Art history? No, we're starting this month with an exhibition that we'll be tagging #artherstory on social media. Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 opens at Tate Britain in London on May 16, with the aim of charting the path of women to being recognised as professional artists over the centuries. More than 100 will be represented: relatively widely known names such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman , Gwen John and Laura Knight , as well as the more obscure or neglected -- Levina Teerlinc, Mary Beale and Sarah Biffin . It's on till October 13, and as we've just seen a show in Germany focused on women artists over much the same timescale, we'll be keen to compare and contrast. Let's stick with a female theme. A short stroll up Millbank and across Lambeth Bridge, and you're at the Garden Museum, where from May 15 to September 29 you can see Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors . The show takes you around the gardens of Vane
The year is 1843. And the theme of this hard-hitting painting is slavery, in all its gory detail, as practised in France's West Indian colonies. Slavery, you say? What about liberté, égalité, fraternité? Ah yes, slavery was abolished in 1794, after the French Revolution. But, and this takes a bit of getting your head round, it was reestablished by Napoleon eight years later. By the 1840s there was a strong abolitionist movement going in France, and an effective way to spread the message was to shock the public with the visual truth of what slavery actually meant.
This painting by Marcel Verdier, Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies, is perhaps the most searing image in a sprawling exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse, focusing on the way black people have been depicted in French art over the past 200 years or so and taking in broader themes of black history along the way.
In Verdier's picture, a black slave is stretched out naked on the ground, his hands and feet attached to four stakes, ready to receive the lashes that are being administered, not by the slave-owner, but by another black man who's doing the white man's dirty work for him. The master is relaxed, leaning back, cigar in hand, watching the action. For him, punishing a slave is an everyday occurrence. But his wife's eyes seem to betray that she's not so sanguine about it, and neither is their chubby-cheeked child. Meanwhile, in the eyes of the slave who's next in line for the lash, there's a look of perhaps resigned apprehension at the whip as it's about to descend.
Verdier's no-holds-barred work wasn't accepted for the 1843 Salon, the official annual exhibition of the French Academy, but six years later, the Salon did show this large canvas, by François-Auguste Biard, marking the final abolition of slavery the previous year, and it's all a bit of a triumphalist propaganda piece. As the Tricolour is waved, the liberated give thanks, brandishing the fetters they no longer need wear. A sailor in the Navy carries a small black child, and two refined-looking white ladies on the right comfort a black woman who's presumably weeping with joy. Vive la France!
But let's meet some real people now, and the first sitter we encounter in this exhibition that we can put a name, or at least half a name to, is Madeleine, depicted by Marie-Guillemine Benoist in a portrait that was exhibited at the Salon of 1800. She's an ex-slave, from Guadeloupe in the West Indies, and this really is a strong, dignified image of a woman, six years after the abolition of servitude.
When the picture was first shown, it was called Portrait of a Negress. When it was exhibited in 2000, it was under the title Portrait of a Black Woman. For this show, it's become Portrait of Madeleine. If she had a second name, we don't know it. But one thing the curators are trying to do in this exhibition is to counteract a form of racial discrimination of picture titles in which whites are names but non-whites are just black, or African, or Chinese.
We only know the next model by his first name as well. He's Joseph. But he's one of the most famous artist's models of the 19th century, and he's painted here by Théodore Géricault.
Joseph features in Géricault's most famous painting, The Raft of the Medusa. In fact, he has pride of place, at the top of the pyramid of desperate shipwrecked sailors, frantically brandishing a piece of red fabric to attract the attention of a distant vessel. Géricault added black sailors into the final painting after leaving them out of his initial sketches.
The 19th century saw the rise of theories according to which white Europeans were innately superior to other races. Some artists took to making pictures or sculptures of types from France's widespread territories overseas, and Charles Cordier was among them. This sculpture may be entitled Woman of the Colonies, and we have no idea who she was, but there's nothing in this splendidly dignified antique-looking bust to suggest that Cordier in any way shared those views of a hierarchy of races. She's one of a row of similarly beautiful and classical busts.
Now, if you saw the BBC's version of Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables recently, you might assume that early 19th-century France was a remarkable beacon of racial equality, with a black Inspector Javert occupying a prominent role in the Paris police. This exhibition goes a long way to disabusing you of any such thoughts.
