Room number 521 of the New York Metropolitan Museum is actually just a passage room in the Kunstpalast on Fifth Avenue, a narrow, low space between two spacious exhibition halls. Coming from the entrance, behind you are the monumental halls for the largest collection of Byzantine and medieval art in the world. In front of you is the light-flooded atrium of an extension built in 1975 to house New York financier Robert Lehman’s opulent collection of sculptures, paintings, textiles and manuscripts. Room 521 isn’t exactly a place the museum would choose for an exhibition that wants to draw attention to itself on a grand scale. And yet it has placed what is perhaps the most interesting show of the spring here.
The title is Fictions of Emancipation. Behind this lies the risk of devoting an entire exhibition to a single work. But the project is not just about Jean Baptiste Carpeaux’ bust, which was actually called “La Negresse” but now has the inscription “Pourquoi Naitre Esclave!” named on the pedestal. Rather, the space is a site for the development of an important self-critical discourse of the Met institution. The museum acquired the bust in 2019 to complement the marble group “Ugolino and His Brothers” by Carpeaux, which illustrates a scene from Dante’s Inferno. The two pieces were housed in the Great Hall of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, one of the museum’s grand galleries.
However, with the “Black Lives Matter” protests of 2020 and the associated criticism of the colonial constitution of encyclopedic museums around the world, the director of the department for European sculpture, Sarah Lawrence, had concerns about the placement.
She has become the symbol of the indomitable black woman
The bust, dated 1868, shows a black woman’s face, wracked with pain and confusion, with the shackles of oppression tightening around her shoulders. However, in the context of the great works of Western sculpture, Lawrence feared, the brutality the bust seeks to portray was lost in the general context of aesthetic edification. So she, together with the curator Elyse Nelson, tried to find new and uncomfortable connections for the piece in gallery number 521.
The bust, as a portrait of the proud African woman stripping off her bonds, has assumed an iconic character since its creation. Replicas adorn shop windows both on Fifth Avenue and on the Champs Élysées, pop queen Beyoncé used them as props for a fashion shoot. The bare breast makes the figure a black Marianne, she has become the symbol of the indomitable black woman over the decades. In her exhibition, however, Nelson seeks to subvert this reading. As the title “Fictions of Emancipation” already suggests, the show problematizes representations of emancipation from the era of slave liberation to the present day and questions the colonial, imperialist view.
The archetypal bust is placed in dialogue with the works of Carpeaux’s contemporaries such as Charles-Henri Joseph Cordier, who is considered the master of ethnographic sculpture of the Grande Nation at the height of their power. The sculpture of that time itself is worked out as a colonizing project. Artists such as Cordier and Carpeaux presented stylized racial types in Paris salons, and the inhabitants of the Empire were cataloged with a lust that was as exotic as it was erotic. At the same time, men like Cordier and Carpeaux saw themselves as enlightened humanists, just like quite a few “Allies” of the “Black Lives Matter” movement today. But in the supposedly enlightened view of the artist, fetishization inevitably took root.
Elyse Nelson reads this not least from the history of the bust’s origins. The bust was a study of Carpeaux’s fountain in Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg, in which the five continents are allegorically represented as female figures. The putative model, the freed American slave Louise Kuling, was stylized into an archetype.
In addition, the bust was commissioned by the Empress Eugénie at a time when slavery had long since ceased to exist in France. So the impulse to create them was hardly emancipatory. Rather, the reputation of the French imperial couple had suffered greatly from the fact that they had supported the south in the American Civil War for economic reasons. With the performance of the bust in the imperial residence, Eugénie could now demonstrate her good intentions and win back popularity points.
Since “Black Lives Matter” the museum wants to “make diverse voices heard”
Last but not least, the exhibition warns against the shallows of “virtue signaling” into which the supposedly enlightened humanists of the 19th century naively blundered. At the same time, she tries to demonstrate that the great Metropolitan Museum, also a humanist institution of the era, is beginning to learn its lesson.
At least since “Black Lives Matter” it has been one of the museum’s declared goals “to make diverse voices heard,” as director Max Hollein says. The museum aims to become a place “where one can have a broader, high-level cultural discussion” without falling into the aggressive antagonisms that often characterize debates about inclusion and social justice. To this end, the museum commissioned a mural from Indigenous artist Kent Monkman for the entrance hall. It has positioned the Oceania, Africa and the Americas section more prominently and has placed an Afrofuturistic “Period Room” between the historic interiors, intended to bring the visitor closer to the contemporary tastes of different eras.
Nevertheless, one cannot expect an institution like the Met to fundamentally question itself. However, moderate self-reflection is encouraged. The new terminology is that one sees oneself as a “universalist” museum and no longer as an encyclopedic one, even if it is not clear what improvement this will bring.
Of course, Carpeaux would certainly have claimed universalism for himself. The black artist Kara Walker has formulated a contemporary answer to this, which Elyse Nelson pointedly contrasts with the bust of liberation. Walker took a plaster cast of the face of the woman portrayed by Carpeaux, which now lies carelessly in the corner of room 521. The emptiness behind the mask is to be shown. According to the comment, Carpeaux’s work shows nobody and certainly not, as claimed, any essence of female blackness.