THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Roberta Smith
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| Frédéric Bazille’s “Young Woman With Peonies,” 1870. It is among the works in “Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today,” at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Credit: National Gallery of Art, Washington |
We still live in an Age of Rediscovery regarding the role of women in art, and revelations regularly reshape the way we view both female creators and subjects. In this case the narrative that abstract painting was the early-20th-century invention of a few white male Europeans. “
Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet and Matisse to Today” sows disruption on another more nuanced front. This taut, riveting exhibition — currently on view at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in the new Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia University — revisits mid-19th-century Paris to examine the significance of
black female models in paintings from the earliest years of European modernism. It then peripatetically traces such figures through successive generations of artists. [
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| A woman looking at Edouard Manet's “Olympia” in Venice, during the “Manet Return to Venice” exhibition in 2013. Credit: Giuseppe Cacace/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