But then, who could be more French than Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers? So French that he was portrayed on film by Gérard Depardieu. Except Dumas was a quarter black, the grandson of a Haitian slave. Pictures brought together by the curators demonstrate how depictions of Dumas early in his career show him as distinctly dark-skinned, with very fuzzy hair, becoming rather whiter, more European later on as he became a more established figure.
Dumas didn't hide his origins; on the contrary. After seeing a performance by the American Ira Aldridge, the first black actor to play Othello on the London stage, Dumas's words were: "I am a negro too."
And here is the celebrated Aldridge, posing for the British artist John Philip Simpson in the role of The Captive Slave, painted in 1827, as the debate on abolition raged in the UK. Aldridge's pose captures a yearning for freedom and reminds you of pictures of saintly devotion.
And the most famous painting in this show? Well, it has to be this one, which comes about halfway through: Edouard Manet's Olympia, one of the most scandalous pictures in the history of art. But that's down to the provocative pose of Olympia, modelled by Victorine Meurent.
The black servant, providing the counterpoint to Olympia's whiteness, hardly attracted much attention amid the contemporary uproar. And it's significant that we know the woman who modelled for her only by her first name: Laure, to be found in Manet's notebooks described as "a very beautiful negress" along with her address. More of Olympia shortly.
This is a pretty enormous exhibition, and as we move through the late 19th century and into the 20th, the focus shifts somewhat from the art toward broader black history, in particular the world of entertainment. Films, photos, posters and music-hall programmes tell the stories of performers like the dancer Josephine Baker and Chocolat the clown. There are also tales of how black American soldiers brought jazz to France and how colonial African troops fought in the trenches in World War I.
While all this is very interesting, you get a feeling in the second half of the show that the art takes something of a back seat. The curators squeeze in a little bit of Picasso here and a large Henri Rousseau there, but they seem a bit tangential to the theme.
But before we get to the grand climax, let's look at one more picture from the late 19th century, when those black celebrities were coming to the fore. In 1879, when Edgar Degas made this picture, Miss La La was the circus performer par excellence.
Born in northern Germany to a white mother and a father who was a freed black slave, Olga Albertina Brown (her real name) created a sensation at the Cirque Fernando in Paris with feats of strength and agility. Degas depicts her being hoisted to a dizzying height on a rope clenched in her teeth.
To end the show, back to Olympia. White courtesan, black servant, right? Well, not always.
American Pop Art exponent Larry Rivers produced an alternative version in 1970: I Like Olympia in Black Face gives us his sculpted and painted take on the original and one in which the racial roles are transposed. Turning the black cat white is a nice touch as well.
And alongside Rivers's reinterpretation, there's one by Congolese artist Aimé Mpane made from pieces of salvaged wood. Laure is now clearly recognisable as the reclining nude, with Victorine Meurent as the servant. And the bouquet of flowers brought by the maid has an addition: a skull, the West's gift to Africa.
The revisionary Olympias are a resounding final flourish to an exhibition that's for the most part really compelling and enlightening, if somewhat too long. Our advice: Break up your visit for a coffee or something to eat; this is an exhibition than you can actually wander in and out of at will once you're in the museum.
The Musée d'Orsay is on the south bank of the River Seine just across from the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, and it has its own station on line C of the RER suburban-rail network. Solférino station on line 12 of the Metro is also close by.
In Verdier's picture, a black slave is stretched out naked on the ground, his hands and feet attached to four stakes, ready to receive the lashes that are being administered, not by the slave-owner, but by another black man who's doing the white man's dirty work for him. The master is relaxed, leaning back, cigar in hand, watching the action. For him, punishing a slave is an everyday occurrence. But his wife's eyes seem to betray that she's not so sanguine about it, and neither is their chubby-cheeked child. Meanwhile, in the eyes of the slave who's next in line for the lash, there's a look of perhaps resigned apprehension at the whip as it's about to descend.
Verdier's no-holds-barred work wasn't accepted for the 1843 Salon, the official annual exhibition of the French Academy, but six years later, the Salon did show this large canvas, by François-Auguste Biard, marking the final abolition of slavery the previous year, and it's all a bit of a triumphalist propaganda piece. As the Tricolour is waved, the liberated give thanks, brandishing the fetters they no longer need wear. A sailor in the Navy carries a small black child, and two refined-looking white ladies on the right comfort a black woman who's presumably weeping with joy. Vive la France!
