Whose Gaze Is It? Dueling Carpeaux Shows at the Met & Cleveland Museum Take Liberties with Black Liberation

After allowing the Metropolitan Museum’s Why Born Enslaved! by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux its moment in the spotlight in March, the Cleveland Museum boldly upstaged its New York counterpart in April with the triumphant announcement that it had “acquired…the master model [emphasis added] from which the other versions [presumably including the Met’s] were produced.”

The “master” is plaster, with a “polychromed surface [that] is covered with complex, nuanced hatchings and subtle modeling that enhance the expressive power of the figure,” as described by Cleveland:

An exultant William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum (as quoted by Steven Litt in the Cleveland Plain Dealer) described this Carpeaux as “one of the greatest works of art that we’ve acquired in a very long time and it speaks to so many of the issues we’re grappling with today.”

Although I’ve seen it only in reproduction, my comparison of that image (above) with the Met’s white marble (which I viewed during the Mar. 7 press preview for the Met’s focus exhibition—Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast, to Mar. 5, 2023) gives credence to Cleveland’s contention that its example’s “powerful aesthetic qualities, its formidable stance on one of the most pressing social and political issues of the 19th century and the relevance of its subject today” will have “enormous impact on the CMA’s collection.” With its muscular modeling and darker tonalities, Cleveland’s version convincingly captures the subject’s energy, ethnicity and agony.

Here’s the Met’s more pallid version, as seen from approximately the same angle. Given the chance, which one would you choose?

The Met’s sculpture, rediscovered in 2018, is one of only two known versions in white marble. (The other is at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.) It was sold at Christie’s, Paris, on Sept. 10, 2018 by Juan de Beistegui and was purchased at that auction by Daniel Katz of Daniel Katz Ltd., which sold it to the Met.

As the Met’s press release tells us:

Carpeaux commercially reproduced and marketed his sculpture to a broad range of consumers. As a commodity, the bust of an enslaved woman symbolically echoes the objectification of people of African descent, embodying a practice the sculpture was ostensibly designed to critique.

While their power is undeniable, the sadomasochistic subtext of these graphic depictions of an enslaved, impotently resistant woman-in-bondage is, to me, abhorrent and repellent—an effect not mitigated by the inscription on the base that implicitly acknowledges that a wrong had been perpetrated. After my revulsion-at-first-sight, I returned for a calmer, closer look, trying to engage my critical faculties to analyze why this object had affected me so viscerally: Indecently exposed and immobilized, Carpeaux’s subject glares with undisguised hostility at her tormenter(s), and we can easily imagine what happens next.

In the Met’s wall-text introduction to the show of some 35 works (including sculptures, paintings, ceramics, works on paper) by a variety of artists, its organizers—assistant curator Elyse Nelson and guest curator Wendy Walters, poet and associate professor of writing at Columbia University—seemed to anticipate my mixed feelings about the signature object:

While the subject’s resisting pose, defiant expression, and accompanying inscription have long been interpreted as conveying a powerful antislavery message, the bust also visualizes longstanding European fantasies about the possession of and domination over Black people’s bodies [emphasis added].

The fact that slavery had been abolished before the work was created didn’t make this throwback to the master/slave dynamic any less repulsive, notwithstanding its supposed “antislavery message” on the pedestal:

The sculpture’s original title (which it bore at the Paris Salon of 1869) was less polemical—“Négresse,” a term that “reinforces the fallacy of human difference based on skin color,” in the Met’s words. (Perhaps it was intended to be merely descriptive.) The Met’s translation for the inscription—“Why Born Enslaved!”—struck me as slightly off-kilter: “Naître” (the infinitive verb), means, “be born.” The past participle—“born”—would be “née.”

Whatever you call it, the Met’s bust, as the introduction to the show’s catalogue tells us, is one of “numerous versions in collections throughout Europe and the United States.” It is “one of many accomplished compositions that Carpeaux made in multiples” and “exemplifies the artist’s late-career practice of extracting narrative elements from his public sculpture” (in this case—the “Fountain of the Observatory,” Paris).

There’s a more realistic 1875 version of the same subject at the Museum of Fine Arts in Reims, France:

The Met’s show includes a smaller version (plaster with patina) of its exhibition’s signature object, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum. In line with the Met’s recent propensity (under director Max Hollein) to make forced comparisons emphasizing multicultural relationships with contemporary relevance, the curators juxtaposed Brooklyn’s Carpeaux with Kehinde Wiley‘s “After La “Négresse, 1872,” 2006, on loan “courtesy the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.” This daffy pairing of the Carpeaux with a similarly posed basketball player, sporting a LA Lakers jersey, might seem like a marriage-made-in-heaven in a fanciful Wiley display, but not in a serious show centered on European works from the 18th and 19th centuries:

A Carpeaux-inspired impression in plaster by Kara Walker, taken directly from a reproduction of “Why Born Enslaved!”, is also conscripted into service of contemporary relevance:

But back to the Cleveland Museum’s focus exhibition, opening June 6. As described to me by William Robinson, its senior curator of modern art, it promises to offer a more astute, nuanced analysis of the entrapment of an ex-slave in a position of subjugation.

Here’s what Robinson wrote to me in response to my query about the upcoming show:

Why Born Enslaved! will allow the CMA to host complex conversations through artworks that provoke painful histories and challenge conventional historical narratives. When the sculpture goes on view later this spring, it will feature an interpretive framework that considers the unnamed sitter, what she represented when the bust was created and her relevance now. By highlighting her place in a global lineage of colonial images of Black women, as well as in the contemporary scholarship and museum practice that seeks to name or otherwise identify sitters like her, the model’s status as both living person and allegorical figure will allow viewers to reckon with the power imbalances that existed even in the creation of abolitionist art [emphasis added].”

It could be argued that when it comes to taking a traditionally scholarly approach to Carpeaux, the Met had already been there and done that, in the late James Draper‘s 2014 full-scale Carpeaux retrospective. The best known Carpeaux in the Met’s collection, a bravura depiction of one of the most agonized characters in all of western art and literature, was omitted from the current show, perhaps so as not to upstage the rest:

At the end of his NY Times review of the Met’s current show, Holland Cotter praised the the museum for “creating a template that could have far-reaching applications for a critical rethinking of its permanent collection displays”…

…or maybe not: In my view, this type of experimental “rethinking” should be reserved for a limited number of temporary installations. The planned one-year run for the Carpeaux-based agglomeration is about nine months too long. Traditional displays—coherent, well organized, erudite—ought to remain the norm for permanent-collection installations in our country’s premier museum.

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