Art History as Moralism

A critic once told Henri Matisse that if he met one of his models on the street he would “run away in terror.” To which Matisse said, “I do not create a woman; I make a picture.” Paintings, in other words, are not documentary photographs. We are now accustomed to look through paintings into the lives of the model, to ask seemingly burning questions about the artist’s moral attitude toward his subjects. Part of the interest in Laure is less about Laure’s life (about which we know very little) than about the discerning the artist’s moral attitude toward his subject — what did he think of her?

We have become highly sensitized to these moral questions, as though probing the artist’s soul through their pictures and handing out judgments. Within the small cottage industry of race studies around Laure, the latest wrinkle in the debate is that she is not simply black, but “mixed race,” a Creole. Laure now takes her place in a lineage that goes back to figures like the Caribbean-born artist Guillaume Lethière, the subject of a major retrospective currently on view at the Clark Art Institute, from which it will soon travel to the Louvre.

Laure figures centrally in Darcy Grigsby’s new book, Creole: Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century (2022). For Grigsby, to see Laure as black is to distort our understanding of race both past and present. Grigsby is nothing if not sensitized to the variety of ways of construing race in the nineteenth century. Her aim is to root out past and present “pretenses to blindness” to the variety and complexity of racial thinking around the notion of Creole, something that goes well beyond the black and white binary.

According to Grigsby, a “Creole” is someone born in a French colony “of either European, or African, or mixed European and African ancestry”; it’s a matter “of birthplace, not race.” And then, a few sentences later, she writes of “people with black and white ancestry.” The slippage between geographical ancestry — which we all have — and “black and white” ancestry — which no one has — shows the kinds of confusion that mark racial discourse more generally. The problem, for Grigsby, is “the purported purity of black and white races,” not their existence. But is it right to say that Creole challenges racial purity, that it brings the complexity of race to light? As Werner Sollors has shown in Neither Black nor White yet Both, what Creole actually shows is race as an empty category, a mythical construct designed for exploitative purposes.

So while the phrase “mixed race” appears no less than eighty times in Creole, not once are we asked to question the idea, but only the “bedrock” of “anti-blackness” and white purity that surrounds it. It is upon this antiblack bedrock that “culture and history” functions exactly like the racial biology of old; it “determines identity” in ways that “supersede” “language, nation, and socioeconomic status.” Here is what all the race talk is about, whether it’s black, white, mixed: to show how race “supersedes” class.

As Barbara and Karen Fields put it in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, “The first principle of racism is belief in race.” The first principle of racism is not white supremacism, black inferiority, racial hierarchy, or racial difference — it is race itself. According to the Fieldses, what we don’t need is “a more varied set of words and categories to represent racism but a politics to uproot it.”

One of the primary targets of Racecraft is the contemporary reemergence of the nineteenth-century race fictions that dominate accounts like Grigsby’s and Murrell’s. “People marching under the banner of biracialism and multiracialism . . . may not be aware of the malignant history to which they are signing on,” the Fieldses write. Contemporary “talk of ‘biracial’ or ‘multiracial’ people rehabilitates mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and the like — yesterday’s terms for mixed ancestry.” Mixed descent and ancestry is one thing (something we all share); mixed race is another (which no one shares).

Even if notions of mixed race “reemerge in the costume of . . . progressiveness . . . their origins are racist.” As one reviewer puts it, the Fieldses

remind us that there are no accurate racial designations and no bi or multiracial identities. Genetically speaking, it makes no more sense to describe someone with, say, a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father as a person of mixed race than it would to describe someone with a tall mother and a short father as a person of mixed height.

Under the “capacious inclusiveness” of Creole, class disappears — “peoples with and without power (masters, slaves, free people of color)” — rich and poor, colonizer and colonized alike suffer under the stigma of Creolization.

