Background Color, Redux II
by Guest Contributor Mimi, originally published at Threadbared
Today I rejected a comment on the entry Background Color for its sneering hostility. In short, the author of the comment called us stupid, too preoccupied with Gucci (as if) to know anything about art (which fashion, the author asserted firmly, was not). Furthermore, she scolded, we should “educate” ourselves so we might better recognize the “brilliance” of the NYLON editorial as an art historical reference to such canonical images like Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) (Fig. 1) and not a comment on racial thinking or class inequities at all.
Fig. 1
First, let me mention that I will reject comments that are insulting or poorly composed. (Phrases strung together in a jumble connected with ellipses are not fun to read.) Second, the author of the rejected comment does point out something worth noting — yes, the editorial certainly does reference a canonical theme in European art history, and no, this hardly excuses the editorial. If anything, it makes the editorial that much more a poignant example of the long duration of racisms and their entanglements with other vectors of power, including gender, sexuality, empire and labor. That is, what this comparison makes too obvious is that colonial and imperial histories of conquest and aesthetics continue to exert themselves in the present.
Fig. 2
In an essay called Slavery is a Woman, art historian James Smalls writes of this genre:
“A recognized example of the standard representation of blacks in European art is provided by Jean-Marc Nattier’s 1733 Mademoiselle de Clermont at Her Bath Attended by Slaves. (Fig. 2) There, black women are shown in their expected roles as servants and exoticized complements to the white mistress. […] The portrait constitutes a visual record of white woman’s construction and affirmation of self through the racial and cultural Other. […] The black woman’s headwrap and partial nudity are signs that mark her as different from white womanhood. As well, they constitute visible markers of white woman’s command over black woman’s labor.”
(The whole essay — a meditation on visual representations of black women in 19th century European portraiture– is well worth a look.)
And in an American Literature essay about an African American experimentalist poet, Deborah Mix speaks about these hauntingly familiar images too (to contextualize one of Harryette Mullen’s poems, “A Petticoat”):
Questions of power—to speak, to create, to relax—are further interrogated by the fact that one woman lounges while another hovers inattendance. […] In signifying on ‘‘A Petticoat , ’’ Mullen evokes Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia, whose nude, reclining white woman gazes directly at the viewer, while a black woman in a shapeless pink dress hovers in the background. Feminist art historians have read Manet’s painting as representing transgressive female sexuality, its female nude bold enough not only to revel in her nudity but also to stare directly at her would-be voyeurs. But this boldness appears to be available only to the upper- class white woman; the black servant nearly disappears into the shadows, holding flowers that may be a lover’s gift to Olympia. The servant’s sexuality, even her identity, appears to be subordinated to her mistress’s sexual power and to the power of the gaze. (Both Olympia and her viewers are free to look brazenly, but the black woman is not.) In fact, the black woman’s ill-fitting dress may have been a gift from her mistress, an exchange in which white femininity is thrust upon a black woman as both condescending generosity and an assertion of authority. Yet the dress, and the attitudes about gender and racial identity for which it is synecdoche, fails to fit. Furthermore, as the white woman luxuriates in the “rosy charms” of her pink nudity, the dark-skinned maid “wears [the white woman’s] color.” Still cloaked in traditional “pink and white,” the servant apparently exists to complement the privilege of Olympia’s femininity and sexuality. Olympia and her couch are painted on top of the murky background of heavy draperies and, of course, her servant, whose presence is highlighted primarily through the dress she wears rather than through her own body. In interpreting Mullen’s insertion of the Manet painting into her re-vision of [Gertrude] Stein’s poem, we confront the ways in which Stein, like “Olympia,” enjoyed privileges conferred by her class and race. Stein’s boldness as a writer was enabled by wealth and leisure; those who enabled that leisure, such as domestic workers, are rendered nearly invisible.
