“BLACK MODELS: FROM GÉRICAULT TO MATISSE”
Curated by Cécile Debray, Stéphane Guégan, Denise Murrell, and Isolde Pludermacher
When Manet depicted the servant of Olympia, the heroine of his eponymous 1863 canvas, as a black woman, he subverted a long tradition of featuring black figures as mere accessories of white subjects. Based on a specific persona black model named LaureOlympia’s attendant possesses aesthetic and subjective presence equal to that of her “mistress.” Yet art historians, focusing on Olympia alone, have long considered only the white side of Manet’s pictorial subversion. This groundbreaking exhibitionan