Posing modernity : the black model from Manet and Matisse to today / Denise Murrell.

9780300229066 (hardcover)
0300229062 (hardcover)

New Haven : Yale University Press ; New York : in association with The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York, [2018]

English

xvii, 206 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 27 cm

N8217.A67 M87 2018

704.9/424
709.4

This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Edouard Manet's Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic "other." Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet's reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane "New Negro" portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet's and Matisse's depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimâe Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices.

Exhibition: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, New York, USA (October 24, 2018-February 10, 2019); Musâee d'Orsay (March 26-July 14, 2019).
This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Edouard Manet's Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic "other." Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet's reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane "New Negro" portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet's and Matisse's depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimâe Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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