The conditions of possibility for what the NYLON editorial looks like today are deeply embedded in the now-blunt nature of these earlier images. It might be a project for another time to attend to what has and has not changed about these aesthetic formations, their structures of knowledge production (especially of racial thinking), and unexpected entailments, but for now, I think it’s clear that the aesthetic conventions of the NYLON editorial are both jarringly new and disturbingly the same.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:
Ugh, I’ve always hated that painting. I find it so insulting, sexist, racist and demeaning to both white women and women of color.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 9:57 am ¶
Renee wrote:
@feminist punk but McCain with obviously racialized Asians us ok? Racism should be unacceptable in all situations.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 10:25 am ¶
DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:
Renee, you need re-read my post on the McCain cartoon. I stated that the cartoon looks as if it was MAKING FUN of McCain for being racist.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 10:31 am ¶
Lea wrote:
It’s morbidly fascinating. How luminescent, pearly white the woman’s skin is in the second painting. How in the first painting the second woman’s face is so dark it’s almost indistinguishable from the background, made all the more glaring when the image is this size. Magnified to full screen, I can just about make out her eyes. How both women stand at their mistresses’ feet.
My mind keeps grasping after a way to subvert the dynamic, to look at it ironically, but I can’t seem to manage it.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 10:35 am ¶
ilana wrote:
It’s absolutely true that the implications toward the Black woman in the Manet painting are not exactly flattering, to say the least. However, it is worth noting that the white woman in the painting is recognised to be a prostitute, hardly a woman that the viewer of the time would have respected. In its way (and for its time) Manet’s painting is a social commentary.
All this is not to say, of course, that the Black figure in this painting and its contemporaries is portrayed in a fair or flattering light.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 11:07 am ¶
Yoli wrote:
I was always taught that Olympia served as a piece of social commentary. The fact that Olympia kept a servant and that the servant nearly vanishes was supposed to be objectionable. It wasn’t an assertion of Olympia’s superiority or affluence- she may be a courtesan- but a take on the exploitation of both women.
It gets complicated, though, because now I’m thinking this interpretation shames women for their sexuality.
I love art history.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 11:42 am ¶
Florence Craye wrote:
Hmmm… as if you can’t comment on racism, classism, and art history all at the same time!?! Isn’t that a major part of art history? Interpreting images within their original context and within our context today? I seem to remember that being a large part of the art history classes I took as part of my art degree.
The original pieces are so loaded with messages about race, class, and gender, that I don’t see how this commenter could have made such a strange judgment. As if art is completely separated from what happened in the real world, and history isn’t made to be scrutinized.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 11:49 am ¶
Rosie wrote:
Interestingly enough in my high school art history class, when we looked at Olympia there was not one mention of the woman in the back!
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 12:13 pm ¶
DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:
Hmmm… as if you can’t comment on racism, classism, and art history all at the same time!?! Isn’t that a major part of art history? Interpreting images within their original context and within our context today? I seem to remember that being a large part of the art history classes I took as part of my art degree.
The original pieces are so loaded with messages about race, class, and gender, that I don’t see how this commenter could have made such a strange judgment. As if art is completely separated from what happened in the real world, and history isn’t made to be scrutinized.
i agree. ONE advantage to racist paintings like that shows us how racist and sexist society was back then and how white people felt toward people of color. So i guess those kind of paintings are some kind of a painful lesson for us all.
sadly, some people don’t bother to see how racist and hateful that painting is. All they wanna do is ogle her pink tits and admire her “white beauty” without so much a glance at the black woman lurking in the background.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 12:15 pm ¶
NancyP wrote:
Re: Olympia - I don’t know the history behind the painting, but I always assumed that the white woman was a highly paid mistress, along the lines of Violetta in the opera La Traviata. There’s no question that it is a great painting from the technical standpoint. To me, both women are servants - one selling her sexual assets, one selling her ordinary labor. Criticize me all you like, because I am a complete duffer about the fine points of art history - I recognize paintings but don’t know a lot of history behind them.
