HARLEM IS EVERYWHERE

Denise Murrell takes on the Harlem Renaissance at the Met.

- HILTON ALS

I first learned about Denise Murrell— the curator and scholar behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big and shiny new spectacle, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” (through July 28th)—in 2018, when I saw her landmark exhibition, “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today,” at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, in Harlem. The show, which occupied a relatively small space but never felt cramped, apprised us of what had been left out of the available history (even the British art historian T. J. Clark’s essential 1984 study, “The Painting of Modern Life”): the importance and the resonance of the Black female presence in the early days of modernism. As someone who’d been enamored of nineteenth-century French literature in college, I’d longed to know more about the poet Charles Baudelaire’s mixed-race lover, Jeanne Duval, the inspiration for his “Vénus noire,” in “Les Fleurs du Mal” (1857). From “Posing Modernity,” I learned not only that Duval had been an actress when she met Baudelaire, in the early eighteen-forties, but that, during her volatile relationship with the poet, she visited artists and writers with him and frequented a coffeehouse on the Rue de Richelieu. I knew, from Clark and other scholars, that Baudelaire’s depiction of the changes in industrial-era Paris had influenced his friend Édouard Manet, but it was Murrell who showed me that one reason works such as Manet’s 1862 painting “Baudelaire’s Mistress (Portrait of Jeanne Duval)”—in which we see difference that is not sentimental or exoticized, that looks back at us with no need to be liked or adored—were powerful was that they also at times illuminated how difference looked at itself.