E8 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.
museCRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
BY PHILIP KENNICOTT IN NEW YORK
I
n 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted a large
and revelatory survey of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, one of
the leading sculptors of 19th-century Europe. It left the
impression of an artist of extraordinary talent and
inventiveness, maybe not as great as his compatriot,
Rodin, but close enough.
Carpeaux was the Brahms to Rodin’s Wagner. He was
inventive but with a classical bent, and a tendency to
sweetness that sometimes crossed into the saccharine. He
also served power unapologetically, making flattering, even
kitschy images of the royal court and family of Napoleon III
during the Second Empire.
Since that survey, t he Met has acquired another key work of
Carpeaux’s, one of two marble busts depicting an enslaved
woman, known by the words inscribed on its base, “Why B orn
Enslaved!” Now the museum has mounted a smaller but much
more focused show devoted to that work, including versions
in terracotta, clay and plaster, as well as other sculptures,
medallions and decorative pieces that reference the abolition
movement in France and its colonies. It is accompanied by a
book of probing essays about the role of ethnography and
colonialism in shaping how people of African descent were
represented in France during the 19th century.
“Why Born Enslaved!” is a troubling and compelling image
of a woman, with rope cutting into her exposed arms and
breasts, and a defiant but anguished look on her furrowed
face. The original of what became a widely reproduced luxury
object — the Empress Eugenie owned and prominently
displayed a copy — was made in 1868, just three years after the
end of slavery in the United States, but 20 years after the
abolition of slavery in France’s Atlantic colonies. Unlike an
equally famous image of abolition, Josiah Wedgwood’s c. 1787
medallion of a Black man kneeling, in chains, pleading the
words “A m I not a man and a brother?,” Carpeaux’s bust is a
postlude to slavery in France, more of a congratulatory
patriotic exercise than a direct appeal to the conscience. And
that makes it particularly problematic.
If slavery was already abolished, what feelings are this bust
meant to inspire? The catalogue essays point to the obvious
sensuality of the woman, to the erotic drama of her captivity
and the way that invites viewers, especially men, to objectify
her for visual gratification. They also raise doubts about the
depth and sincerity of Carpeaux’s anti-slavery views, and by
extension, the sincerity of France’s belief in the genuine
equality of the people in its far-flung empire.
“Why Born Enslaved!” is presented as an exercise in
19th-century ethnography, an effort to codify and generalize
racial types, which became intertwined with a larger project
of assimilating colonial subjects into a universal idea of
French citizenship and identity.
Ethnographic sculpture was perversely complicated with a
wild mix of objectives and motivations, and this exhibition
does a good job of revealing that complexity. On one hand, it
involved a new and more rigorous look at its subjects, an
effort to depict people of different races not by the conven-
tions of academic art, but through actual attention to the
world and its variety. And one can’t look at “Why Born
Enslaved!” (and other sculptures in the show, including the
sumptuous works of Carpeaux contemporary Charles Henri
Joseph Cordier) without sensing the presence of real people as
source and inspiration at some point in the creative process.
In the case of the Carpeaux bust, it may have been Louise
Kuling, a Black woman from Norfolk, who was living in Paris
at the time.
But the new and more rigorous effort to look at the world
also was part of the pseudoscientific goal of making broad
generalizations about the races and their essential nature,
with a hierarchy in which the White male artist from Paris was
natural arbiter of all distinctions. Cordier, who draped his
African figures in flowing robes of marble or bronze, may have
been in search of the beauty unique to other races. But the
particular beauty he found, and the way he dressed up his
figures with classical references, suggest he was mythologiz-
ing his subjects within a decidedly European sense of what
was attractive and universal.
The Met exhibition, which includes about 35 objects,
features two contemporary works that demonstrate the long
shadow Carpeaux’s bust has cast. Kehinde Wiley’s “A fter La
Négresse, 1872” is made of cast marble dust and resin,
showing a young Black man wearing a Lakers jersey, with his
head turned in the same, awkward way as the Carpeaux figure
it references. It was part of a series of 250, and the overt
commercialism of its reproduction references the commercial
forces that drove Carpeaux to make multiples of his work. It
also appropriates, glibly, the eroticism of the original, recast-
ing it in homoerotic terms.
Far more substantial and moving is Kara Walker’s 2017
“Negress,” a plaster cast made from Carpeaux’s bust, but
displayed on the floor, illuminated by a single light. The
plaster appears as a void bounded by the famous, anguished
face, and suggests both the desire and futility of any effort to
get “inside” the head of the unknown figure who modeled for
Carpeaux.
That gesture summarizes the darkest question raised by
the show: What happens as we look intently at this face in
front of us? Does our looking simply extend the exploitation
that Carpeaux both dramatizes and indulges? Does it recolo-
nize this woman and, by extension, all women of color? Is
there any innocent participation in this exhibition?
Some of the essays in the catalogue clearly suggest that
there can be no pleasure in this object that isn’t fundamental-
ly an extension of the violence that it supposedly condemns.
That makes this Carpeaux exhibition a far darker enterprise
than the 2014 show, which acknowledged the complexity of
the artist and his intimate engagement with the corrupt and
imperial forces that led France at the time. But the stakes of
the 2014 show weren’t as high, and guilty pleasure could be
snatched from its darker imputations.
There is no such offering here. That leaves this bust, in its
many iterations, in a curious place. It embodies a history that
must be told and it implicates us in that history. It does so
because it is a highly successful artistic object, clearly
expressive, dramatic and engaging. We leave with the para-
doxical sense that we are both condemned and privileged to
live with it, as it casts an ever longer shadow over the history
of race and representation.Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast Through March 5,
2023, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
metmuseum.org.A Complexhistory ofAbolitionistSculptureMU
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK
ABOVE ROW FROM LEFT: “Antislavery Medallion,” c. 1787,
manufactured by Josiah Wedgwood, after a design by William Hackwood;
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s “Study of a Woman Kneeling,”
c. 1867–1868; and K ara Walker’s 2017 plaster work “Negress.”