As it turns out, it’s often the masters who suffer here. In this world, it matters that white “slave-holding ‘aristocrats of the colonies’” were ridiculed by Parisians. In this world, “black persons in courtly costume [she means Haiti emperor Faustin Soulouque] were vulnerable to mockery” as much as laboring maids in working-class attire. In this world, aristocrats (Fortunée Hamelin and Alexandre Dumas), emperors, conservative military leaders (indigenous general Tomás Mejía, who is being shot in Manet’s Execution of Maximilian), dedicated Confederates (Degas’s family), and one maid (Laure in Manet’s Olympia) are equally victims of racial denigration. In this world, what matters is that wealthy white Creole slave owners in Louisiana, whatever their prejudices, still “believed that the dark people who shared their culture, language, and American birth were Creoles like themselves.

Grigsby’s book is largely focused on the moment of 1848 and after, the moment slavery was abolished in French colonies. For Grigsby, it was abolished in idea, not reality. In her narrative, slavery was never a “condition of labor but whether one’s person belonged to oneself or to another.” The class character of Creole can be summed up in Grigsby’s sense that what matters past and present is differentiating workers from slaves (and not seeing them both as workers). The “key question posed by slavery was not the condition of labor but ownership of oneself,” she writes. Not rights, not economic equality, not exploitation, but self-ownership is what workers want (as though Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi were writing the history of labor). In Grigsby’s world, what matters is that white workers could choose how they sold themselves (or they could choose to starve), while racialized workers were denigrated, even if they were rich.

Chapter after chapter tells the story of how white artists and models had the “freedom to embrace and discard racial difference,” something that was “not shared by their models of color.” In this world, the sublime virtue is the capacity to play a part, to perform a role of one’s choosing. What matters in this world is choosing your identity and moralizing about who does and does not get to choose. This is the class project behind Creole: to make class inequality disappear behind the “bedrock” of inequity and racism. Not once does it imagine that selling oneself is the problem that race was designed to naturalize, by dividing the world into winners and losers based on empty ascriptive categories.

According to Grigsby, Creole is a more accurate idea than black and white, as the “isolation of blackness as race . . . overlooks the historical complexity of racial difference, its elusiveness, and its variable, changing constructions.” The problem, again, is to “overcome the simplifications and erasures” of racial difference, not for a moment to question its reality. In this world, it is the “denial” of race, the “pretense to blindness about the utter intermingling of races in Creole society” that matters, not the bogus idea that races intermingle.

Both Murrell and Grigsby see Manet as a liberal, a dedicated republican (in the French sense), with progressive views on race. In Olympia, Laure, as opposed to the naked model Victorine Meurent, is fully clothed. Not just clothed, but her “clothing may have been for Manet the sign of the financial transaction that differentiated her position in Paris from enslavement.” “Being dressed was not a sign of natural servitude, but of the contrary: her entry into class relations, her modernity,” Grigsby writes. In other words, Manet takes particular care to distance Laure from any association with past colonial slavery (which was abolished fifteen years earlier). A bold move for the time.

Both Murrell and Grigsby see Manet as progressively committed to giving his black models autonomy, to reflect how for Laure this is just a job and does not represent her identity as a servant. But for Grigsby, even if it looks like Laure “belongs to herself,” she, unlike her white worker counterpart, is necessarily coded as a slave. So even if black women were “paid a wage . . . their bodies looked like slaves.” The documentary and visual evidence — “the unmooring of illusion [where Victorine and Laure touch]; the free-floating appearance of paint and color that fail to attach to form” — is thin, at best (these kinds of painterly passages are ubiquitous in Manet).

As Grigsby declares, the “‘freedom’ [of black women] to earn money as models inevitably, insidiously, connoted slavery and their incapacity to do so; their modernity was recast as a sham.” According to this New Jim Crow–type account, slavery was prohibited in name only. Thus, we reach Grigsby’s extraordinary thesis, that the singular “value of Manet’s picture reside[s] in its refusal to sentimentalize the inequities of modernity, including the subordinate status of the black working-class woman to her white counterpart.” Olympia, in other words, is both an instance of, and a commentary on, white privilege: “one model was more vulnerable and subject to violence; one was more likely to be treated as yet another object, as if slavery lingered. One woman connoted such dehumanization and dispossession — the black woman whom many art historians failed to see.” In Grigsby’s world, the real battle is not between capital and labor, but between white and black workers. This is the ideal scenario for capital: divide and conquer, worker against worker.

