unfinished. At least one critic

272
Schwartzman, Myron. Romare Bearden: His Life and Art. New York: Charles Abrams &
Sons, 1990:30.
273
Griselda Pollock, “A Tale of Three Women: Seeing in the dark, seeing double, at least
with Manet.” In Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s
Histories. (London and NewYork: Routledge), 1999: 285.
274
Lorraine O’Grady, "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity," reprinte with
"Postscript" in Grant Kester, ed, Art, Activism, and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage,
Duke University, 1998.

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of Manet’s own time voiced a view similar to Bearden’s about the incompleteness of this

figure. Alfred Sensier, considered the most astute critic of 1860s Paris, wrote of

Olympia that “the Negress and flowers [are] insufficient in execution, but with a real

harmony to them…hideous but still something.”275 And when Manet’s acolyte Frederic

Bazille painted a tribute to Manet in 1870, he re-imagined, with much greater clarity, not

the much-debated prostitute in Olympia, but her obliterated black maid. (Image 136)

Bearden can be seen as within the lineage of artists extending from Bazille who

seek to advance Manet’s problematic modernization of the maid figure. Like Bazille, he

the unfinished business was the marginalized and obscured representation of the

“Negress.” Patchwork Quilt, made exactly one century after the Bazille, can be seen as

part of this lineage of critical and artistic interest in retrieving what Sensier called the

“something” that Manet left “insufficient.” Bearden confronted Olympia’s formal and

iconographic methods en route to developing his own distinctive vision of the reclining

nude female, reversing her relegation to the margins of visibility, and placing her instead

in a newly central position reflective of 1960s African Americans’ societal role and

aspirations.

Manet and Boucher: Archival Sources for a Synthesizing Pose

Bearden voiced a reluctance to clarify specific iconographic influences himself,

preferring, in comments about Patchwork Quilt, that the viewer’s “sense of searching

within the work imparts to it an added tension and has power to lift the onlooker with a

sense of discovery.” 276 But Bearden wrote extensively about his admiration for Manet’s

275
T.J. Clark, 1984: 140.
276
Museum of Modern Art. Artist’s Questionnaire, Object Record for Patchwork Quilt by
Romare Bearden in the Collection of Painting and Sculpture: New York, 1970: 4.

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painterly style.277 He states that, although while living in Paris in 1950; after his return,

he studied and copied works by Manet and other masters, though none of these works are

known to be extant: “ I made reasonably free copies of the work of artists including

Giotto, Verones, Rembrandt, Manet and Matisse, substituting my own choice of colors

for those of these artists, except for those of Manet and Matisse, when I was guided by

color reproductions.”278

Bearden’s fidelity to Manet’s color tones is especially relevant, since as

previously discussed, he almost exactly reproduces the shade, if not the murky texture, of

the green-black background tones surrounding, and seemingly absorbing, the maid figure

in Olympia. This formal affinity between the two works, and the fact that it is hard to

imagine any artist copying Manet without looking at Olympia, together imply that

Bearden was almost certainly aware of Olympia, and that he engaged with Manet’s ideas

in his own work. Further evidence emerges from additional visual analysis based on

Bearden’s archival records.

There are strong indications that Olympia’s imagery was part of a vast inventory

of pictorial elements from which Bearden constructed his collages. Archival research at

the Romare Bearden Foundation in New York reveals that Bearden owned at least one

large color reproduction of the painting. It appears, together with images of nudes by

Renoir, Titian, Boucher and others, as part of a 5-page article titled “Languorous Ladies

on Couch and Cushion,” torn from what appears to be a 1960s issue of Look magazine.

277
Romare Bearden and Carl Holty, Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and
Space in Painting, (New York: Crown Publishers), 1969: 142-145.
278
Sharon Patton, Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden 1940-1987, (New York:
The Studio Museum in Harlem and Oxford University Press), 1991: 31. This quote also appears
in Ruth Fine, The Art of Romare Bearden. exh. cat. Washington, D.C.:,The National Gallery of
Art, 2003: 263.

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(Image 137) Found stored in a folder containing dozens of magazine tear-sheets,

clippings and photographs, the “Languorous Ladies” article was part of an extensive file

of images of medieval, old master and modernist paintings, art photography, and

hardcore pornography. This folder was clearly a working file for Bearden; several items

were cutouts or fragments of photographs; and cryptic notes and pencil sketches were

sometimes found in borders and inside covers. 279

Scrutiny of the archival images suggests that Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt nude is a

blend of the Olympia pose and another image shown in the “Languorous Ladies” article--

that of Boucher’s portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy, a teenaged mistress of Louis XV,

which was part of the Languorous Ladies” spread. With one leg dangling off the edge of

the bed and along its side, the pose of Bearden’s nude, from the legs down, closely

emulates that of the Boucher nude. While the page with the full image is missing, the

caption for the image, placed just below the Olympia image, identifies it as Boucher’s

1752 celebrated portrait of Mary-Louise Murphy.

Re-Situating the Object of Desire

Bearden may have been especially receptive to the conflation of the Manet and

Boucher odalisques due to his pre-existing interest in conflating imagery from varied

sources into symbolic representations of African American concerns. Bearden regularly

used fragments of images drawn from African masks and ancient Egyptian tomb

279
I reviewed and selectively photocopied the Bearden Foundation archives on January 9, 11 and
29, 2009. “Languorous Ladies” is a color spread, on pages sized in the oversized format of old
Life and Look magazines, but these pages did not carry the name of any magazine, nor were they
dated. The folded multi-page clipping was included in a folder of magazine clippings of paintings
by Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and several Impressionists. The clippings file was in a box labeled
“ship to Sheila” which was dated October 2005. The Foundation’s library of books owned by
Bearden included one titled French Painting, by Joseph C. Sloane, which included a section on
Manet and discussed the controversy that Olympia triggered during the 1865 Salon.

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sculpture to collage African American figures.280 The flattened, masklike form of the

Patchwork Quilt odalisque’s face in profile suggests a continuity of that practice her, as

does the combination of nearly full-frontal breasts and profile-view legs often shown in

in striding relief figures from Egyptian tombs. (Image 139) The Boucher nude’s leg

placement bears an uncanny resemblance to the archetypal Egyptian striding figure. By

placing the Egyptian-inspired form in the reclining pose of a European odalisque, and

arranging her on a patchwork quilt connotative of African American culture, Bearden

creates an intriguing visual metaphor for the hybrid origins and double-consciousness of

that culture.

The face-down placement of the figure may well suggest other key components

Bearden’s signifying intentions. The positioning of Bearden’s nude on the picture plane,

as discussed above, clearly mirrors the prototypes established by Titian and Manet, even

as he radically alters her skin tones. Like Olympia and Venus, she lies on a sofa facing to

the right. It is perhaps in the pose of the Bearden nude, however, that we also see the

most complex evolution of Bearden’s revisionary work. The Patchwork Quilt reclining

nude occupies the same pictorial space as those of Titian and Manet.

But the precedent nudes present themselves frontally to the viewer, and place

their sexual attributes on almost complete display, while Bearden’s nude lies on her

stomach, her sensuality all but concealed. She evokes the European odalisque, but her

attributes are her culture, not her sexuality. Bearden’s iterative images of the black nude

suggest that this was a careful and discerning revision, done with full awareness of the

280
In discussing Bearden’s 1960s photomontages, Thelma Golden observes that “African masks
replaced black faces in Bearden’s work, and black faces (were) constructed as African masks,” in
Romare Bearden in Black-and-White (The Whitney Museum), 1997:49. And Bearden alludes to
Egyptian tomb sculpture as a source in an unpublished artist’s questionnaire on file in the
Museum of Modern Art’s Object Record for Patchwork Quilt by Romare Bearden (1970:3).

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different significations of a frontal vs face-down pose. The former suggests sexual

availability to the viewer; the latter places the figure as an object of desire, but the

implication of her sexual availability is more recondite.

The connotation of sexual availability projected by the frontal female nude is an

especially fraught one when the nude is a black woman, as it can all too easily conflate

with racist stereotypes of promiscuity and hypersexuality that have long associated with

black female figure in art. As Kellie Jones has pointed out, this is one reason for the

paucity of black nudes in paintings by black artists, with very few exceptions, such as

William H. Johnson’s Mahlinda.281 (Image 141) Lowery Stokes-Sims relates this 1939

painting to Johnson’s engagement with German Expressionism and Fauvism –the

exaggerated bodily proportions, densely textured facture and Matisse-like still lifes

manifest these influences.282 And simply by making the subject black, Johnson relates

to a Harlem Renaissance –era interest in situating the black female as the focal object of

desire, Yet it did not address the derogatory myths around black sexuality that images of

nude black women evoked.

281
Jones writes that “Some of the (black) artists who were able to portray sexuality prior to the
1960s were W.H. Johnson, Archibald Motley and Eldzier Cortor. With the sexual revolution of
the 1960s, the topic became more acceptable among African American artists. Romare Bearden
was the first to work consistently with the nude, which has been a standard them of Western (and
I would argue African) art for centuries. Some of his collages portraying the black female body
were created out of clippings from porn magazines, a topic that has yet to be thoroughly
interrogated….” in a note to her essay about the contemporary artist Lorna Simpson, in
Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, Duke University Press, 2011:121. The essay
was originally published in Lorna Simpson by Kellie Jones et al (London: Phaidon Press, 2002).
282
Sims further relates the painting to Gauguin’s studies of Tahitian women, as part of the
modernist inclination for “anti-classical” depictions of the odalisque, while noting that “…most
black artists did work towards dramatic or radical transformations of the human body that had
been a hallmark of vanguard modernism….They did, however, entertain modernist constructs of
identity {with regard to} issues of self-assertive sexuality, self-definiiton in the fae of stereotypes
and caricature…” In The Challenge of the Modern: African American Artists 1925-1945 (New
York: The Studio Museum in Harlem) 2003: 74.

