Tea at Trianon: Barometer of Hate

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Barometer of Hate

From Heather MacDonald at City Journal:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct. Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

Arriving at this reading of the Carpeaux statue and of similarly themed works requires the deconstruction of virtually every aspect of artistic creation. An artist’s use of live models, the representation of the nude, the selling and buying of art—all are revealed by the Met as ploys used by a white European power structure to oppress nonwhite people.

The Met’s first engagements with Why Born Enslaved! provided no hint of the revisionist readings to come. In 1997, a donor gave the museum a terra-cotta version of the bust, dating from 1872. In announcing the gift, the Met described Carpeaux as a “liberal romantic” whose “humanitarian sentiments” were manifest in the museum’s new sculpture. The museum was still in the business of stylistic explication rather than ideological denunciation, so it noted the influence of Carpeaux’s most important master in the bust’s “Michelangelesque sideward turn.”

In 2014, the Met assembled a magisterial Carpeaux retrospective, introducing many Americans to this stunningly gifted artist for the first time. The show, The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, included some of Carpeaux’s most psychologically acute busts, along with his tormented self-portraits and flamboyantly kinetic paintings. It traced the artist’s hard-fought rise, from son of a stonemason in provincial northern France to premier sculptor of the Second Empire. Carpeaux’s fountains, pediments, and bas-reliefs contributed exuberant beauty to the public-works projects then transforming Paris. (Why Born Enslaved! was an offshoot of one of those commissions, for the Fountain of the Observatory in the Luxembourg Gardens.) The exhibit also marked Carpeaux’s harrowing end, dying in agony at 48 after a botched cancer operation pierced his bladder.

The 2014 show displayed the Met’s terra-cotta version of Why Born Enslaved! Even in 2014, the museum could still discuss the work in sympathetic terms. The bust’s early success was due to the “beauty of the woman’s expression and the powerful emotion to which it gives rise,” the catalog suggested. Art historian Laure de Margerie wrote in a catalog essay that the bust “partook of the prolonged enthusiasm generated by the abolition of slavery in France in 1848 and in the United States in 1865.”

In 2019, the Met bought the marble version of Why Born Enslaved!. The acquisition announcement revealed how much had changed in the museum’s curatorial philosophy. The announcement warned future viewers about patriarchy and white privilege: “It is critical to reckon with the power imbalance enacted when a white male artist transposes the body of a black woman into an emblem of enslavement.” Though the statue had heretofore been interpreted (including by the Met) as “an expression of Carpeaux’s stance against slavery,” the museum was no longer taken in. In fact, the bust was a “disturbing fantasy of aestheticized bondage—the transformation of human carnage into erotically-charged drama,” the acquisition announcement explained. (Read more.)