For Murrell, Manet is an open-minded painter of the growing “black Presence” that coalesced around northern Paris at mid-century. Like Grigsby, the point for Murrell is about growing “self-possession.” “You can see the evolution as the black figure comes closer to subjectivity, or agency, portrayed by women artists,” Murrell says, “or by showing black women in a way that’s closer to their own modes of self-representation.” That ideal clarifies Murrell’s commitment to celebrating the growing presence of “members of the black bourgeoisie,” although it is less clear how this helps “ordinary black people.”

It’s not exactly high society that is at the heart of Murrell’s concerns; rather it is the wish to celebrate the “degree of racial and economic diversity among the general population within Manet’s environs as well as the multiethnic mix of Manet’s close social and artistic circles.” For Murrell, Manet is exemplary because he didn’t look down on the poor, offering instead a sweeping panorama of the “new racial reality.” Manet, in other words, is anti-classist; he does not “disdain” models with “working-class origins.” His work stands out because of his profound empathy toward rich and poor, black and white alike: “from destitute shantytown dwellers to the statesmen, socialites, and demimondaines, all of whom he portrayed in empathetic and elegant portraits, regardless of social stature.”

Murrell’s account makes it hard to see Manet’s work as an image of progress, but more like the opposite, a way to solidify and naturalize class exploitation by celebrating the “diversity” of the class structure. (I wonder what happens when the poor appeal to empathy to pay their rent?) Moreover, the only possible way Murrell’s story can be construed as the “evolution of the black figure” toward greater “agency” and “self-representation” is if she means the growing power and representation of the “black bourgeoisie” that prominently figure in both books. There is no sense, after all, that the women “eking out livings as servants, sex workers, street vendors” of the Old World are in anything but the same situation today.

Like Grigsby, Murrell sees race as the prime mover in society. No matter the degree of “social privileges transcending racial lines,” every one of the racialized subjects considered here “was confronted with racial animosity and prejudice.” Too often, Grigsby’s and Murrell’s racialized subjects held high degrees of “social privilege,” even if the maid Laure is the featured subject of their accounts. Laure, despite all the putative efforts to “center” her as the fulcrum for a new art history, stands exploited once more. She stands alongside every other “ordinary” black, brown, and white person who sees their economic position grow more precarious every day while watching an (increasingly diversified) elite carve up the slices of an ever-diminishing cake. This is in fact the point of every “centering” of racialized subjects, to displace class by separating race from the only work it has ever done: naturalize the winners and losers of capitalism.

T. J. Clark’s account of Manet succeeded in convincing most critics that the French painter’s works are “about class” on some level, although what they mean by that is only what it means for Grigsby and Murrell: classism, about how people see and feel about one another, whether the artist looks down on their subject or affirms it. But of course, no reading of Manet that doesn’t address what every painter was struck by — the facingness, the stark frontal mode of address — can begin to explain the politics of a painting that can’t possibly be reduced to moralizing about its subject matter.

There are few artists in the history of art as impenetrable as Manet. In all his works, he challenges our most basic assumptions about meaning. Any account of Manet that does not acknowledge how he frustrates every normative expectation of meaning has not come to terms with his art. His art is about challenging what we think we know about the world: about what makes a finished picture as well as about what constitutes a politics of class, gender, and race. Part of the point of, say, the Old Musician is the fascination of the bourgeoisie with the “underclass,” and how the picture resists our empathetic connection with its subject. Doesn’t the staging and artifice of Olympia similarly block our (false) desire to empathize with the world of sex workers? Doesn’t the sheer opacity of Luncheon in the Studio frustrate our commonplace desire to “read” into the lives of others? And doesn’t the moral value of artworks lie in their resistance to our assumptions about the world, not how they reaffirm what we already think we know?