It doesn’t surprise me that there aren’t 19th C. paintings showing non-white women in roles other than servant, sexual servant, and/or exotic (occasionally a royal exotic, for history painting genre). The consumers of the paintings are noble and haute bourgeois white men and their women.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 12:15 pm ¶
Vidya wrote:
Sander Gilman has an article in which he analyzes this and other paintings. He notes that the inclusion of a black figure often serves to signify sexuality, particularly sexuality which is transgressive or excessive (in the case of this painting, to indicate that the white woman is a prostitute).
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 3:37 pm ¶
Whitney wrote:
@ Rosie:
Same with my Art History classes.
Mimi, thanks for pointing out examples in the non-fashion art history world. It’s almost easy to forget about these examples, or write them off as simple ignorance.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 3:50 pm ¶
Jane wrote:
I hope this isn’t too off topic–but I think it’s also worth noting that in a lot of paintings from the impressionist/postimpressionist era, the craze for all things Japanese manifests itself in background details. I know that in the previous thread, there was some discussion about Beth Ditto’s make up and its supposed similarities to geisha make up (I don’t know enough about geisha to determine if this is true or not), which is why I bring this up. I’m by no means an art history expert, but from my own independant study of paintings from the 19th century, fans, kimonos, ukiyo-e prints, and even flowers (particularly orchids and chrysanthemums) are often used to make a European-looking woman seem exotic and sexual. In particular, I’m thinking of this painting by Monet of his wife wearing a kimono while surrounded by Japanese fans (picture here:
http://www.hku.hk/french/dcmScreen/lang3022/monet.jpg ). In this painting, even as Camille Monet’s form is lost in an ornately embroidered kimono, her golden blonde hair is obviously meant to contrast with the reds and blues of the Japanese fans in the background. Traces of Japanese culture (or more accurately, the artist’s perception of Japanese culture) are consequently just props that highlight a white woman’s sexual and economic power. They not only mark the white woman as mysterious and seductive, but they are also signs of a significant economic wealth: only wealthy women could afford expensive imports such as kimonos and woodblock prints. In a really sick way, the cultural appropriation of Japanese arts plays a similar role to that of servant women in these paintings: both are status symbols that are seen as secondary to the attractivness of the wealthy white woman.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 5:49 pm ¶
heyhey wrote:
I, too, hope this isn’t too off-topic, but this whole discussion reminds me of the work of this talented painter, Titus Kaphar, that removed “background color” and thrust it into the foreground, without context. It’s just heartening to me so know that there are people within the fine art community visual addressing these issues we’ve grappling with here.
http://www.openvizor.com/events/visual-quotations-solo-exhibit-titus-kaphar-february-626-2004
http://www.galleryad.com/past_exhibits/tituskaphar04/index.html
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 7:24 pm ¶
heyhey wrote:
eta: “without the context of the original painting”
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 7:25 pm ¶
Lauren wrote:
Jane, that’s a really good connection. The Impressionists were very into Japan- if you think of anything by Degas, for example, he usually shows both the the ceiling and the floor in sort of a distance shot. This was pioneered in Japanese woodblock prints. And the entire Art Nouveau movement is arguably influenced by the Japanese tendency to create symbols out of the everyday.
I’m moving farther away from the topic at hand, I know, but I just wanted to say that the fascination with Japanese art went far beyond kimonos and fans.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 8:10 pm ¶
Latoya Peterson wrote:
@all -
As long as you are talking art, derail as you wish. This is fascinating, and while I can’t add much to the conversation, I am starting to think we should get more art critique on the site.
