artist Karine Percheron-Daniels's retouch of Marie-Guillemine
Benoist's "Portrait d'une négresse" with Michelle Obama)
***
I'm furious to see French feminist painter Marie-Guillemine Benoist
(1768-1826) maligned by association in the current "racism"
controversy swirling around the very revolutionary painting that
established her reputation when it was displayed at the 1800 Salon.
On display at the Louvre today, "Le Portrait d'une négresse" is a tiny
oil on canvas painting (85x65cm) in which Benoist densely compresses
its theme to a flashpoint.
The painting was meant as a celebration of the abolition of slavery.
By a subtle subversion of its overt meaning, however, Benoist was able
to superimpose layers of radical connotations.
For instance, Benoist chose as subject a woman, instead of the male
slave usually associated with the hard labor of slavery on the
plantations of the Americas.
She further casts her subject in a bourgeois setting as an object of
sexual desire.
But what Marie-Guillemine Benoist brilliantly achieves is to make a
mockery of two major promises of the French Revolution:
1) The "brotherhood of the human race" was a con after all, and in
fact, two years after Benoist's painting, Napoléon reinstated slavery;
2) Gender equality was likewise another lie: French women were still
second-class citizens and in many ways just as disenfranchised as
plantation slaves.
Who knows? Maybe the "négresse" in Benoist's painting is the Parisian
woman still shackled as a slave in her bourgeois surrounding.
Now, fast forward to the furore these past few days over the Spanish
magazine Fura de Serie for having on its cover the "palimpset" over
Benoist's painting by Bristish artist Karine Percheron-Daniels.
Percheron-Daniels's retouch adds its own layers of subversion to
Benoist's subversive painting.
The absurdity of the present outrage is that the article of Fuera de
Serie is laudatory of Michelle Obama.
And Percheron-Daniels, a big fan of the American First Lady, meant her
work to be a tribute to her.
Oh, by the way, Percheron-Daniels's nude series has also one featuring
Barack Obama with his penis out!
Odd that this Obama's penis didn't get as much press and absurb
outrage as Brett Murray's The Spear.
I got a theory: ignoramuses being outraged by art these days never
had the basics of art history or aesthetics.
This tautological theory of mine won't do them justice. For they
belong to the category of the nutjobs willing to kill over a cartoon!
***
PHOTO CREDITS: fueradeserie.expansion.com
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