Entering the Home of Friends

In 2018 the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University presented the exhibition ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today’. It was based upon the postdoctoral research of Denise Murrell, now curator at large for nineteenth- and twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Murrell’s inquiry into the Black model was inspired by Laure, the Black woman who posed for Manet’s provocative Olympia (1863). Although painted in full view, the art-h (…)