The Beholder
Posted on Nov. 11, 2019
“Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” an exhibit at Musée d’Orsay in Paris, focuses on the depiction of black models, the lives they lived and their influence on modernity. (Thomas Padilla/AP Images for Carolina Alumni Review)
When we look at a painting, what commands our attention? Denise Murrell ’76 has exposed a viewpoint the art world didn’t know it was missing.
By Mary E. Miller
Early one evening in June, a crowd gathers in a side entrance to Musée d’Orsay.
Talking among themselves, distracted with anticipation, the crowd at first doesn’t notice the woman quietly descending the marble staircase in a plum pantsuit and sensible shoes, discreet jewelry, her black hair natural in a short Afro.
Once they see her, they break quickly into applause. Paris artists, gallery owners, academics and business executives, this group of 30 mostly African American expats has arranged a private tour of the exhibit “Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse,” to be led by the
exhibition’s American co-curator, Denise Murrell ’76. For them, she is as much a draw as the exhibit itself.
The walls are black, with the figure of Laure, the maid in Edouárd Manet’s Olympia, dramatically enlarged to nearly 20 feet high. At this scale, the overlooked details about Laure that speak to her status as a member of the black Parisian working class — her pink dress with its white lace collar and billowing sleeves, the drop earring and printed headscarf — are obvious.
Denise Murrell ’76 with Manet’s masterpiece, “Olympia.” (Thomas Padilla/AP Images for Carolina Alumni Review)
Underscoring the concept of opening a new door onto old art, the doors to the exhibit pass through what would be just beyond the frame of the painting.
The groundbreaking show is the Orsay’s first to focus on the depiction of black models, the lives they lived and their influence on modernity. The endeavor reflected the work of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people, including three curators from the Orsay. But all of it was inspired and largely guided by the insight and scholarship of Denise Murrell. She’d balk at the framing, but Murrell is a living star of the show.
Murrell, a Harvard MBA who left a career in global finance to earn her art history doctorate at age 60, has been aptly described as an outside pair of eyes in the exceedingly white, still male-dominated world of art history curation. From an early childhood divided between her mother’s home in Gastonia and her father’s in Harlem, she grew to become someone who consistently forged her own path to discover and engage with the world. Fine art became her abiding passion, inspiring her to wonder why, wherever she traveled, she could see paintings and drawings featuring people who looked like her but whose stories were almost always hidden beyond the frame.
Using Manet’s iconic painting of the nude white prostitute and the clothed black maid holding a bouquet of flowers, Murrell wondered why almost no one ever considers the other woman who takes up nearly half the painting, who she was and what she represents. Which led to bigger questions about why so many people of color featured in fine art were all but invisible to academic research. To her, this is Art History 101.
“Look, this is really Art History 101. There are two women, and one takes up almost as much space as the other. What does that mean?”
— Denise Murrell ’76
Laure, she tells those at the Orsay, posed three times in the space of a year for Manet — once as a maid; then as a nanny in the park; finally, for a more formal portrait, in a white blouse with a headscarf. Her name and address already were known, Murrell says.
Ten years ago, sitting in the office of her adviser at Columbia in a small seminar, Murrell had raised her hand and asked her question aloud: Why, after all this time, was the maid still referred to almost dismissively with the word “negress.” Who was she? What had Manet meant to convey? He completed the painting in 1863 and his interest in the U.S. Civil War was well known.
The adviser, art historian Anne Higonnet, urged her to write a paper.
Murrell says Laure posed three times in a year for Manet — once as a maid; then as a nanny in the park; and finally, for a more formal portrait.
In works widely loved but considered so exhaustedly studied and analyzed that nothing new was likely to be discerned, Murrell’s scholarship diagnosed a white blind spot. Until now, it might be argued, shows at the Orsay emphasizing color meant paints, not people.
“She opened the door to see these pictures in a new way,” said Elizabeth Easton, director and co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York. “Through Denise’s eyes, you saw completely differently. That’s a pretty big thing to do.”
It was a bold move and a considerable risk by the museum’s new president, Laurence des Cars, especially considering that the cornerstone work of the exhibit is the museum’s most famous and historically significant painting.
The Orsay show was an expansion of the January 2019 debut exhibit of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today,” which was based on Murrell’s art history doctoral dissertation for Columbia and which she curated.