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 Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt, however, made a more definitive, if still not

complete, break from this tradition, privileging the cultural aspects of the black nude as

the basis for her desirability over the purely erotic dimension. But this was an evolution

in Bearden’s own imaging of the black female nude. During the same period that

Patchwork Quilt was composed, other Bearden collages depicted the frontal female

nudity of Titian and Olympia, often, as in a 1971 version of The Street , in the explicit

poses excerpted directly from pictures in pornographic magazines..283 (Image 153) On

the one hand, these women were typically situated in bedroom love scenes, including

those voyeuristically seen as part of panoramic cityscapes, thus situating them outside the

space of pornography, as part of the artist’s frank representation of all aspects of black

life in urban tenements. (Image 142) And the artist’s many images of brothels, such as

The Apprenticeship of Jelly Roll Morton, related to Bearden’s interest in the biographies

of great jazz musicians like Morton. (Image 152) This combination of high and low

culture is captured in the many single figures composed in photomontage from a mix of

pornography and fine art. Bearden conflated high and low images of nude women, from

paintings and pornographic magazines, without seeming to privilege one format over the

other.

This observation is underscored by the contents of Bearden’s archives. The

“Langourous Ladies” article was found in a folder in which explicit color images torn

from hardcore pornographic magazines were stuffed inside an expensively designed

book, titled Nus, of artistically photographed nudes. Pencil sketches were drawn on the

283
See Judith Wilson’s comments that Bearden’s work often uncritically reflected the most
graphic tropes of hardcore pornography, including the romanticization of sex work and
voyeuristic scenarios, and other. in “Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden’s Use of
Pornography and the Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro-U.S. Art.” In Gina Dent and
Michelle Wallace, Black Popular Culture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992:116, 118.

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inside covers of Nus, in close imitation of the poses of enclosed images of both

pornographic and artistic poses. And almost identical poses can frequently be seen in

several of Bearden’s final collages. This extensive engagement with pornography and

brothels may relate to Bearden’s childhood, when he first learned to draw from one of his

best friends, who was the son of a prostitute.284 He was clearly fluent with what images of

frontally nude women implied --her status as an object of desire was based on the display,

and implied availability, of her body to the viewer; frontal nudes were sex objects, even

commodities, presented for inspection, mating or the purchase of sex. By turning the

nude of Patchwork Quilt away from the viewer, therefore, Bearden appears to very

deliberately situate her desirability more with her cultural iconicity than on her sexuality.

In a Study for Patchwork Quilt, Bearden painstakingly writes a note above the

legs to “take care for leg angle” suggesting his close attention to the stiffening

reminiscent of Egyptian tomb reliefs as well as the precise placement of the legs as

slightly off-balance in relation to the sofa. (Image 149)285 Collages featuring a face-

down black nude made before Patchwork Quilt, which appear to have been

experimentations with this pose leading up to his final composition, reveal an

284
Reginia Perry recounts Bearden’s story of how he first became interested in drawing --when
a childhood friend Eugene showed him notebooks full of his drawings of couples in different sex
positions. He had apparently observed this through holes in the floor of his attic room in the
brothel owned by his mother, and reflecting that viewing perspective, he depicted the brothel as
if without walls, so that the viewer could see into every room -- an idea which Bearden repeatedly
used when depicting urban life in works such as The Street. When Bearden’s grandmother, with
whom he lived while in Pittsburgh, became aware of these notebooks, she invited Eugene to live
with them. When Bearden helped him pack in his attic room, he saw the holes in the floor through
which Eugene saw the scenes he sketched –which depicted a brothel without walls so that the
viewer could see into every room –In the exhibition catalog Celebration and Vision: The Hewitt
Collection of African American Art, Charlotte: Bank of America Corp, 1999:22-23). Judith
Wilson also details this incident.
285
Bearden’s longtime studio assistant Andre Thibault (“Teabo”) remarked, during a January 16,
2013 talk at ACA Galleries New York, remarked that there had also been a smaller study tacked
to Bearden’s studio wall as he made the 1970 Patchwork Quilt;; the study now appears to be lost.

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increasingly abstracted figural treatment. (Image 144) In the 1968 Black Venus, the

figure, though in black paper cutouts, retains a more naturalistic treatment of bodily

curves as well as of the arms folded under the head. A second black woman shown

topless in the background and the man seated in the left foreground suggest a brothel

venue. While the odalisque rests on a patchwork quilt, its pastel colors, as well as the rich

fuschias of the walls and the flowers and wine on tables, all seem intended to heighten

the allure of the women. Black Venus is suffused with pictorial ideas from early

modernists whose work Bearden was known to analyze and copy.286 The Matissean

palette reflects Bearden’s comment, cited herein, that when he copied Manet and Matisse,

he was guided by color reproductions, and did not adapt the palette as he did when

copying other artists. The style of the foreground still life and the use of black cutout

silhouette figures, stylized to the point that hands and feet are merely suggested, but not

actually depicted, also manifest Bearden’s admiration for Matisse—the cutouts evoke

Matisse’s 1943-47 illustrated book Jazz, which would hold special thematic interest for

Bearden given his commitment to the visualizing the improvisation of jazz . The guitar

player’s somewhat ominous presence –including the specific treatment of the eye--

together with the woman’s hand and head placement, may suggest Gauguin’s Manao

Tupapau.287 The abstracted patchwork patterning of the bed anchors a scene otherwise

resonant of European depictions of brothels within a specifically African American

286
Fine discusses Bearden’s admiration for Matisse and his presumed interest in the Jazz cutouts,
2003:28.
287
Curator Kate Butler of the Kempner Museum of Art, to whose collection Black Venus belongs,
pointed this collage out to me and discussed her sense of a combined Manet and Gauguin
influence during a June 15, 2012 discussion.

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context, while the image is universalized by the quilt’s tipped over contribution to

modernist pictorial flatness.

In Bearden’s 1969 version of Patchwork Quilt, the female figure appears to be a

standing study for the reclining figure of the final version, her multihued body still

curvaceous, but turned in profile away from the viewer as she appears to step into a

washbasin while a man nearby either removes his shirt or pulls on one previously

removed –thus marking the scene as a bedroom, perhaps again in a brothel. This is a far

more threadbare bordello, the small shabby room with potbellied stove perhaps placing it

in a rural context not unlike the environs of Bearden’s native Charlotte, or perhaps the

Pittsburgh countryside. The fact of Bearden’s encounters as an adolescent with

prostitution through his friend, as well as his many images of brothel scenes, demonstrate

an interest in brothels ; it is almost inconceivable that Bearden’s acknowledged close

study of Manet would not have included Olympia.

Only in the 1970 Patchwork Quilt ,now at the Museum of Modern Art, does

Bearden make a clean break with Johnson’s Mahlinda, an image which replaced the

white object of desire with a reclining black woman, but still presented her on the basis of

sexual attributes. (Image 141) The 1970 Patchwork Quilt refuses the brothel scene of

Olympia, in which idealized beauty is subverted by the dual images of the prostitute and

black maid., by contextualizing the odalisque in a manner that is not explicitly sexual. 288

No lover or customer is present; the reclining nude’s figure is constructed with the

angularity and stiffly extended limbs of the Egyptian tomb relief. The patterning of the

quilt is greatly clarified beyond the 1969 version, after the careful preparatory drawing

288
Coco Fusco writes of the significations of sexual immorality and uncleanliness, by both
prostitution and the black females, in “Captain Shit and Other Allegories of Black Stardom.” In
NKA (Spring/Summer 1999: 40-45, 134.

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seen in the study. In this version, the sensuous Matissean palette resolves into solid flat

planes of color, described upon its first exhibition as “ increasingly more sophisticated in

color and design, less compressed, airier, and more elegant….Here is an artist who truly

enjoys the plasticity of his medium.”289

By positioning the 1970 Patchwork Quilt’s black nude in the precise pictorial

location of the Manet (and Titian) nudes, but imbuing her with the attributes of black

culture rather than the frontal exposure of sexual availability, he creates a new ideal of

beauty. Facially generalized, she id not a specific individual, but a black female

archetype, representing an idealized and cultivated beauty that suited 1960s civil rights-

era aspirations. She is not necessarily sexually available to the viewer; she seeks the

more elevated status of goddess, or of the mistress who becomes the wife. Or, shown

alone, she may be a harbinger of the liberated woman whose stature, even her place of

residence, seems totally her own, and not necessarily dependent on the support of male

admirers.

In this context, the Boucher figure seen in the archives reveals still more affinity

with Bearden’s evolving composition of the Patchwork Quilt nude. As the caption notes,

while O’Murphy’s legs are provocatively spread, it is a relatively modest pose, and even

suggests youthful innocence. The troubled, but ultimately triumphant, story of Boucher’s

young royal mistress was a saga widely known to connoisseurs of this famous painting.

O’Murphy was renowned in the 18th century as a woman of humble origins who

289
From Carroll Greene’s essay in Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual, (1971: 4) the
exhibition catalogue accompanying MoMA’s exhibition of this collage in its first Bearden solo
show.

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overcame great adversity and achieved success on her own terms. 290 She had been

placed by her military family, while still a teenager, as a mistress of Louis XV. But

Madame Pompidour, Louis’ principal mistress, openly plotted to expel her from the royal

court, leaving her in a tenuous position at court. But O’Murphy soon married a count,

upon whose death she, as a wealthy widow became an arts patron and married a man

thirty years her junior. O’Murphy thus symbolizes a woman who emerged from

society’s margins and became a well-placed and venerated figure.

If Bearden, as a serious student of French art, knew this story, he would be aware

of this eighteenth century parallel to modern cultural aspirations of black Americans. In

his artist’s statement about Patchwork Quilt, Bearden wrote that art celebrates a victory,

and that he searched for all those elements in which life expresses that victory.291 It

appears that it was the innocence and cultivation of the royal mistress, rather than the

sexually available persona of the Titian/Manet courtesan/prostitute, that symbolized the

iconographic victory that Bearden wished to achieve for the black nude in Patchwork

Quilt.

Bearden was clearly aware of the iconographic means to depict this distinction

between the nude who is venerated versus merely available. As he pictorially moves the

Laure figure of Olympia from her marginal and subservient status, and re-imagines her

as an object of desire, placing her in Murphy’s pose signifies her further transformation

from the Titian/Manet courtesan/prostitute to a position of security and respect within

290
Jill Jimenez and Joanna Banham. The Dictionary of Artists’ Models. London: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 2001:142.
291
Ibid., MoMA 1971.

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society. This double revision is thus one of Bearden’s most multilayered syntheses of the

fragments of tradition into his vision for the future.

