it all started as a graduate seminar then it got picked up by the Wallach
gallery as a show idea then it got picked up by the National Museum in
France and then it became a spectacularly
successful show
posing modernity the black model from Manet and Matisse to today was the
latest exhibit at the Wallach Art Gallery on Columbia's new Manhattanville
campus. This ambitious and revelatory study investigates how changing modes of
representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of
modern art. From October to February thousands of people have flocked to the
Wallach Art Gallery to see what the New York Times is calling taut, riveting and
long overdue. Denise Morel was a PhD student at
Columbia when she began to ask very important questions about how we as a
society fundamentally view some works of art.
I spoke to Professor Anne Higonnet
to learn more about this exciting exhibit. The idea came out of discussions
in a seminar on the 19th century French painter Manet. We were as a small group
discussing one work after another and trying to look at every painting with a
very open mind and Denise looked at maybe the most famous of all of Manet's
paintings, Olympia, and said why haven't we talked more about the fundamental
role in modernity of race as money represents it in his painting?
And the
dissertation evolved straight out of a seminar paper. I mean that sort of how it
sometimes goes at Columbia but you have a little idea and then the institution
makes it bigger and bigger and bigger and then it becomes something that that
the New York Times devotes entire pages to.
while planning the exhibit Denise Murel began talks with French curators who are
quick to recognize the significance of her project and offered to expand it at
the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. Professor Higonnet says the reasons for
this are obvious.
No nothing like this has been done before not in the Columbia
PhD program in Art History, not at the Wallach gallery. This show is timely, it's
because it has a real idea behind it that has lots of wonderful twists and
turns there it's not just a 2-dimensional sort of one idea show it's
a show that really develops an idea in a lot of ways and clearly has contemporary
relevance.
Many undergraduate students credit Art Humanities as their favorite
Core [Curriculum] class.
Since 1947 students have taken part in a semester-long analytical
study of a series of artists and their works. The class also teaches how to look
at think about and engage in critical discussions surrounding the visual arts.
I recently spoke with an undergraduate student to understand how Posing
Modernity has played a crucial role in her understanding of the Masterpieces of
Western Art.
I think it means everything because in our study of the
Western Canon I think we often forget the effects that other communities had
and this this exhibit was very much still a part of the Western Canon but
just showing a face that people often look over. I think it was honestly
crucial to seeing the effects that these different bodies and different people
had on the Western Canon. The whole idea of the Columbia Core [Curriculum] is that a group of
students get together and guided by a caring teacher who listens they discuss
why it is that some crucial aspect of human expression
is always relevant in the present. What does Denise's show do for that it
helps every Art Humanities student take the issue of race into account as
they think about self-expression and what it means to be a creative human
being.
Roberta Smith that the New York Times put it well at every point black models
pose or raise the question of modernity what is it who makes it and who is it for