I first learned about Denise Murrell— the curator and scholar behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big and shiny new spectacle, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” (through July 28th)—in 2018, when I saw her landmark exhibition, “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today,” at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, in Harlem. The show, which occupied a relatively small space but never felt cramped, apprised us of what had been left out of the available history (even the British art historian T. J. Clark’s essential 1984 study, “The Painting of Modern Life”): the importance and the resonance of the Black female presence in the early days of modernism. As someone who’d been enamored of nineteenth-century French literature in college, I’d longed to know more about the poet Charles Baudelaire’s mixed-race lover, Jeanne Duval, the inspiration for his “Vénus noire,” in “Les Fleurs du Mal” (1857). From “Posing Modernity,” I learned not only that Duval had been an actress when she met Baudelaire, in the early eighteen-forties, but that, during her volatile relationship with the poet, she visited artists and writers with him and frequented a coffeehouse on the Rue de Richelieu. I knew, from Clark and other scholars, that Baudelaire’s depiction of the changes in industrial-era Paris had influenced his friend Édouard Manet, but it was Murrell who showed me that one reason works such as Manet’s 1862 painting “Baudelaire’s Mistress (Portrait of Jeanne Duval)”—in which we see difference that is not sentimental or exoticized, that looks back at us with no need to be liked or adored—were powerful was that they also at times illuminated how difference looked at itself.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March 11, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March 11, 2024-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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A Critic at Large - Off the Leash
The wacky and wonderful world of the Westminster Dog Show.
A Campus in Crisis
Dissent and defiance at Columbia's pro-Palestine protests.
Consolation
Five years before my mother died, we had a violent argument—a thing that had never happened before.
THE INSTIGATOR
How Miranda July starts again.
LOADED
We used to think the rich had a social function. What are they good for now?
BLAME GAME
“Baby Reindeer” and Under the Bridge.”
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
Zemlinsky, Schulhoff; and other neglected Jewish composers of Central Europe.
BOOKS - FORGET IT
A neuropsychologist says that we're thinking about memory all wrong.
PERSONAL HISTORY - TABULA RASA
THE WORDLE PHILOSOPHY
NEIGHBORLY
My name is Margaret Jo Stinson, and I’d like to share my own perspective on this sort of thing.