This intentionality is visible in other collages made in the years surrounding

Patchwork Quilt. When Bearden represents the temptress goddess Circe, or the favored

mistress of the sultan Khayan, she lies face-down, her turned-away face and body

eluding the viewer’s gaze. (Image 146) It is further worth noting that the setting of

works like Khayan and the Black Girl, in an outdoor garden, invokes another stereotype

problematic for the black nude-- the longstanding nature-culture juxtaposition which

equates black women (and to some degree all women) with the unrefined nature of

plants, wildlife and the outdoors, and carries the accompanying notions of excessive, too

easily available sexuality, in comparison with that of the virginal, educated woman,

invariably white, as the epitome of culture.292 In Patchwork Quilt, Bearden evades such

allusions by placing the nude within an interior, intensifying her location in the domain of

culture rather than nature. These images show that, as Bearden developed his face-down

nude though multiple iterations, Patchwork Quilt emerged as the masterwork revision

that addressed almost all of these legacy issues.293

Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt nude, however, even though connotatively an advance

from Johnson’s Mahlinda, still reflected the limits of its time. On the cusp of the

feminist movement of the 1970s, it did not address what became the ultimate goal of the

reconstituted black woman. Once the presumption of desirability and beauty becomes a

given, the final stage of completion requires an end to even this exalted form of

292
Wilson, 1992: 118.
293
Elizabeth Alexander discusses the construction of the self in the “spaces we designate and
create” in The Black Interior, (Saint Paul, MN, Graywolf Press), 2004: 9.

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objectification in favor of imaging women’s own subjectivities. Still, Bearden’s face-

down nude pre-saged the formal qualities deployed by a later generation of black female

artists, including the photography of Lorna Simpson featuring turned-away black women.

Even as Bearden achieves the problematic goal of establishing an art-historical presence

for the black woman as exalted object of desire, he is also a precedent for the next

phase, which is not only to place her within her own cultural legacy, but to remove her

from the object position of the reclining nude, and to give her an individually specific

subjectivity, as contemporary artists like Maud Sulter would subsequently attempt.

The Fragmentary Development of Revision

The presumption that Bearden conflated and inverted the two figures of Olympia

into one reclining black nude is underscored with observations of other aspects of

Bearden’s engagement with Olympia. Bearden used interpolated fragments of

Olympia’s imagery in numerous other works, including several featuring

decontextualized, but stylistically faithful, evocations of Olympia’s tense black cat.

(Image 147) The cat appears in the lower right of the image, its tail crookedly upright,

its eyes feral and glaring, all in the manner of Olympia. From the beginning, scholars

have related Olympia’s cat directly to Manet’s friend the poet Charles Baudelaire, whose

poetry related cats to feminine sexuality, and especially to the idea of sexual immorality

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or promiscuity.294 It is entirely plausible to imagine that Bearden, himself a cat lover

who regularly quoted Baudelaire, was fully aware of the connotation.295

There is a similarly fragmented engagement with the Laure figure, whose

baseline configuration, of a solidly built black woman extending an offer to another

figure, is ubiquitous in Bearden collages of varying subject matter and emblematic of

vernacular black culture and folk culture.296 Whether posed as a conjur woman, a

brothel madam, in a garden greeting a visitor, or at home feeding her family, Bearden’s

proffering black woman figure is invariably placed in the same pictorial space and pose

as Olympia’s maid. She stands to the left of center and is profiled from the left while

facing right. Her arms are outstretched toward a figure to her left, whether to offer fruit

or flowers, serve a meal, or reach for an embrace of greeting or affection. With her sturdy

body build, brown and black skin tones, placement within the right half of the pictorial

space, headscarf and single earring, the stance of Bearden’s proffering black woman is

that of the Laure figure in Olympia.

The frequency of Bearden’s engagement with the proferring woman

image, and the variety of the scenes, that suggests a preoccupation with not only

294
Guégan, 2011, p137 asserts that the Baudelairean link is a certainty, noting that three poems in
Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal relate to “the one who occupies first place in the bestiary.”
295
Sources describe Bearden as an avid reader of Baudelaire, including Schwartzman, who notes
that Bearden in 1948 gave a Christmas gift to a friend of a book of Delacroix drawings along with
a copy of Baudelaire’s essay on Delacroix (p154-6); O’Meally quotes Bearden’s citation of
Baudelaire’s definition of the modern person as someone who “may be wounded by mystery and
absurdity” but nevertheless has great capacity to endure, in Romare Bearden in the Modernist
Tradition, Romare Bearden Foundation: 2008: 102. Bearden’s friend the novelist Ralph Ellison
quoted Baudelaire’s observation that “wise men never laugh but that they tremble,” in his 1986
collection of essays Going to the Territory (see John-Edgar Wideman’s June 20, 1999 New York
Times review).
296
See Patton and Campbell’s placement of the proferring black woman withn black vernacular
culture in Memory and Metaphor: The Art of Romare Bearden 1940-1987,1991.

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depicting but re-imagining this figure. Her proffering stance stance is in essence one of

serving, or nurturing, the needs of others –she brings food to her family’s table, offers

herbs or food, apparently handpicked from the nearby garden, to a friend. This profusion

of scenes, all rooted in daily African American life, suggests a different aspect of

Bearden’s lengthy evolution of this figure from a stance of marginalization, indistinct

subjectivity or outright obliteration--the de-sensualized black woman at the service of

others –into the nurturer, mother or friend , all pillars of African American community

life. Bearden adapts the formal devices of Manet’s Olympia--the placement of the figure,

pictorial flatness--but re-imagines it as a site for the transformation of the Laure figure, as

an archetypal black woman, from marginal to the many central roles she occupies in

African American society. His transformation in Patchwork Quilt of this standing

figure and marginalized subject position into a reclining black everywoman embodying

beauty and desirability, carries fragments of all of her predecessors, just as the African

American culture she represents is a collage of multiple influences.

As an additional factor sustaining the Manet - Bearden attribution made herein, it

is noteworthy that, on the basis of perusal of the images in this folder alongside catalogs

from Bearden exhibitions, it is clear that pictorial elements from several images in the

Bearden Foundation’s archives, of both fine art and pornography, are readily

identifiable in numerous Bearden collages.297 These archival images, therefore, are

invaluable to the excavation of iconographic sources that could have informed the

pictorial evolution of Patchwork Quilt. The pattern of evolution bolsters the idea that the

297
The Manet-Bearden affinities suggested herein are indebted to the methodology of Ruth Fine,
who corresponded with me about their approach to the use of comparative visual analysis to
suggest that numerous specific Bearden works were influenced by artists including Giotto,
Renoir, Picasso and others. see her exhibition catalog The Art of Romare Bearden, Washington,
D.C.: The National Gallery of Art, 2003: 145-151, 170.

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black reclining nude in Patchwork Quilt is, in addition to its African and Egyptian

sources, a revised composite of the two Olympia figures and other well-known reclining

nudes.

Bearden and the School of Life in Paris

No single experience was more influential to Bearden’s synthesizing of multiple

artistic influences than his intensive engagement with the modernist avant garde of Paris.

While Bearden drew his subject matter from his lived experiences within the black

communities of Charlotte, Pittsburgh and New York, his collage fragments drew not just

from black and African imagery but from his passionate and extended engagement with

the art of antecedent European masters. By the time Bearden enlisted in the American

armed forces in 1945, his family had lived in Harlem for over two decades, and he had

come to know many leading Harlem Renaissance-influenced artists and writers through

his mother, Bessie Bearden, the New York correspondent for the Chicago Defender, an

African American periodical with national circulation. He had been exposed to the

collaged techniques of Dadaist photomontage through his 1935 study with George Grosz

at the NY Art Students’ league, but this method remained dormant in his artistic practice

for two decades, as he eschewed the overtly political subject matter of Dadaism.

While Bearden wanted to depict the black community in ways rarely seen in

popular culture, he eschewed the idea of art as propaganda and believed an artist’s

commitment was first and foremost to aesthetics.298 It was when Bearden became aware

of this philosophical affinity with Manet, who personified Baudelaire’s “painter of

modern life” (as discussed in Chapters 1-2) and with the School of Paris of Matisse and

298
Gelburd, 1997: 18.

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Picasso that extended Manet’s modernizing turn, that he found a path to the synthesizing

artistic practice that best captured his vision.

Bearden’s awareness of this affinity crystallized during his nine-month stay in

Paris in 1950, when he used income from the G.I. Bill to join African American artist and

writer friends already in France.299 (Image 151) Bearden’s fellow Harlemite James

Baldwin had been invited to live there by the French government; other friends and

acquaintances there included the artist Herbert Gentry, Albert Murray (whom he met

there), jazz musicians Sidney Bechet, Kenny Clark and Don Byas, and the writer

Richard Wright: Gentry described the friends’ lifestyle as centered on school,

camaraderie, painting and jazz; he and his wife owned Honey’s Club, scene of salon –

like gatherings of artists an writers by day and jazz club at night –which was frequented

by other Americans including the painter Larry Rivers., as well as Simone de Beauvoir

and Jean-Paul Sartre. Bearden used the G.I. bill to enroll for a Philosophy class with

Gaston Bachelard at the Sorbonne as well as for French language courses at the Institut

Britannique. This was the site of some of Bearden’s early encounters with European and

white American artists who looked to jazz as a source of influence in their attempts to

break with European classicism; Rivers and other downtown New York artists would

remain close friends after his return to New York.300

299
See Schwartzman, 1990: 160-170, for the most complete and detailed account, including
excerpts from correspondence, of Bearden’s time in Paris; unless otherwise noted, statements of
fact and correspondence excerpts are drawn from this invaluable source. Since Bearden by his
own account (see Fine 2003:23) did not paint while in Paris, monographical accounts of
Bearden’s artistic career give relatively cursory attention to this period. As one example, Fine’s
2003 exhibition catalog, arguably the most impressively comprehensive treatment of Bearden to
date, covers the period in two pages (2003: 23-24).
300
Jerald Melberg provides a detailed discussion of Bearden’s friendships with Stuart Davis, Piet
Mondrian and Joan Miro, whom he had met during his mid-1940s Art Students’ League classes, a

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 Bearden initially set up a studio with a fellow expatriate in a Latin quarter attic,

and wrote of making charcoal drawings, none of which are known to be extant, but not

paintings. But he found it impossible to remain confined, preferring instead to participate

full-time in the life of the city, often joining James Baldwin and others at cafes in St.