Des Cars had heard about Murrell’s dissertation when the Columbia show was just a proposal. On her second day on the job in 2015, des Cars contacted Columbia to say the museum would like to expand the proposed Wallach show for the Orsay and include Murrell as a co-curator.
What you were meant to do
The Orsay show brought together more than 100 famous paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos and multimedia works from some of the world’s best-known museums and most important private collections covering the French Revolution to modern times. The works include depictions of dark-skinned people as slaves, as exotics, as angels; paintings done in Europe after France abolished slavery; vivid torture scenes that were painted as political statements against slavery; portraits of men and women whose blackness was either caricatured or denied.
This show differed from a standard way of looking at art in another important way —it displayed biographies of the men and women who posed, the result of exhaustive research among what often were few records. Where possible, the museum chose to honor their humanity by renaming the works using their names.
Higonnet, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of the art history and archaeology department at Barnard College and Columbia, says she pushed for the action, coached entirely by Murrell. “I don’t think there has been a Columbia art history PhD in living memory who achieved such prominence so fast,” she said.
It’s a mesmerizing accomplishment. It’s even more vibrant at an age when most people are downsizing and embracing retirement. After Murrell did the scholarly work, she pulled together a huge cohort of foundation executives, private funders, museum staff, other curators and art collectors and donors to gather and launch a complicated pair of international shows. It took years of convincing, hundreds of thousands of dollars raised.
Her career advanced, and she loved her job. But the more she traveled, the more she wanted to do more of it. She visited many of the world’s most prestigious museums, looking at thousands of works of art. She saw beauty, exoticism, the human form in all its iterations.
There were so many setbacks. Just after she enrolled in graduate school, the stock market crashed and the recession began. She ran out of money and sold paintings from her personal collection to keep afloat. While she was writing her dissertation, Murrell took time off to care for her ailing mother.
The voice in her head told her she was too old to be doing this. “Yes!” she admits with a laugh. “I was terrified. There were times I thought that nobody would care about this idea.”
Some ideas require a lifetime to form and figure out. All the things she did and learned in her previous career, she believes, were foundational to her success in this, from the money she earned and saved that allowed her to travel and then to change course and return to school, to the marketing and presentation skills she learned, the contacts she made around the globe.
“People have said, you know, it’s just so obvious this is exactly what you were meant to do. And that’s why the stars aligned the way they did. … There was definitely struggle initially, but then the funding coming through and the Columbia venue coming through and the Orsay coming on board. These are things you wanted to happen, that you couldn’t in any way anticipate, you couldn’t have a plan.”
For the Columbia show, lenders didn’t want to ship paintings to a new building for a curator with no experience. At one point, she and Elizabeth Easton had to jump on a plane to pitch the concept of the exhibit to a group at the Ministry of Culture. As Easton recalls, the people at the ministry, who had been told to take the meeting as a matter of course, began to earnestly listen. She saw their interest grow the longer Murrell spoke.
Still, Murrell and Easton did not get Olympia. They felt dejected. Would anyone even come to a show without the main art?
Katie Ziglar ’79, director of UNC’s Ackland Art Museum, had the same reservation. Murrell has served on the Ackland’s national board since 2015 and notes she remains the only woman of color on it. Ziglar saw the show in Paris and New York; it was the latter that made a deeper impression about Murrell’s talents.
“Imagine an art show where the star work is not there,” Ziglar said. She arrived in New York on one of the last days of the show, she said, and the lines were still out the door. “The power of the exhibit was not the image but the ideas and the research. People were really talking about it.”
Many setbacks behind her, Murrell hosted family, friends and professional contacts, attended gallery openings and taught at Columbia, basking in the success of her own openings in New York and Paris. (Thomas Padilla/AP Images for Carolina Alumni Review)
A whirlwind three months
Paris celebrates the summer solstice with the Fête de Musique. The city blooms with free live musical performances in every arrondissement. On this holiday, Murrell arrives at Les Editeurs, a literary restaurant, bar and library near the Latin Quarter. Against a backdrop of red fabric walls, ebony bookcases stacked with 5,000 volumes on culture, literature, art and travel, Murrell settles into a leather club chair.
