ART: The Black Model from Géricault to Picasso

The Black Model from Géricault to Picasso: a very innovative project and a major international premiere at the ACTe Memorial. This exhibition has already had a first stop in New York at the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University and a second stop in Paris at the Orsay Museum. She moved to Pointe-à-Pitre from September to December 2019. Through 110 works, it shows the representation of black figures in fine art.

2. Delacroix Ferdinand Victor Eugene. Study based on the Aspasie model, oil on canvas, around 1824-1828, © Fabre Museum of Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, photography Frédéric Jaulmes.

MORE THAN AN EXHIBITION, A MESSAGE

Going far beyond the artistic dimension, this exhibition focuses on aesthetic, political, social and racial issues. She also looks at the imaginary aroused by these representations over the decades. It deals with a great unsaid, a great unseen in the history of art, which is the relationship between modern artists and black models. A dialogue between the artist who paints, sculpts or photographs and the subject who poses for him. The artists are involved alongside these figures who often pose in the greatest silence.

THE GREATEST ARTISTS

Géricault, Delacroix, Carpeaux, Matisse, Cézanne, Rousseau or Gauguin, committed artists who, through activism, denounce the slave trade and fight, brushes in hand, to rehabilitate their human conditions.
If the abolition of slavery was declared in 1794, it would be well over half a century before society really integrated this new condition as a reality.

THE INITIATIVE...

... was born from a fruitful collaboration on both sides of the Atlantic between Denise Murrell, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher from the Ford Foundation at the Wallach Art Gallery in New York and the Musée d'Orsay. It was on the basis of the thesis she defended in 2013 at Columbia University, Seeing Laure: Race and Modernity from Manet's “Olympia” to Matisse, Bearden and Beyond, that an entire reflection was developed.

IDENTITIES FOUND

• Who knew, before this exhibition, that the famous handmaid in the painting”Olympia” by Manet was the name Laure?
• Who remembered that one of Matisse's favorite models,” The Haitian dancer ”, was the name Carmen?
• Finally, who remembered that the model by Géricault, which overlooks the very famous painting” Raft of the MedusIt was black. Coming from the former colony of Saint-Domingue, which would become Haiti, he embodies this victorious, conquering and optimistic figurehead, who contrasts with the other prostrate castaways. Her first name? Joseph.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux Why be born a slave? , after 1875, polychrome plaster ©Museum of Fine Arts of the city of Reims, photography C Devleeschauwer.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Young Black Man with a Sword,, oil on canvas, 1848-1849, © Orsay Museum, Paris