German and especially Montparnasse, to watch and comment on passersby, or simply

strolling at leisure through neighborhoods and park.

Still, Bearden constantly thought about his art, and shared his ideas in letters to

friends. He completed two chapters of the book he co-authored with Carl Holty The

Painter’s Mind, a treatise on how different artists achieved flatness in painting, in which

discussed, for example, his desire to feel as free in his use of color as the German

Expressionists in a gallery show he had seen in Paris.301 Paris seems to have been a

catalyst, a source of influences that surfaced years later, after Bearden’s return to New

York. Bearden, who had long habitually roamed his Harlem neighborhood and other

areas of New York, would later translate the style of the Parisian Baudelairean flaneur,

who roamed the streets of Paris and depicted all aspects of life, high and low, to his

panoramas of Harlem life, such as The Street, but rather than painting gatherings in cafes

and parks, turned more toward representing the range of activity in private life that

would normally be invisible to the public.

time when Bearden was already trying to make art infused with a blues aesthetic. It would be
after Paris, in the 1950s-60s, that Bearden recalled Davis’ interest in making art that visualized
the compositional principles, as well as Mondrian’s pictorial architecture, both of which informed
his 1960s embrace of collage processes as reminiscent of jazz improvisation. (Romare Bearden:
1970-1980, Mint Museum of Art exh.cat, 1980: 20-23.
301
Bearden and Holty’s The Painter’s Mind was published in 1969 and includes extensive
analysis of works by Manet, Matisse and many others (New York: Crown Publishers).

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 Bearden wrote of visiting museums –the Louvre, Cluny for tapestries, the

Museum of Man for African art, and numerous gallery shows, including those for Asian

art; he also took short train trips throughout Italy, where he remarked on his awe at

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescos.302 One crucial experience for Bearden’s

later work was that, while he was already familiar with the art of the European past from

antiquity and through the post-Impressionists, it was while in Paris that contemporary

European art became more vivid for him. Bearden carried letters of introduction to

French artists from friends, and from Samuel Kootz, owner of his New York gallery; he

made several visits with Brancusi in his expansive studios, but wrote mainly about their

joint excursions to markets to shop for the feasts Brancusi, a superb cook, prepared for

groups of friends. He made short trips to the south and west France, traveling at night to

avoid hotel costs, including to see Picasso, who had responded to his letter of

introduction, in Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera –“like gong to see the Eiffel Tower,a

colossal tourist attraction,” he wrote, describing the steady stream of people stopping by

to visit the master painter.303 Fragments of images from all of these sources would later

show up in his collages.

But perhaps Bearden’s most profound encounter with , or better, observation of,

an artist in Paris was a sighting of Matisse while Bearden was at the Dome café in

Montparnasse with friends. Bearden described the scene as Matisse, then elderly and in

302
Fine, 2003; 23.
303
There are some omissions and ambiguities in the literature describing Bearden’s comments on
his time in Paris. Schwartzman offers the quote about Picasso (1990: 169) but attributes it to no
specific letter. He also attributes Bearden’s discussion of seeing Matisse pass by the Dome to an
Avis Berman article, “Romare Bearden: I Paint out of the Tradition of the Blues” from
ARTNews, Dec 1980: 66. Fine indirectly summarizes this episode as an “often-recounted” event,
but without attribution.

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the last four years of his life, walked past, supported by a young man and a young woman

on each side: “A waiter hollered something like, ‘He’s passing by,” and all the waiters

ran to the front of the café and started clapping….Matisse then walked over to shake

hands with the waiters, and all the people were reaching over to shake his hand. I though

‘isn’t this wonderful. They’re not applauding a movie star, but a man who changed the

way we saw life because he was a great painter.’ After being in the States, Paris was a

miracle because things like that could happen.”304

Still, Bearden also found disillusionment in Paris. He later noted his surprise to

feel that Paris seemed “tired,” lacking in energy in comparison to New York. Larry

Rivers agreed that a turning point was occurring around 1950, and that “more was

happening in New York; there was more energy and more interest.” Bearden had already

noted in a1945 letter that, despite the black Americans’ feeling of well-being in Paris,

their experience remained invisible in the American press: “why is it that Stein,

Hemingway, Fitzgerald are eternally being written about (re their years in Paris) and for

all their notoriety and fame, it did not affect French life in the least. The same cannot be

said of the exodus of jazz musicians who “invaded” France, Yet that is rarely, if ever,

mentioned in the American press.” 305 Bearden ultimately came to feel that Paris, while

“a thing of dreams,” was not the place to transcend this invisibility, at least not for a

black American artist who could not tap into the popular appeal available to a musician

or writer. The center of gravity in the art world had shifted to New York; he would take

304
Deidra Harris Kelly at the Romare Bearden Foundation first alerted me to this quote, which
can be found in its entirety in Schwarztman, 1990: 168.
305
From a page of notes in Bearden’s handwriting dated Oct. 1, 1945, shared with the author by
Myron Schwartzman, who said Bearden had given it to him but that it had not been included in
any of his publications, in March 2013.

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all that he had absorbed with him, but it was in New York, and specifically in Harlem,

where he would make his career. In one of just two return trips to Paris after 1950, in the

early 1960s with his wife Nanette, he wrote to Carl Holty: “I don’t know, now, if I

would want to live in Paris; New York, at this time in our history, is far more alive.”

Yet Albert Murray recounts that Bearden teared up repeatedly on the last day of his trip.

As Sharon Patton summed up, Bearden’s time in Paris reinforced for him the

importance of art history, and increased his awareness of current trends. It immeasurably

deepened the trove of imagery from western art that he would later combine with African

and other sources to make his collages. She noted that Bearden frequently quoted Andre

Malraux’s comment that “art is made from art.” 306

Upon his return to New York, after a decade of downtime from art while

employed as a social services caseworker and jazz lyricist, Bearden returned to artmaking

with a new vision taking shape. One lasting impact of his time in Paris was his decision

to systematically undertake critical deconstructions of admired paintings. Having read

Delacroix’ journals about his own such explorations, Bearden felt that he too could

develop artistically by extensively and analytically copying masterworks. The intimate

familiarity with the entire canon that surfaced repeatedly in the collages Bearden began a

decade later. We see quotations from Picasso and Courbet in a version of The Street,

arguably his greatest single work. (Image 153) We see in Homage to Mary Lou a

conflation of influence from two Matisse Piano Lesson paintings. (Image 152) In both

collages, Bearden displays antecedent ideas about color, about masklike figural

treatment; but always deployed to representing these scenes within the context of African

American life. His eclectic sourcing of materials and ideas is perhaps best seen as
306
Patton, Memory and Metaphor, 1991:34.

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metaphoric of his belief that, in drawing subject matter from the community around him,

he highlights the universality of the human lived experience, showing that the basics of

life are the same across cultures

Paris Blues Revisited

It is ironic that Bearden’s experiences as a black artist in mid-century Paris, given

his sense of the lack of popular interest, drew the interest of at least one moviemaker,

Bearden’s former studio mate, Sam Shaw. In 1961, Shaw produced the movie Paris

Blues, scored by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, featuring Louis Armstrong in a

cameo role, and starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier and Diahann

Carroll. Shaw, Bearden’s former studio mate, had originally been inspired to make the

movie about Bearden, based on his Paris stories. The Hollywood studios rejected this

idea as “too abstract for American moviegoers.”307 It was reworked to revolve around

music, but the interracial cast was still unusual for the time. In the early 1980s, Shaw

revisited the project, this time teaming up with Bearden and Albert Murray to make a

series of images that reinvented the story, but with Armstrong and Ellington as the

protagonists. As O’Meally wrote, the intent was to create “a tale of the quest for the

freedom of artistic expression in three of the world’s greatest cities.”

A visual analysis of available reproductions offers interesting insights into what

about Paris continued to compel Bearden’s interest more than thirty years after his stay

there. (Images 154-155) One green and yellow toned image, which features Ellington

leaving a bandstand, draws an imagined map populated with the names of leading

307
See Robert O’Meally’s brief essay in Paris Blues Revisited, the brochure for a fall 2011
exhibition at Jazz at Lincoln Center that displayed a complete set of the collages-finished and
unfinished-and sketches designed by Romare Bearden for an intended, but never realized project
intended to evoke but re-tell the story of the 1961 movie, including scenes from Paris, New York
and New Orleans.

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writers of Manet’s time –Apollinaire, Gaultier, Victor Hugo, and most centrally, Charles

Baudelaire, whose name is bracketed by references to the idea of the dream (le reve) –

“cite du reve,” “aimai je un reve.” The grammar is perhaps deliberately fracture,

recalling Bearden’s frustrations with the language. But the evocation of the

preoccupations of Baudelaire’s “invitation au voyage,” his longing for a place of “luxe,

calme et volupté,” is an unmistakable sign of Bearden’s intimate knowledge of

Baudelaire. It bolsters the idea of his intention that the Patchwork Quilt nude reclining on

her patchwork sofa, her head resting on a flowery pillow, is also replete with such

evocations. The second image fast-forwards Ellington by almost a century, into the mid-

twentieth century world of Matisse. A white cutout figure, perhaps a dancer to the left

evokes Matisse’s illustrations for the book Jazz, while Ellington now inhabits a more

fully realized jazz club scene replete with multi-ethnic bandmates and audience --a

second vision of an idyll that could, by its 1980s date, exist in any of the three subject

cities on either side of the Atlantic. Bearden commented to Holty that he admired the

way that Matisse reworked paintings over and over, and then finally, like jazz, just

stopped.308

Bearden and Matisse: Affinities in the Absence of Encounter

Even as Bearden, after Paris, was perhaps more profoundly inspired by the art of

Matisse than by any other early twentieth century master, he was apparently oblivious to

the many ways in which their paths almost, but never quite, crossed. The artists’ lack of

direct encounters, despite sharing friends, entertainment venues and artmaking values, is

emblematic of the continuing gaps in art history narratives, where incomplete narratives

308
Schwartzman, 153-4.

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are presented as entire truths.309 The fact that the two artists both viewed cats as

intriguing household companions may seem trivial, until we connect the connotations of

cats to Baudelaire, an author whom both read and admired. (Image 156) Noting that

Bearden referred to his cat by its French name “le chat” should lessen the strain of

credulity that he may have such ideas in mind.“

As discussed in Chapter 3, Matisse engaged perhaps even more extensively with

the iconography of the Baudelairean muse in his illustrations of a 1947 edition of the

poet’s Les Fleurs du Mal. What would perhaps be surprising to Bearden would be the

idea that Matisse may have evolved these modernizing images of a black model through

his exposure to the aesthetics of the Harlem Renaissance during repeat visits to Harlem.

