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

An ambitious and revelatory investigation of the black female figure in modern art, tracing the legacy of Manet through to contemporary art

This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active particip...