In a new exhibition, the popularity of antislavery art is revisited with a critical eye on what is being shown and why it’s being celebrated
the famous work. Then a rare marble went on sale in 2018. “When the opportunity to acquire this bust came up,” Elyse Nelson, the conceiver and co-curator of the show, told me, “we acquired it with the idea that this could be the linchpin for an exhibition.
In this spirit, the show interrogates Carpeaux across his early sketches of the bust, his marble, his earlier versions and his renderings of a larger public work related to her. It must be the fullest examination ever staged of his iconic sculpture. Viewers will leave either outraged by such politicization of art or equipped with a more nuanced understanding of the touchy era following abolition, a time when European heads of state made grand gestures toward equality while they plotted the Scramble for Africa.
Though Wedgwood’s intentions were good and his timing ingenious, such finery smacks of the black Instagram square, the corporate pledge to “do better”, the pint ofThe most illuminating guest is Jean-Antoine Houdon, Carpeaux’s forebear in marble. Locals have long admired Houdon’sin the Met’s sun-drenched court of European sculpture. Braced for a splash, the bather is lovely – the arch of her outstretched foot fixed nimbly on a stone, a detail both structural and emotive.
The curators believe Houdon’s cheap intentions with his smiling slave “served as precedents” for Carpeaux 90 years later. But Why Born Enslaved! is not so easily reduced – not quite.
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