Matisse’s visits in Harlem in 1930-33, as discussed in Chapter 3, occurred when Bearden

was still an adolescent. But it is remarkable that Bearden was still an anonymous stranger

to Matisse when he observed the 1950 adulation scene at the Dome in Paris. Bearden

likely had at least a passing acquaintance with Matisse’s portraitist and sometime Harlem

host Carl van Vechten.310 And while Paul Robeson sometimes stayed with Matisse during

1920s and 30s visits to Paris, he was during the same period a guest at the literary and

309
Although, as discussed in this chapter, Bearden had a letter of introduction to Matisse during
his 1950 Paris trip, he apparently never met him; Matisse’s known contacts with Harlem-based
artists had been with the older generation of the 1920s-1930s; there is only a brief mention of a
Matisse exhibition, but not of contacts with African-American expatriate artists, in the Peter Selz
essay “School of Paris at Mid-Century” and Michel Fabre’s “The Cultural Milieu in Postwar
Paris,” both in the exhibition catalog Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists
in Paris 1945-1965. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996: 28, 34-37.
310
Patton, Memory and Metaphor (1991: 27) notes that van Vechten, upon viewing Bearden’s
1944 exhibition of religiously themed paintings at the Kootz gallery, at a time predating his
collages, refrred to Bearden as “the Negro Rouault.” This exhibition, in which 20 of the 24 works
on view sold out, one to the Museum of Modern Art, was the start of Bearden’s rise to success as
an artist.

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artists’ salons held by Bearden’s mother, a prominent journalist, in her Harlem

apartment.311

Perhaps the most remarkable coincidence of a venue shared unknowingly by the

two artists was the iconic jazz club Connie’s Inn. Matisse, as discussed in Chapter 3,

went to performances there during his early 1930s New York visits. The entrance to

Connie’s Inn was directly across the street from Bearden’s family home during the 1920s

and 1930s on West 131st St.312 By the time Bearden made his iconic 1974 collage At

Connie’s Inn, the audiences were integrated; the club has since closed.

Martinique as Eden and Inspiration

A final shared interest was the Caribbean island of Martinique. For both artists,

the island was an idyllic destination, redolent of Baudelairean “luxe, calme et volupte.”

Matisse visited the island en route from Tahiti to France in the early 1930s; his later

Fleurs du Mal illustrations were seen as derived from his nostalgia for his visit. During

the 1970s, Bearden and his wife Nanette (whose family was from the island) build a

house on the nearby island of St. Martin, and took cruises that stopped at Martinique. Just

as Matisse’s visits to the Caribbean were opportunities to expand his representations of

modern female beauty to encompass non-Western cultures, Bearden’s time in the

Caribbean was an opportunity to broaden his engagement with wider of the African

311
Schwartzman, p69, names and describes the many illustrious guests who attended Bessye
Bearden’s events, while Fine, p6, notes that Harlem Renaissance luminaires Langston Hughes
and Countee Cullen were also on the guest list.
312
Schwartzman (1990:69) writes that “from a front window of the Bearden apartment [on the
third floor at 154 West 131st Street], one could see a passageway that led straight to the backstage
entrance of the Lafayette Theater on Seventh Avenue between 131st abd 132nd streets. Near the
Lafayette stood the Tree of Hope, the great elm around which all the performers would gather in
the evening…On the same side of Seventh Avenue, toward the corner of 131st Street, was an
entrance, going downstairs, to Connie’s Inn, which, like the Cotton Club, had black entertainers
playing to an all-white clientele.”

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diasporas that comprise Gilroy’s Black Atlantic; he developed an enduring friendship

with Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, and the two men discussed Cesaire’s concept of

négritude, a blackness that transcends national boundaries, and knew the St. Lucian

writer Derek Walcott. Bearden produced at least thirty works inspired by Martinique

following a 1973 cruise there, which were later exhibited together in a Prevalence of

Ritual – Martinique exhibition. Patton observed that “secrecy and mystery veil faceless

women….who walk or lie nude in tropical landscapes. They remind us of the

mythological nudes of Titian, Rubens and Delacroix or Renoir and Manet.”313 As one

example, the 1973 Martinique work The Mimicry of Water displays two nude bathers by

the sea, rendered in black cutouts reminiscent of Matisse’s Jazz cutouts, in a seaside

landscape like those on the French Riviera often depicted by Matisse. (Image 159) These

images restate compositional ideas explored earlier in Black Venus, set in African

American bordello. Yet even as he made this series with content specific to the

Caribbean, the most lasting influence of Bearden’s Caribbean work was that the region’s

lush vegetation and lifestyle reminded Bearden of his native American South --he wrote

to a friend that “ the yard is filled with stray cats and the fowl community.” His time on

the islands mainly helped him refresh his approach to portraying his home culture.314

Collage as Manifestation of Identity and Influence

It is crucial to the understanding of Bearden’s revisionary use of source imagery

to consider the implications of Bearden’s choice to work in collage. Bearden seldom

reproduced these source images in their entirety; they are instead most often discernible

313
Patton, Memory and Metaphor, 1991:67.
314
Sally Price and Richard Price, in Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006: 103) for a discussion of Bearden’s activities and interests whole in the
Caribbean. Add orig text

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as figural fragments, or as prototypes for pose positions or pictorial structure. But these

image fragments and patterns appear repeatedly in Bearden’s collages during the ten year

period around his creation of Patchwork Quilt.

Bearden’s engagement with Manet’s imagery appears in a repertory of collage

techniques, including fragmentation, inversion and de-contextualization, which manifest

a commitment to pictorial improvisation that Bearden believed he shared with Manet.

Yet, as Kobena Mercer, quoting Ralph Ellison, has suggested, the method of collage is

also a manifestation of the cultural processes that shaped African Americans’ cultural

identity.315 If, as Ellison says, collage’s “sharp breaks, distortions, surrealist blending of

styles, values, hopes and dreams” characterize much of African American history, these

factors also characterize the nature of Bearden’s engagement, as an African American

artist, with the art of the past. Given Bearden’s intent to inject a previously obscured

black subjectivity--including the images of daily African American life evoked in his

seminal 1964 photomontages--into his re-workings of this imagery, he had as a matter of

necessity to selectively decide which fragments of source images, styles or process were

useful to him, and to synthesize these with his own artistic vision. This selective re-use

and revision provides a framework for considering how Bearden’s reclining nude in

Patchwork Quilt evolved from, yet radically revised, those of Titian and Manet.

A complementary, yet contrasting perspective has been offered by Toni Morrison,

who has written that Bearden‘s images, like hers, are not so much broken or fractured,

but “pieced and layered.,” thus, she asserts, many African Americans are not so much

315
See discussion of collage as compositional hybridity by Kobena Mercer in “Romare Bearden,
1964: Collage as Kunstwollen.” In Cosmopolitan Modernisms, London and Cambridge
Massachusetts: The MIT Press and The Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005:125.

198
broken as they are multilayered, withmany dimensions that are not readily seen or

fathomed.”316

Bearden’s fragmented citations from Manet might also be framed by Harold

Bloom’s theorization of the phases by which creative influences are absorbed. 317

Creative output tends not only to swerve away from, or avoid, close emulation of

admired predecessors. It may also manifest a process that Bloom defines as tessitura,

which involves the completion of even antithetical material through a fragmentation of

the original. The fact that the term tessitura is also used in the making of mosaics only

strengthens its relevance to Bearden’s collage –especially his final image related to quilts

Quilting Time, a monumental mosaic commissioned by the Detroit Art Institute which

represents multiple generations of a community at a quilting bee. (Image 157)

The Quilt as Metaphor: Legacy and Materiality

If the face-down stance of Bearden’s nude begins the process of her elevation

from sex object to cultural icon, her transformation is completed by her stylized repose

on a collaged image of a bed draped with a patchwork quilt. Her figural aesthetics

invoke an ancestral legacy of Egypt and West Africa, while the quilt locates her in a

specifically African American cultural milieu.318 In the manner of a history painting,

both the image and the materials of this collage manifest a fragmented synthesis of the

multiple styles, ideas and influences which have shaped the African American

316
Robert O’Meally discusses Toni Morrison’s comments in the essay “Layering and Unlayering:
Jazz, literature and Bearden’s Collage,” in Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition, 2008: 96-
97.
317
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997:14.
318
Museum of Modern Art Object Recored for Romare Bearden, 1970: 3

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experience. If, as Kobena Mercer suggests, the diasporic identity is itself a collaged

condition, or Morrion’s layers, then this collaged figure is constructed as emblematic of

that identity. 319

Bearden suggests the figure’s everywoman status by constructing her arms, legs

and breasts from papers painted in varying shades of brown. Her rigid, angular body

recalls the striding figures of Egyptian tomb reliefs, rotated ninety degrees to a reclining

position. The figure retains the stiffly extended arm, and the combination of a face in

profile with a frontal view of the breasts, that are signature Egyptian aesthetics. The

Egyptian striding stance of the legs is deftly conflated with Boucher’s bottoms-up pose,

as a manifestation of the multiple cultural origins of Bearden’s sources. The proportion of

the head to the body recalls the outsized heads of Benin bronze sculptures, whose

function as objects of the Benin royal court help ennoble Bearden’s lounging black

woman in repose-- and perhaps provide further resonance to Bearden’s revisionary

blending of these African figural forms with those of Boucher’s portrait of the royal

mistress O’Murphy.