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 8:35 pm ¶
jvansteppes wrote:
@Vidya; your mention of Sander Gilman, race and prostitution reminds me of an observation he made about how white prostitutes in London used to be described as having ‘Africanized features’ [and of course there’s always the term white slavery…] because sexual depravity was projected onto Africans as if it were a morphological trait. It’s a bit odd to picture these pale women being described that way but in Canada white sex workers on the street are often presumed to be aboriginal, both because native women are over-represented among street workers but also because prostitution is seen as what Sherene Razack calls ‘a space of aboriginality’. The same is true of course when it comes to white male criminals in Canada who have long hair…
Posted 04 Aug 2008 at 10:29 pm ¶
Whitney wrote:
heyhey:
Thanks for the links! Not only what the artist is doing is very different, it’s also saying something, offering a commentary on Western art of the past. It’s appropriation but not entirely so which is what makes it interesting. He’s taking an image and making it his own. He’s giving the subjects in the background who were merely used as background images and giving them a personality, a voice, the center of the piece, humanizing them. And he’s using a medium that i’ve never seen before “oil in dry erase board.” Very cool.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 12:09 am ¶
Jane wrote:
heyhey: I reiterate what Whitney said. Kaphar’s paintings are really moving. He’s got a lot of photos up on his blog too that are really interesting as well.
Anyway, Kiphur’s art got me thinking about Yasumasa Morimura, another artist who takes images from canonized Western art and reimagines them in his own way. Instead of focusing on background characters, though, he superimposes his body on various characters in the painting. He’s actually done this with Olympia:
http://departments.risd.edu/depts/arth/web/lecture_21_scans/10_Morimura_Twins.jpg
I don’t really know what to think of his art, actually. The fact that he puts on blackface in his reinterpretation of Olympia makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but in some of his other works, I see the value in his critiques of Western culture and gender roles.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 2:24 pm ¶
hello Im cat wrote:
I love this article, especially since I read Latoya’s post on IR dating before this one.
Posted 05 Aug 2008 at 7:04 pm ¶
Free wrote:
@ Lauren - the fascination with Japanese art went far beyond kimonos and fans.
Fascination was a two-way-street. The works of Katsushika Hokusai, one of the most famous Edo period ukiyo-e painters and printmakers took much influence from Dutch and French landscape painters. Hokusai learned perspective, shading, and realistic shadows from studying the works of Dutch and French landscape painters.
http://www.andreas.com/hokusai.html
@Jane - In a really sick way, the cultural appropriation of Japanese arts plays a similar role to that of servant women in these paintings: both are status symbols that are seen as secondary to the attractivness of the wealthy white woman.
Japan was just beginning to re-open to Europeans thanks to Commodore Matthew Perry on board the USS Powhatan. The importation of Japanese printed paper, porcelain and other objects into France spawned the craze Japonisme. From what I’ve read these objects were not expensive and easy to purchase at shops all around Paris. When I view this painting I don’t think of the artist of being guilty of cultural appropriation. Rather, it’s curiosity and admiration. And Camille - her expression is reminiscent of when I’ve tried on a beautiful outfit, a new style and found it pleasing.
What interests me is the intersection of Imperialism, Japanese artists of the Ukiyo and Namban periods and the French Impressionists. Imperialism brought vestiges of Japanese culture to France which fueled Monet’s imagination and expressed admiration for Japanese people and culture that he really didn’t know because he never traveled to Japan. With objects and second-hand accounts as basis, he concluded that Japanese people as a whole were culturally refined, which is expressed in the kimono painting. Monet attended Japanese art exhibitions in Paris. He became interested in how Westerners were interpreted by Japanese artists (here again, the two-way-street). Namban is the first known term for westernization and also refers to Japanese art produced from the 16th - 17th centuries which was influenced by Spanish and Portuguese art techniques. Namban also means southern barbarians, the subjects of Namban artists.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Namban (scroll down for images. notice the dark-skinned man in image Namban-02).
Monet was not alone in his admiration for Japanese art: Hiroshige is a wonderful impressionist, Camille Pissarro wrote to his son. “Me, Monet and Rodin are enthousiastic about them.”
http://www.intermonet.com/japan/
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 8:58 am ¶