Invisible Image: An exploration of depictions of Black women in Western art, ca. 1850-1930s

The history of images of Black women in Western art is complex. It’s a story full of tension. Often, even when portrayals of Black women have seemed celebrated, the women behind the images have been rendered invisible. Models have been left unnamed, women have been stereotyped, sexualized, and objectified. Abolitionist art, such as Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved!, seemed to advocate for Black women’s humanity and rights, and yet their portrayals have been typified and the women’s particularity forgotten. Primitivism romanticized non western and nonwhite women. But rather than portraying them as they truly were, artists such as Gauguin made them into what they wanted them to be. The real women faded behind the artist’s fantasy. Yet there is beauty to be found here nonetheless. Each of these models bears the image of God, no matter how much their artist, circumstances, or social context sought to hide it. The workmanship and skill of these artists is beautiful. In the midst of the brokenness, there is grace. The viewer must reckon with this tension, between truth and lies, beauty and objectification, particularity and invisibility, celebration and degradation.

This exhibition is arranged chronologically. The first five pieces range from 1857 to 1868, spanning the Civil War and the emancipation of slavery in the United States. In these pieces, we see the popularity of abolition and its connection to French nationalism, as well as a growing Western interest in the “exotic.” We also see modernization, and the shifting roles of Black women in society. This theme is carried through by the sixth piece, from the 1890s, which is an example of primitivism. The final piece is from the 1930s, and created by an African American artist. It challenges the invisibility of Black women, offering an alternative image that confronts stereotypes and affirms particularity.

Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, African Venus, 1857; bronze and gold; H: 15 9/16 x W: 8 in.; H with base: 19 1/2 × W: 8 1/4 × D: 6 11/16 in. (The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD).

Cordier’s African Venus is a beautiful and graceful bronze and gold bust. Twisted beads entwine her slender neck, and a garment is wrapped around her torso, leaving her shoulders bare, and clinging close enough to her skin to show her breasts and belly button underneath. Her eyes are partly closed, and she seems to be looking down. Along with her male companion, Nègre de Tombouctou, the state commissioned Cordier to make a cast of African Venus for the ethnographic gallery of the Musèum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Cordier saw himself as revolting against slavery, and pioneering anthropology. He claimed that he was widening the scope of racial painting by finding beauty everywhere. The image of this woman is beautiful, yet the model is unnamed, and the woman behind the image rendered invisible, subject to the artist’s ability to find beauty rather than having her own intrinsic value.

Edourad Manet, Olympia, 1863; oil on canvas; 130.5x190cm (Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France).

Featuring a white woman laying on a bed, unclothed except for a choker, bracelet, shoe, and flower in her hair, Manet’s Olympia reflects modernization as it pushed the boundaries of art in his time. The woman is cast in a bright light against a dark background, her hand strategically covers her crotch, and she looks unflinchingly at the viewer. But in the background, there is another figure, a Black woman, dressed in the clothes of a maid and bearing flowers. In a sense, her presence also reflects modernity as a member of the French working class. Yet she fades into the darker background, she does not meet our gaze. The figure of Olympia makes the viewer uncomfortable, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable. But the figure of the maid anchored the viewer in that day, offering some stability and normality in her status of servitude.

Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867; marble; H. 41 3/4 in. W. 22 1/2 in. D. 12 3/8 in. (Howard University Art Gallery, Washington D.C.).

A sculptor of mixed African-American and Native-American heritage, Edmonia Lewis settled in Rome in 1864 and worked among other American expatriate artists and made abolitionist work. In Forever Free, the figure of the man raises his arm in triumph, a broken shackle hanging on his wrist. He stands over the broken ball that would have been connected to a chain–triumphant. The woman beside him kneels, clasping her hands almost in prayer. The figures’ contrapposto and the sheer fabric clinging to their idealized bodies echoes classicism. This is a complex piece. It celebrates freedom, but freedom looks different for the man than it does for the women. A Black sculptor has created a place for herself as an artist, yet she portrays these figures in white marble in a classical style, almost completely hiding the subjects’ blackness . Does this image resist invisibility? Or does it reflect the models’ invisibility in another way?

Thomas Eakins, Female Model, ca. 1867-69; oil on canvas; 23 x 19 ¾ in. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection).

Painted by the American artist Thomas Eakins while studying in Paris between 1866 and 1869, Female Model shows a nude Black woman, painted in soft brush strokes against a soft background. The red in the striped head scarf matches the red of her earrings, and she looks downward and to the viewer’s right, her expression a mixture of tranquility and sadness. The piece is unusual, in its beauty and representational quality, and careful portrayal of the model. But there is a sense of invisibility as well, in the model’s anonymity. Who was she? What led her to be a model, posing naked for this white male artist? Was it by choice?

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Why Born Enslaved! 1868-1873; marble, 22 7/8 × 16 × 12 1/2 in.132.7 lb.; pedestal: 22 × 18 in. 1298 lb. (The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 548, New York, NY, accession number 2019.220).

Debuted in Paris in 1869, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s marble bust Why Born Enslaved! was recast for mass reproduction and is emblematic of the popularity of abolitionist artwork in France at the time. Slavery was abolished in France in 1848 and there was a sense of nationalistic pride in France as a nation of freedom and equality. And yet France still held colonies all over the world, and there was still a racial hierarchy in French society. Carpeaux’s bust seems to be a protest against slavery. The woman’s eyes look over her shoulder in a mixture of fear and defiance. The inscription on the pedestal is an outcry. But the piece was created after slavery was abolished, by an artist who gave little indication of his personal beliefs concerning slavery. Though beautiful, the piece is full of tension, and the model is left anonymous, typified, sexualized, and rendered invisible.

Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1892; oil on burlap mounted on canvas; 116.05 x 134.62 x 13.34 cm (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY).

Paul Gauguin moved to Tahiti, a French colony at the time, in search of something deeper and more transcendent than what he saw in modernizing Europe. He was dismayed, when he arrived, to find that it was not what he expected, and Tahiti too was modernizing. But rather than portraying the reality he encountered there, he was committed to portraying the fantasy he longed for. This is reflected in Spirit of the Dead Watching, a painting of his young Tahitian mistress laying on her stomach. The girl’s posture highlights her sexuality, but also dehumanizes her, giving her an animalistic quality. The blend of colors and organic shapes in the background, as well as the watching figure in the top left of the painting hint at something exotic, and of an ancient spirituality. What Gauguin thought he was celebrating, he was actually distorting, as he stripped away the model's particularity.

Charles Alston, Girl in a Red Dress, 1934; oil on canvas, 28 x 22 in. (Harmon and Harriet Kelley Foundation for the Arts, San Antonio).   

Charles Alston’s Girl in a Red Dress was made over fifty years after the other pieces in this exhibition, but it is relevant to the conversation because it responds to the invisibility of Black women in Western art. An African American, Charles Alston was a part of the Harlem Renaissance, creating modernist art that challenged racist stereotypes. In this piece, we see a Black girl in a red dress with a white collar, and red earrings. She sits against what may be a brick wall and a window, and around her head there is a sort of halo of pale blue. In this piece Alston resists the conventional images of Black women, creating instead a woman which art historian Richard Powell says is “defiantly black, beautiful and feminine, yet also unsettled, mysterious, and utterly modern.” He uses her image to make visible what others have made invisible.