Bearden’s placement of the figure within the expanse of collaged quilt

intensifies the revision. If it is sex for sale that ties Manet’s prostitute to the cash

economy, the quilt-making craft is the visible source of possible income for Bearden’s

nude. By using actual fabric, Bearden is not only improvising on the early modernist

tradition of paper-based collage; he is participating in the elimination, in contemporary

art, of the divide between the materials of fine art and handicraft or women’s work--

another aspect of his presaging later feminist artistic strategies. He uses collaged fabric

and paper, instead of a painted illusion of fine, opulently draped white linens. By
319
Kobena Mercer,. “Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen,” 2005:125.

200
blending the image with its material, his ennobling of the black everywoman is

transported from the realm of illusion to material reality.

If some sections of the quilted corduroy bedcover on which she lies are slightly

torn, or look worn and faded, they do not signify an uncleanliness comparable to the

prostitute Olympia’s gray-white skin. It instead suggests a temporal patina, a history

that is being restored to a people whose past had been stripped away. Likewise, the

scalloped edging across the bottom of the quilt, despite its wear and tear, evokes a

tradition of making fine things from even the plainest materials.320 This analogy is

strengthened by the matching of the nude’s striped belt fabric with a patch of the quilt,

which aptly extends this make-do improvisation from home furnishings to budget

fashions sometimes cut from discarded upholstery.

Having imbued the Patchwork Quilt nude with this ancestral and black

American aesthetic tradition, Bearden completes her configuration as everywoman with

trans-temporal references that also place her within contemporary styles of its 1970

period. Her headscarf and earrings may evoke a past of mammies or household workers,

but during the 1960s-70s, it aso reflected the fashion of wearing African-influenced

headscarfs, which together with kente cloths, dashikis, cornrows, etc., served as

rhetorical devices of the then-current black power and black is beautiful movements.

Although the scarf is stylistically ambiguous, and could also resolve as a (perhaps Jazz

Age-inspired) cloche, it also can signify vernacular figures such as the conjur woman. In

320
This aspect of improvising with available everyday materials to create a work of both
functional and aesthetic desirability is central to the African-American quilting culture, as
explored by Bridget R. Cooks in Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art
Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press), 2011:140; Jane Livingstone also contrasts
the vernacular yet synthesizing aspects of quilts in The Quilts of Gee’s Bend by John Beardsley et
al (Atlanta, GA; Tinwood Books in association with The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), 2002:
40-41.

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contrast, the very materiality of the sparkly bangle bracelet --made of photostated paper

with circle patterns like the Benday dots of comic strips and Lichtenstein Pop paintings -

-provides a touch of more unambiguously contemporary elegance. This subtle detailing

serves to further conflate the timelessness of her Egyptian-inspired figure with a

contemporary feel that places her in the present day. She represents no single period, but

exists across the ages. Due to the multiplicity and nuance of Bearden’s choice of

compositional materials, Patchwork Quilt stands as a masterful example of the

materiality of an artwork as metaphor for its meaning.

Collage as the Visualization of African American Identity Formation

If the materiality of Bearden’s collage is one metaphor for meaning, his

compositional technique is an important corollary. As previously discussed, the very

nature of collage-making is metaphoric of the fragmented, improvised basis of African

American identity formation, as well as an emphatic reminder of its culturally hybrid

sources.321 Bearden warned against essentialism and stated that there is only one art and

that it belongs to all mankind, and his collage methods embody this belief.322 He poses

his reclining nude within a pictorial trope advanced by Western masters Titian and

Manet, even as he stylizes the figure with the aesthetics of Egypt and Benin. His

fragmented and revisionary sourcing of imagery from Olympia, re-imagining the

marginalized black maid as an object of veneration, reveals Bearden’s willingness to

321
Kobena Mercer 2005: 126.
322
Ibid., 132.

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work with and learn even from sources, such as Manet’s Laure figure, that are

antithetical to his own artistic vision. 323

The compositional method of collage, moreover, embraces the constant re-

working required to create imagery from such a multiplicity of sources. Bearden’s

admiration for Manet’s blurred, “incomplete” surfaces stemmed from the fact that Manet

extensively re-worked his canvases, often stripping the surfaces down every day, to

achieve an effect in his finished paintings that looked as if they could have been done in

a single setting. 324 This type of reworking is evident in a comparison of Manet’s

preparatory drawings and portrait study for the Laure figure in Olympia, which show her

facial features and attire quite clearly. But in the final painting, although the attire

remains intact, the facial detailing is almost indiscernible after her skin tones are blended

with the wall behind her.

Bearden saw in this reworking of fragments of images --his perception was that

Manet never absolutely finished a work, but at some point simply “relinquished” it --as a

process similar to jazz and collage. 325He perceived this act of just stopping, as opposed

to finishing, as leaving the work open to re-interpretation, in much the way an Ellington

jazz score was written with space left open for repeat subsequent improvisations.

Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt constituted a move to occupy the space left for

improvisation by the blanked out aspects of the Laure figure in Olympia.

323
Ibid., 139.
324
Myron Schwartzman: 1990:30, 38.
325
Ibid., 38, 40

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Situating Patchwork Quilt Within the History of Modern and Contemporary Art

On the one hand, it is the sense of Patchwork Quilt as a completion, a re-vision,

of the Laure figure that had been left unfinished by Manet, that frames the significance

of Patchwork Quilt within the narrative of modern art. On the other hand, Patchwork

Quilt is pivotal in its own right, due to the cultural specificity of its nude, and its

anticipation of the work of subsequent generations of especially black female artists. If

Bearden’s 1964 photomontages represented the panorama of modern black life and

culture, which was otherwise largely excluded from the canonical images of art histories

of the period, Patchwork Quilt constituted a specific redress of the invisibility of the

black female.

Judith Wilson defines Bearden’s role in an important recuperative project of

twentieth-century African-American art as the re-visioning of the black female, and the

situation of this figure within an African-American cultural context after a long tradition

of erasure and marginalization. 326 This art of retrieval can be contextualized even more

broadly, as a major work in the project of imaging race that is a defining aspect of

modernism. Given Olympia’s stature as a foundational painting of modern art, its

representation of the Laure figure, even though flawed, establishes the imaging of race as

foundational to modern art. The most thoughtful nineteenth century responses to

Olympia’s Laure figure-- including the critic Sensier and Manet’s acolyte Bazille--

evinced a sense that this figure was compelling but incomplete. Both Bazille in 1870 and

Bearden a century later, redressed this void by creating solo images of this figure, with no

326
Judith Wilson, “Getting Down to Get Over: Romare Bearden’s Use of Pornography and the
Problem of the Black Female Body in Afro-U.S. Art, 1992: 112-122, esp. 118.

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white companion to subordinate or limit her, with carefully nuanced detailing, each

evocative of their own time, that serve to fill the void. The existence of these and other

carefully considered responses to the Laure figure suggests that the history of

modernism, which has to date been largely silent about this subject, must likewise be

completed. This act would situate Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt within a central narrative

of modernist art history.

Roland Barthes writes, in his “Discourse of History,” of the necessity for shifters

in any historian’s organization of a narrative, which determine what is included given the

necessity to exclude material deemed insignificant.327 A redress of art history’s exclusion

of the matter of race, and an acknowledgement of the subject’s centrality to modern art,

will require a re-evaluation of these criteria. As Derrida points out, the distinction

between the inside of a work and the parergon, the material relegated to the outside, is

unstable; that the outside is often essential to the definition of the inside and therefore an

indispensable part of it.328 If the artworks themselves are subject to subsequent

intervention, so are the narratives about them.

Within the context of its own time, during the American civil rights and black

power movements, Patchwork Quilt is most radical in the hybridity of the sources it

embraced; an eclecticism arising from Bearden’s resistence to racial essentialism during a

period when the expectations placed on black artists were often emphatically essentialist.

Bearden’s improvisational collaging of fragmentary source images from Manet and

327
In his essay “The Discourse of History,” Barthes points out each historian selects which details
to include in his or her narratives, but that subsequent generations may opt to revise this
constructed account. In The Rustle of Language, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press), 1986: 130.
328
Derrida, Jacques. “Parergon.” In The Truth in Painting, (Chicago and London: The
University of Chicago Press). 1987: 15-149.

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African art, from paper and fabric, to craft patchwork imagery emblematic of African

American culture, replicates the hybridity of influences that have shaped African

American identity. The fact that Bearden centers this project on the black female nude,

an image whose rarity even by black artists was induced by the prevailing racist

connotations associated with black nudity, reinforces the radical boldness of his work.

Patchwork Quilt is equally important as a counterpoint to the imagery

concurrently emerging from the then-dominant Pop art movement. As just one example,

Patchwork Quilt first appeared in a 1970 exhibition titled She, within years of Richard

Hamilton’s eponymous 1961 collage. (Image 161) The Hamilton image manifests

Pop’s engagement with the female figure, here shaped from kitchen appliances, within

the cultural context of popular culture, mass media and consumerism, while Bearden’s

nude engages with the legacy and aspirations of the civil rights movement which was

equally definitive of the period. Art history often dismisses the latter as mere politics,

and thus unworthy of inclusion in the discussion of art. But it is no more political than

discussing Russian Constructivism within the context of the Bolshevik revolution, or

Dada as a resistance of Nazism, or Abstract Expressionism in terms of postwar pro-

American ideology. It is the juxtaposition of images that capture the aesthetic impact of

both consumerism and the political context of the 1960s that presents the most complete

art historical representation of the period.

This comparative approach is equally salient even for works of Pop art that

appear to directly address the issue of race, but do so with aesthetic strategies that read

more as satire, which was an acceptable trope of artistic expression, than as political

critique, which at the time was not. Larry Rivers, in making his 1970 I Like Olympia in

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Blackface, was motivated by his black seminar students’ objections to the fact that only

images of whites were presented for study in their painting and sculpture courses. 329

(Image 160) Rivers created I Like Olympia in Blackface as a work that contemplated

the implications of reversing that situation, though he acknowledged that the “corny

minstrelization” with which he styled the work detracted from that objective even as it

succeeded as a work of Pop art. Like Manet one hundred years earlier, Rivers submerged

his work’s politically revisionary intentions with an overlay of recognizable satire that

obliterated one of its original purposes. Bearden’s Patchwork Quilt, made in the same

year as the Rivers piece, rejected mainstream Pop’s sublimated approach to race, in favor

of an aesthetic strategy that explicitly addressed the issue, with the result that this work is

omitted from most art histories of the period. There are strong parallels between Rivers’

play to market expectations in 1970 and Manet’s ambivalence in the face of his 1863

Salon audience’s expectations; in contrast with the more overtly revisionary, and thus

more historically marginalized, work of their respective contemporaries Bearden and

Bazille. An art history narrative that looks at Bazille together with Manet, as well as

Bearden together with Hamilton, Warhol and Rivers, would comprise a more nuanced

reading of these artists’ work and times.

