Black Models from Manet to Matisse and beyond

Manet’s Olympia is one of the most notorious paintings of the past two centuries, and the attendant maid carrying a huge flower bouquet to the naked courtesan/whore is a now-famous accessory figure [along with the hissing black cat].   

Traditionally, the maidservant received minimal critical attention.  As T.J.Clarke confessed in his revised edition The Painting of Modern Life,  ‘blackness’ was  conventionally a ‘natural’ pictorial sign of servitude, not worth investigation.   This is largely because earlier depictions of female nudes in European art often included dark-skinned attendants, to set off the admired whiteness of the higher-ranking (in this context) naked woman. Or, worse, as visual metaphors for dark female sensuality.  

Posing Modernity: the Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, an exhibition curated by Denise Murrell at Columbia University, offers a thorough examination of Olympia, its creator, the model for its maidservant and its pictorial legacy. 

The model was ‘Laure, très belle négresse’ painted by Manet  three times in 1862-3.  Her features are seen more clearly in Manet’s untitled painting now in Turin [possibly one obtained by the Nazis but that’s another story.] and in a genre scene by Jacques-Eugene Feyen, where she is portrayed as a smiling nanny. 

Despite deep searches into late-nineteenth century images of Black women in Paris – including a glass negative of portrait of Bertha Archer, whose husband became a local politician in Lambeth and was a professional photographer - no further details of Laure have emerged  beyond her third-floor address off the rue de Clichy recorded by Manet.  Griselda Pollock found a birth record from 1839, but no surname has been proposed.  Like so many people of colour, a first name is all that history gives her. 

In the catalogue to Posing Modernity (Yale UP 2018) Murrell writes: Only when Olympia is seen as an emphatically bi-figural work, representing issues of both gender and race as central to modern life [can] the extent of Manet’s radical modernity be most fully understood’. She does not interrogate the cat equally, but its pose is quite alarming, as it appears to hiss at the spectator.

The exhibition opens at the Musée d’Orsay in March, as Le Modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse, which suggests that it will be re-configured to include more mainstream French pictures, perhaps by Gérôme and Delacroix (Géricault’s black models were mostly male) and fewer by US artists like Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold, whose pictorial responses to Manet are a key element in the catalogue.    A whole load of lovely images in  this podcast which has interview with Denise Murrell