We only know the next model by his first name as well. He's Joseph. But he's one of the most famous artist's models of the 19th century, and he's painted here by Théodore Géricault.
The 19th century saw the rise of theories according to which white Europeans were innately superior to other races. Some artists took to making pictures or sculptures of types from France's widespread territories overseas, and Charles Cordier was among them. This sculpture may be entitled Woman of the Colonies, and we have no idea who she was, but there's nothing in this splendidly dignified antique-looking bust to suggest that Cordier in any way shared those views of a hierarchy of races. She's one of a row of similarly beautiful and classical busts.
But then, who could be more French than Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers? So French that he was portrayed on film by Gérard Depardieu. Except Dumas was a quarter black, the grandson of a Haitian slave. Pictures brought together by the curators demonstrate how depictions of Dumas early in his career show him as distinctly dark-skinned, with very fuzzy hair, becoming rather whiter, more European later on as he became a more established figure.
Dumas didn't hide his origins; on the contrary. After seeing a performance by the American Ira Aldridge, the first black actor to play Othello on the London stage, Dumas's words were: "I am a negro too."
And here is the celebrated Aldridge, posing for the British artist John Philip Simpson in the role of The Captive Slave, painted in 1827, as the debate on abolition raged in the UK. Aldridge's pose captures a yearning for freedom and reminds you of pictures of saintly devotion.
This is a pretty enormous exhibition, and as we move through the late 19th century and into the 20th, the focus shifts somewhat from the art toward broader black history, in particular the world of entertainment. Films, photos, posters and music-hall programmes tell the stories of performers like the dancer Josephine Baker and Chocolat the clown. There are also tales of how black American soldiers brought jazz to France and how colonial African troops fought in the trenches in World War I.
While all this is very interesting, you get a feeling in the second half of the show that the art takes something of a back seat. The curators squeeze in a little bit of Picasso here and a large Henri Rousseau there, but they seem a bit tangential to the theme.
But before we get to the grand climax, let's look at one more picture from the late 19th century, when those black celebrities were coming to the fore. In 1879, when Edgar Degas made this picture, Miss La La was the circus performer par excellence.
To end the show, back to Olympia. White courtesan, black servant, right? Well, not always.
American Pop Art exponent Larry Rivers produced an alternative version in 1970: I Like Olympia in Black Face gives us his sculpted and painted take on the original and one in which the racial roles are transposed. Turning the black cat white is a nice touch as well.
Practicalities
Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse runs at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris until July 21. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 0930 to 1800, with late opening on Thursday until 2145. Full-price tickets to the museum and all exhibitions are 14 euros and you can get them online (valid for three months from date of purchase) here. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month (but it will be crowded!) as well as for under-25s living in an EU member state.The Musée d'Orsay is on the south bank of the River Seine just across from the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, and it has its own station on line C of the RER suburban-rail network. Solférino station on line 12 of the Metro is also close by.
Images
Marcel Antoine Verdier, Beating at Four Stakes in the Colonies, 1843, The Menil Collection, Houston
François-Auguste Biard, The Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies on 27 April 1848 (detail), 1849, Château de Versailles
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine, 1800, Musée du Louvre, Paris. © Musée du Louvre/A. Dequier-M. Bard
Théodore Géricault, Study of a Model, c. 1818–19, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Charles Cordier, Woman of the Colonies, 1861, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
John Philip Simpson, The Captive Slave, 1827, Art Institute of Chicago
Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. © Photo Musée d'Orsay/RMN
Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879, National Gallery, London
Larry Rivers, I Like Olympia in Black Face, 1970, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Aimé Mpane, Olympia II, 2013, Collection Gérard Valérius
John Philip Simpson, The Captive Slave, 1827, Art Institute of Chicago
Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Musée d'Orsay, Paris. © Photo Musée d'Orsay/RMN
Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879, National Gallery, London
Larry Rivers, I Like Olympia in Black Face, 1970, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Aimé Mpane, Olympia II, 2013, Collection Gérard Valérius
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