It was a wondrous, whirlwind three months in Paris, in her life. Forty loved ones, friends, family from North Carolina, professional contacts all over, came for the opening celebrations. She has attended many glitzy art openings, including one for artist and Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley’s show at Petit Palais. Friends continually arrive to see the Orsay. Her academic appointment means she also taught an undergraduate summer class for Columbia. And she was in the middle of moving.
The impression she creates is a woman in constant motion, boundless energy. Curiosity is what makes Denise Murrell’s heart beat. She loves the pursuit of knowledge, the excitement in discovering something new, whether it’s business, the stock market or architecture, jazz or literature. She cannot get enough of living — which is to say, of learning.
Curators, as a professional group, are expected to be heard more than seen. Murrell struggles in a surprisingly public role. There have been profiles of her in all the major American mainstream media, The New York Times, The Washington Post and in the French and European press. The BBC and CBS’ Sunday Morning in America have aired features. The Columbia exhibition catalog won an award. And theobserver.com named her one of the Arts Power 50, Changemakers Shaping the Art World.
“Curators are not supposed to talk about themselves,” she insists.
Retiring? Hardly
Murrell was born in New York’s Harlem Hospital but grew up mostly in Gastonia, with her mother and extended family.
Her parents married other people. Her father was a postman in New York, a World War II veteran. Murrell describes a childhood with no television until homework was completed, of everyone gathering to watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite and lots of PBS programming. Her mother put Denise and her brother on the Carolina Crescent train to spend summers in New York with their father. These too, she says, were happy times; trips to museums, the beach and lots of musical theater.
Culture and art rooted both places. Distant kin John Biggers, a muralist who came to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance and went on to teach and exhibit his work, lived in Gastonia; Murrell and another cousin once traveled to Houston to see an exhibit of his work. When Murrell was a young adult, Charlotte’s Mint Museum staged a retrospective of the work of Romare Bearden, a Charlotte native who became America’s foremost collage artist; Murrell and her mother made a special trip to see it.
Curators, as a professional group, are expected to be heard more than seen. Murrell struggles in a surprisingly public role. There have been profiles of her in all the major American mainstream media and in the French and European press. “Curators are not supposed to talk about themselves,” she insists.
But Murrell, a first generation college student, did not take a single art history course at Carolina. She immersed herself in literature from around the world and supposed she might teach.
“My father said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with becoming a schoolteacher, but you have an opportunity to be a pioneer! To be a pioneer would be to be a woman, a black woman MBA.’ ”
After graduation from Carolina, Murrell spent two years as an analyst for Morgan Stanley in New York.
Sixteen-hour days were standard. The offices were near the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so she and her co-workers would take their work breaks in the sculpture garden there, sometimes just to see the light of day. Murrell loved that space, and as a means of professional networking, she became a Museum of Modern Art associate. The few hundred dollars’ membership came with lectures, show previews, even private tours of artists’ studios.
She applied and was admitted to Harvard. In a class of nearly 750, she recalls, approximately 35 students were people of color, “and it was either six or eight of us were women.”
There she learned confidence in her own views and became comfortable with always, always being in the minority, whether by gender or race.
For decades she balanced work with her passion for art, put her money into travel, into night classes in art history, into collecting contemporary African American art. She became involved in the Studio Museum of Harlem.
Her career advanced, and she loved her job. But the more she traveled, the more she wanted to do more of it. She visited many of the world’s most prestigious museums, looking at thousands of works of art. She saw beauty, exoticism, the human form in all its iterations.
When she told people in 2007 that she was going to graduate school in art history, Murrell recalls, they said, “How self-indulgent!” or “Actually, you’re retiring.” Some of her former colleagues are now doing just that; Murrell has only just begun this part of her life.
And she has a choice to make — being an art historian and being a curator are two separate pursuits.
She loves teaching and research, and that life offers the benefits of structure and financial pension, which has to be a consideration, she said. Being an independent curator is a newer endeavor, and there are so many more ideas she has had since her dissertation. She can envision several different shows, even now.
The only thing there is less of is time. But she will take some — the autumn and winter — to make her decision.
“I’m guardedly optimistic. We’ll see. We’ll see.”