Patchwork Quilt can finally be seen as a harbinger of the post-modernist and

contemporary work that not only advanced Bearden’s re-viewing of the Laure figure, but

sustained the anti-essentialist philosophy inherent in his collage. Even as Bearden’s

imagery forms a critical juncture, at mid-century, in the process of revisioning the black

nude, it was also marked by the limited imagining of the black female subject that

329
As described during an interview with Robert Hughes for “Bronx is Beautiful,” in Time,
February 8, 1971.

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characterized the pre-feminist period. Bearden inserted the black female into a central

trope of art history, but she remained subject to the objectification inherent in this trope.

As Bearden himself commented in his 1970 MoMA Artist’s Statement, quoting Goethe,

every artist is anchored to his times by at least two of its major defects. Still, Bearden

captured a pivotal moment in the continuing evolution of this figure, whose subjectivity

would increasingly be asserted in subsequent decades, including for artistic agendas

extending well beyond the construction of the black female subject position. Artists

including Yasumasa Morimura, Renee Cox, and Maud Sulter, among others, form a

vanguard. (Images 162-163)

But perhaps the most radical and conclusive response is just beginning to emerge,

in the work of currently emerging artists such as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. This artist

readily acknowledges the influence of Manet and other early masters; and she, like

Bearden, develops her ideas by making multiple versions of the same image.330 But her

engagement with Manet relates less to his imagery--there are no reclining women in her

work-- than to the formal aspects of his painting style. The women in her paintings are

figured, she says, from images drawn from her imagination, and reflect her specific

perspective, as a British artist of Ghanaian heritage, of being not fully anchored in any

one culture. Perhaps this artist represents one outcome of the long process of recuperating

a black female identity from its obliteration in art history. Yiadom-Boakye continues the

diasporan stance of drawing freely from the mélange of sources that she finds

aesthetically useful. But with a new sense of no longer needing to turn away from or

330
Sarah Kent’s essay “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye,” in Flow, Exh. cat. Christine Y. Kim, ed. (New
York: The Studio Museum in Harlem), 2008: 102-123.

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overtly revise the old objectifying tropes, she can now directly engage the viewer with

the synthesizing complexity of her own subject position.

Summation

If the problem of the twentieth century, according to W.E.B. du Bois, was the

problem of the color line, then a problem of many histories of twentieth century art, as

set forth to date, is their inadequate historicization of the imaging of race as a

foundational element of modernist painting. If this oversight is to be corrected, then the

art of Romare Bearden, including Patchwork Quilt, will be situated at the center of the

discourse around modern art since Manet.

Bearden and Manet were both painters of modern life as it existed in their times.

Both offered visual representations that, while deeply flawed, acknowledged the

question of race, as personified by the black female figure, as a central factor of modern

life. The artists have made the work, and it is the ongoing challenge of art history to

perform the Foucauldian excavations that lead to a remaking of the modernist document,

so that it becomes a more complete critique of the work it purports to historicize.

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CONCLUSION

Seeing Laure: The Anterior as Muse in the Art of Maud Sulter and Mickalene Thomas

This dissertation has asserted a foundational centrality for the black female

figure in the development of modernist pictorial values, as seen its survey of the black

muse from Manet and Bazille to Matisse and Bearden. Numerous artists have explored

this figure in more recent decades, including two leading contemporary artists whose

work advances its legacy into the present day. The Ghanaian-Scottish artist Maud Sulter

(1960 - 2008) and African American painter Mickalene Thomas (b.1971) manifest a

present-day continuity of critical artistic engagement with Manet’s Laureby making work

that is resonant of their own time even as they recapitulate pictorial tropes, processes

and materials retrieved from the past.

Maud Sulter: A Recuperative Mode of Vision

Maud Sulter’s work is unique among all artistic engagements with the Laure

figure surveyed herein because of her attempt to act as both artist and historian. She

attempts to not just revise nineteenth-century artists’ images of black women including

Laure, but to retrieve these models’ lost subjectivity. Sulter wrote of the importance to

her work of “putting black women back in the centre of the frame, by not only

reimagining their depictions, but by constructing plausible histories for these obliterated

personae. Yet Sulter noted the challenges of retrieving surviving fragments of history in

the service of suggesting plausible readings of their meaning and significance,. Sulter

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wrote that, “as a black person and a women I don’t read history for facts, I read it for

clues.” 331

Sulter often worked with pictorial fragments, in a methodology similar to that of

Bearden’s collage, to visualize the dispersed nature of the clues at her disposal. In her

2002 photomontage series Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama, Sulter overlaid Manet’s

depiction of Laure in Olympia with a found photograph. (Images 165-167) By

reformatting the painting so that both women meet the viewer’s gaze, unlike in Olympia,

she suggests that the two women have an equivalent claim on the viewer’s attention. 332

This device thus disrupts the historical treatment of Olympia as a painting solely about

the prostitute.

By selecting an 1850s Nadar photograph of an unnamed black artist’s model for

the collaged overlay, Sulter moreover suggests an historical basis for retrieving Laure’s

obscured subjectivity, since given the date, the Nadar model was a near-contemporary of

Laure.333 Still, in selecting an image of an unknown Nadar model, Sulter acknowledged

the unlikelihood of a full recovery of subjectivities lost to history. Sulter, who

speculated that the model might be Jeanne Duval, traveled to Nantes and the Americas to

331
Deborah Cherry, in a March 2012 draft of her forthcoming essay, “Image-Making with Jeanne
Duval in Mind: photoworks by Maud Sulter, 1989-2002,” which she generously shared with me,
notes that Sulter uses this quote in the “Clio” section of her unpaginated text Zabat: Narratives
(Hebden Bridge: Urban Fox Press), 1989.
332
Deborah Cherry, ibid., for a discussion of Sulter’s use of directional gazes, as well as the use
of scale and other conceptual devices.
333
As discussed in Deborah Cherry’s essay in the exhibition brochure for Jeanne Duval: A
Melodrama, Edinburgh: The National Gallery of Scotland, 2003: 51.

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research a biography of Duval, but it remained unfinished at the time of Sulter’s

premature death.334

Sulter was, however, able to support her choice of Jeune Modele for her to

overlay of the Olympia maid’s visage on the basis of her discovery that Duval’s mother

had worked in a Nantes brothel. By refiguring Manet’s Laure with a surmised likeness of

Duval, a brothel worker’s daughter, Sulter uses fragments of historical fact to retrieve

possible, but ultimately unprovable, biographical narratives for the Manet figure posed by

Laure.

Sulter, in adapting the collaborative artist-model relationship previously seen with

Bazille and Matisse, used a second device for asserting possible narratives, in Portrait

d’une négresse (Bonnie Greer), 2002, based on Benoist’s 1800 painting La Négresse.

(Image 168) Sulter often posed well-known artists and writers like Greer to assert that,

even though antecedent models like Jeanne Duval and Laure are unknown to us today,

they may well have had a prominence within the artistic circles of their day comparable

to the present-day celebrity of Sulter’s own models.335 This device was central to Sulter’s

Zabat series of monumental photographs, including Phalia, in which the award-winning

writer Alice Walker assumes Laure’s flower-bearing stance. (Image 166)

Sulter significantly advances her models creative agency, to the point of allowing

Greer and others to directly possess and rework her depictions of them, as Greer did in

making a 2004 BBC documentary based on her sessions with Sulter. (Image 168) Sulter’s

blending performance and video into her photographic sessions rounds out the

334
Ibid., Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama exh cat., 2003: 21.
335
Ibid., Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama, 2003: 51.

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conceptualist approaches to scale and de-skilling that consistently informed her critical

engagement with art history.

Sulter ‘s use of her own image, with a second overlay photograph in Jeanne

Duval, relates to her highly personal concerns about the erasure of muses’ subjectivity in

the service of the artist’s objectives. This empathy derived from her own experience as a

model for other artists.336 Sulter wrote of an episode in which she posed for an artist

friend who later reworked the photographs taken of Sulter in a manner that rendered her

own personality and collaborative creativity invisible. Her friend moreover reworked the

image to project the exoticized stereotypes that Sulter despised. This can be related to the

many racist stereotypes that were, as discussed in Chapter One, affixed to both Laure

and Jeanne Duval. Sulter therefore infuses the narrative possibilities of Manet’s Laure

with both her own dehumanizing experience as a muse and her imagined sense of Jeanne

Duval’s lived experience. Sulter’s empathy also derived from her sense that Duval’s

facial features, as represented by a Baudelaire sketch, resembled her own. (Image 16)

This doubling is manifested by her placement of her own snapshot image on the bottom

left of Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama – her hair wrapped with a madras scarf reminiscent

of Duval’s. It is Sulter’s personalized response to the Laure figure, based on perceived

parallels with her own likeness and biography, that motivate her ability to so powerfully

re-imagine the image. Like Manet, she reworks past imagery based on her own lived

experiences.

This emotional response informs Sulter’s belief in the capacity of present-day

audiences to surmount the past inability of many observing viewers to actually see the

336
As described in the essay “Maud Sulter on Negotiating the Muse” in the exhibition catalog
Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama, Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2003:14-15.

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obliterated Manet figure. Some art historians, as discussed in Chapter Two, have

described this type of oversight as agnosia, the inability to see an object due to an

inability to make a conceptual or symbolic identification with it.337 In this light, the

silence of art history about the Laure figure could be seen to manifest, simply, an

inability to imagine this novel figure’s subjectivity. If attention derives from experience

and history, it could be surmised that, prior to the late twentieth century, the overall social

and political lack of interest in the black subject throughout Western society framed the

historical silence on artistic representations the free black population in 19th century

Paris. As discussed by Roland Barthes in his “Discourse of History,” (see Chapter Four)

histories are constructed as much through the inclusion of selected facts as by the

exclusion of others; Derrida notes that what is viewed as inside a specific entity is

defined in part by what relegated to the outside. The construction of Western culture as

white and European was served by histories of art relegating non-Europeans to obscurity.

