Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today

From 2014 through the landmark exhibition’s opening in 2018, CCL Director Elizabeth W. Easton supported Dr. Denise Murrell (CCL/Studio Museum in Harlem Curators’ Forum 2021-2023) in her project Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today. The exhibition opened at the Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, and toured to the Musée d’Orsay. Tracing representations of the black figure from the nineteenth- to twenty-first centuries, visitors were provided with new and more complex understandings of race and gender during the rise and establishment of modernism. This publication accompanying the exhibition was published by Yale University Press in 2018.

As Dr. Murrell explains, “this exhibition explores the changing modes of representation of the black figure as central to the development of modern art. The models’ interactions with and influences on painters, sculptors and photographers are highlighted through archival photographs, correspondence and films. The artists featured in the exhibition depicted black subjects in a manner counter to typical representations of the period. The works included highlight the little-known, multiracial aspect of each artist’s milieu…. By taking a multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the connection between the history of art and the history of ideas, the exhibition will study aesthetic, political, social and racial issues as well as the realm of the imagination—all of which is revealed in the representation of black figures in visual arts from the French and American abolition eras to the present day.”

Ms. Easton provided strategic support in the development of this project, continuing CCL’s commitment to countering the homogeneity of many museums, collections, and exhibitions.