Relevant, socially engaged
The questions and comments still rankle — suggestions by some people she knows and by others who share their beliefs — that after all this time, work, doubt and sacrifice, it was somehow less than worthy of the effort. Because art is for the rich. Because fine art is conspicuous consumption. Because art is a pastime. Or because it is white.
Affirming emails, calls and texts have poured in since the Columbia show. People attending shows in other museums, in other cities and countries, write to say they are looking at paintings and sculptures they thought they knew. They are seeing something else. They are asking questions.
“There’s the seeing, but then there’s the cognitive act of deciding what you must pay attention to,” Murrell explained. We are taught, she says, that there are only certain things that we need to pay attention to, that we’re going to be tested on, that we’re going to have to know how to talk about if we want to seem educated. “So by giving viewers a reason to want to look at more in these works, I think it does kind of reset a sense of what they have to pay attention to.”
Why does what hangs in a museum matter? Isn’t what is chosen to be viewed the thing that defines a culture, to itself and to others? How important is it for people to be able to see themselves represented in the world? And what comes after they see something in a new way?
This is where social justice can begin.
“What scholars at their best do is tell us something that we didn’t know or, even, that we didn’t want to know,” Higonnet said. “It was both with Denise.”
Every major French media outlet talked about the show, Higonnet noted. “And they said something that they almost never say: ‘This is art history that is relevant and socially engaged. This is an art exhibition that matters outside the museum.’”
More than 75,000 attended the show at the Wallach and, according to the Orsay’s official tally, 500,026 visitors came to view “Black Models.”
A bridge connects the sides of the Musée d’Orsay. Featured there is a new installation by African American artist Glenn Ligon of Brooklyn, a piece inspired by Murrell’s scholarship. (Thomas Padilla/AP Images for Carolina Alumni Review)
Final frame
Slightly winded, Murrell checks her watch and sighs to her gallery audience.
“We’re at an hour and 17 minutes,” she announces. “I’ve gone over.” Some gasp. “But it felt like 20 minutes!” one person says to murmured agreement. They are not ready to be finished.
Murrell leads them to the bridge that connects the sides of the museum, where the view affords the sweep of its main hall.
She points to the far end of the hall. Atop the towers in the nave is a new installation by the African American artist Glenn Ligon of Brooklyn. Twelve names written in neon, echoing the handwriting of the artists or, when possible, the models themselves. Laure, Josephine, Jeanne, Josef.
The piece, which the Orsay commissioned and Ligon titled Some Black Parisians, was inspired by Murrell’s scholarship.
“Ligon literally put their names in lights,” she says. New art keeps arising from the old.
There is something searing about the sight of their names written in the bright white light; its connections are palpable, emotional. The models look transformed. No longer simply figures, they were people, with names and addresses, histories and jobs.
There is something searing about the sight of their names written in the bright white light; its connections are palpable, emotional. The models look transformed. No longer simply figures, they were people, with names, addresses, histories and jobs.
These expats were here for more than just an art outing, something else Murrell well understood. This night was a splendid, serious way to acknowledge Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when American slaves were told they were free.
The crowd moves in around her, some teary, offering hugs, requesting selfies. Murrell obliges their need to connect. Art can be deeply emotional business. Answering questions, listening to their stories, she holds hands, trades business cards and assures them she will join the group for dinner and more conversation.
One man among them suggests a group photo. Holding his camera, he sprints back up to the entrance hall for the best angle.
Here, Murrell becomes a willing model. She shifts her body slightly to center herself so the names of the men and women models can be read behind her. She stretches her arms, beckoning others to join so that no one is left out.
She knows what she is doing as she poses, aware just how much lies within and beyond the moment’s frame. Across the Seine, Kehinde Wiley’s paintings hang; across the Atlantic, Lonnie Bunch has just been named the first African American director of the Smithsonian and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has movingly testified to Congress about “a dilemma of inheritance” and the question of making reparations to African Americans for the sin of slavery and institutional racism.
Small experiences in museums can have so much power, she has learned. They are key to moving ideas, of moving people and societies. The photographer counts down. A wide and genuine smile breaks across Denise Murrell’s face, and she looks straight to the camera’s eye.
Mary E. Miller is a freelance writer based in Raleigh.
More at bit.ly/black-models, from a CBS Sunday Morning report on Murrell’s work, and at bit.ly/PosingModernity, a Columbia University documentary.