The context for the art historical investigation of Olympia has evolved in more

recent years. The nonwhite population of France has expanded, as in much of Europe

,creating a more diverse audience for major museums. Public awareness of the presence

of a free black working class in nineteenth-century Paris is evolving as events like the

annual May 10 commemoration of the 1848 French emancipation of slavery, invariably

attended by the country’s president, become part of the national consciousness. A

concurrent interdisciplinary scholarly focus on this topic is now emerging.

It is within this context that an emerging group of black European artists like

Sulter are working with strategies of co-optation and retrieval for pre-modern images

like Laure. They seek to reach a multiethnic audience, including individuals who may
337
See Crary (1999:94) and Pollock (1999: 280).

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find it impossible not to “see” the Laure figure. Like Sulter, this audience will want to

understand what is knowable about the reality behind the image of the black muse.

Sulter’s excavations and imagined recuperations therefore perform the necessary

interventions with the histories of art discussed in the Introduction –she enacts the

revision of historical narratives that Benjamin suggests is the prerogative of every new

generation, she also sets forth a Foucauldian suggestion of plausible new narratives.338

Her works of retrieval use contemporary media-- video, performance and

photomontage—that can claim the viewer’s sustained attention. As this leads to a new

cognition of the Laure figure’s faceted significations, a revisionary understanding of

Manet’s representations of both the maid and the prostitute becomes possible. The art

historian, by addressing the centrality of the Laure figure to the art of modern life, can

then reimagine the painting as a bi-figural image. With this enhanced art historical

discourse around Olympia, the extent of the painting’s radical modernity can be most

fully understood.

Mickalene Thomas: Presenting a Trés Belle Négresse of the Present Moment

For more than a decade, the rhinestone-studded portrait paintings of Mickalene

Thomas have underscored the degree to which she has posed the composite body of art

history as her ultimate muse. While this work derives in part from late twentieth century

images of black women in popular culture, it has been her engagement with anterior

generations of avant-garde painters that has induced the most sustained inspiration as she

forges a creative vision that is wholly her own.

338
Foucault’s previously cited text, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and Walter Benjamin’s “On
the Concept of History” comprise a basis for theorizing the premise of this dissertation; as does
the artistic practice of Fred Wilson, especially for his 2003 Venice Biennale exhibition Speak of
Me as I Am, which was the subject of an independent research project for Professor Rosalyn
Deutsche in 2010.

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 Thomas, like Manet and Matisse before her, works with favored models, to create

thoughtfully rendered portraits. Monumentally scaled like Sulter’s photomontages, they

bear titles derived from her artistic commitment to the centrality of the black female

figure within the canons of art. With paintings like Portrait of Qusuquzah 2, Une Trés

Belle Négresse and Din, Une Trés Belle Négresse #1, Thomas asserts an intervention

with the historical effacement of Manet’s Laure, whose portrait, as discussed in Chapter

One, remains titled merely as the anonymous La Négresse. Thomas, in contrast,

formulates titles pairing her models’ names with Manet’s brief description of Laure, “trés

belle négresse.” (Image 172) Thomas’ titles therefore act as textual metaphors of her

visual style; the obscured individuality of Laure is reconstituted in glittering portrayals of

confident and empowered black women. Thomas’ muses are simultaneously subjects and

objects of beauty.

Thomas also embraces the collaborative working methods of Bazille and Matisse

as she engages with her models in a creative exchange that she views as inherent to the

portrait-making process. Thomas speaks of her efforts to “encourage the models to

assume poses that are naturally theirs.” 339 She provides costumes, wigs and makeup

artists for the models, and consults with them to style their poses of looks inspired by

black popular culture from the 1970s to the present. The relaxed give and take that

typifies her studio sessions is revealed to be consistent with the past studio practice of

Bazille --whose Peonies model had enough agency to repeatedly don the same

distinctive headscarf and flower-shaped earrings in poses for Bazille and other artists.—

and of Matisse –whose easy rapport with the model Carmen is revealed in Hélène

339
See Melandri et al, Mickalene Thomas: Origin of the Universe, Murrell essay “The Anterior as
Muse,” 2012: 22.

216
Adant’s photographs ffo their studio sessions for his Baudelaire illustrations, as discussed

in Chapter Two. 340 (Image 71)

The art-historical excision of the black modernist muse, despite the existence of

archival documentation such as the Adant photos, is underscored by the apparent

obscurity of such archives, even to interested artists like Romare Bearden and Faith

Ringgold, who both spent significant time in France actively researching modernist

icons. Yet these artists were resolutely aspirational, as indicated in the narratives for

some of Ringgold’s French Collection series of story quilts. (Image 173) Even as she

assumes that no African American woman could have been a muse to Matisse or Picasso,

she also predicts that this will change before the end of the twentieth century, suggesting

that artists like her young protagonist Willia Marie Simone will ultimately “meet all the

artistic and literary luminaries of the day and make a name for herself in the modern art

movement.” 341

Mickalene Thomas is among the subsequent artists who can be seen as a

fulfillment of Ringgold’s vision, in works like her monumental Dejeuner sur l’herbe:

Les Trois Femmes Noires, which was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art.

(Images 169, 170) Thomas consolidates her mastery of metaphor into a visually opulent

paean to three anterior masters –Manet, Matisse and Bearden --who are among her most

sustained influences. The original Dejeuner sur l’herbe, by Edouard Manet,

transformed the classicized allegory of an Italian Renaissance print into a recognizable

340
Selected Adant photographs of Matisse’s sessions with Carmen appear in a book by home
décor magazine editor Marie-France Boyer, Matisse à la Villa Le Rêve, Lausanne: La
Bibliothèque des Arts (2004).
341
See the exhibition catalog Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and
Other Story Quilts (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art), 1998:9.

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scene from bohemian Paris life. Thomas overlays Manet’s ivory-complexioned

demimondaines with vibrant black women styled from 1970s blaxploitation films.

The blurred background shape of Matisse’s sculpture The Back situates the

tableau in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden, setting up a dialogue with

Matisse’s own reworking of the female figure through a modernist abstraction fusing

classical and African aesthetics.342 The fragmented and layered texture of Dejeuner’s

painted surface, itself derived from a projected photograph, denotes the inspiration of

Bearden’s deconstructed and reassembled collages, which in turn cited the

improvisational aesthetic of jazz, Matisse cutouts and Dadaist photomontage. Thomas

stresses the importance of the collage to her process, noting that it is through collage,

more than drawing or sketches, that she develops her compositions, observing that “the

process of collage allowed me to navigate an image: segmenting, deconstructing, pasting,

and recontextualizing my ideas. I wanted to shift ways of seeing the image.”343 Dejeuner

can therefore be seen a summation of the hybridity of the pictorial cut that Kobena

Mercer attributes to Bearden’s collage, as discussed in Chapter Four, becoming an

embodiment of the “sharp breaks, distortions, surrealist blending of styles, values, hopes

and dreams” that characterizes both African American culture and the evolution of

modernist aesthetics.344

342
Jack D. Flam, “Matisse and the Fauves,” in. “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, exh cat,
William Rubin, ed. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984) v1, 230-231.
343
From the artist’s interview with curator Lisa Melandri in the exhibition catalogue Mickalene
Thomas: Origin of the Universe (Santa Monica: Santa Monica Museum of Art), 2012: 30.
344
Mercer cites Ralph Ellison’s discussion of Bearden in “Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as
Kunstwollen,” in Cosmopolitan Modernisms. London and Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT
Press and the Institute of International Visual Arts, 2005.

218
 Thomas applies an equally revisionary approach to her remaking of Manet’s

fraught depiction of Laure in Olympia, with pictorial devices that bring the gradual

modernization of the black female subject into the contemporary moment.. As Thomas

asserts her intervention, in the 2012 painting Marie: Femme Noire, Nue Couchée, her

reclining nude turns away from the viewer, in contrast to the confrontational stare of

Manet’s courtesan, introducing a Bazille-like ambiguity to the pictorial connotation. She

appears more as an indifferent paramour than as a paid consort–her body on artfully

arranged and unabashed display but her gaze turned away. (Image 174) Her casual self-

confidence is underscored by the spreading disarray of her bouquet as it slips to the floor

from the relaxed grasp of a half-open hand. With the centuries-old presumption of an

objectifying male viewer now dematerialized as an empty chair, it is the figure itself,

rather than its relationship with the viewer, that is the source of pictorial interest. This

radically new black muse transcends an antecedent history of subordination and

obliteration and assumes the power of her central subject position.

Summation

Romare Bearden wrote that “art is an old tune that the artist plays with new

variation. He attempts to see things with fresh eyes yet he must determine his relation to

his past history.”345 This dissertation’s acts of retrieval and revision have comprised an

attempt to clarify just one of the many areas of agnosia, or blindness, still extant in the

art-historical narrative. By focusing on the artists discussed herein, this analysis attempts

to demonstrate that the inability to “see” Laure is primarily be one of narrative omission,

rather than of artmaking practice. Matisse’s innovative aesthetic engagement with

345
Romare Bearden, Artist’s Questionnaire (1970) for his Patchwork Quilt collage, in the
Painting and Sculpture department’s Object Records, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

219
modern black culture is deemed extraneous to his stature as a foundational modernist.

Bearden’s pictorial insights about European masters are subordinated to his visualizations

of jazz. Sulter’s search for self-affirmation in history is subsumed by the demand for

critiques of racial tensions in contemporary Britain. These disparate artists’ shared project

of modernizing the black muse, whether explicitly stated or not, complicates the distinct

categories set up by canons. It therefore advances the impetus toward new narratives

more reflective of the current transformative moment.

With free-ranging imagination, Maud Sulter and Mickalene Thomas stake their

claims to a place in a lineage of transformative artists from Manet and Bazille to Matisse,

and Bearden. Like their forebears, Sulter, Thomas and other contemporary artists, strive

through critical engagement with the past, to capture the essence of their own time, and

thus to foretell the icons of the future.

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