The Slave in European Art

The Slave in European Art
Author: Elizabeth McGrath
Publisher:
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2012
Genre: Art, European
ISBN: 9781908590435

This volume explores the imagery of slaves and enslavement - white as well as black - in early modern Europe. Long before the abolitionist movement took up the theme, European art abounded in images of slaves - chained, subjected, subdued figures. Often these enslaved figures were meant to be symbolic, for slavery was widely invoked as a metaphor in both religious and secular contexts. The ancient Roman iconography of triumphalism, with its trophies and caryatids, provided a crucial impetus to this imagery, particularly for Renaissance artists who developed their own variations. Here the use of classical models had a peculiar force, since nudity, the attribute of antique heroes and idealized abstractions, was the mark of the Mediterranean galley slave. It was also to become the condition of the enslaved and transported African. The poignant sculptures of naked black Africans on Italian monuments of the seventeenth century are Ottoman galley slaves, representatives of the Islamic enemy along with their Turkish companions.But with the expansion and extension of the trade in enslaved Africans among the nations of Europe, African blackness became in itself a sign of slavery in European art. Fashionable portraits increasingly showed young and servile blacks, sometimes wearing silver slave collars, paying tribute to the status or supposed beauty of their masters and mistresses. This imagery often presents itself as playfully metaphorical, even though the slavery of Africans so portrayed could be literal enough. Unsurprisingly, there was little demand for representations of the slave trade. In the few cases in which African slaves in colonial situations became the subject-matter of paintings, they were generally depicted as part of an imperialist and 'civilizing' mission, or accommodated to picturesque formulae, distant from the uncomfortable realities of life on the plantation. Indeed - as the case of Spain especially demonstrates - the representation of slaves in art is never proportionate to their numerical presence in slave-owning societies.It is only with abolitionism that the slave trade and its injustices becomes an artistic theme, provoking the visual counter-propaganda that is charted in the coda to this collection.

Value in Art

Value in Art
Author: Henry M. Sayre
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022680996X

Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term “value” in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet’s art. How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, “high in value” and “low in value”? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history’s most famous and racially charged paintings, Édouard Manet’s Olympia. Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Émile Zola who introduced the new “law of values” in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola’s essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola’s usage of value was intentionally double coded—an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet’s painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire’s complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet’s painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism’s roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe

Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe
Author: Natalie Zemon Davis
Publisher: Walters Art Gallery
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2012
Genre: Africans in art
ISBN: 9780911886788

"This publication accompanies the exhibition Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe, held at the Walters Art Museum from October 14, 2012, to January 21, 2013, and at the Princeton University Art Museum from February 16 to June 9, 2013."

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World
Author: Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2013-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107354781

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.

Witnessing Slavery

Witnessing Slavery
Author: Sarah Thomas
Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781913107055

A timely and original look at the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. "Being there," indeed, became significant not only because of the empirical opportunities to document slave life it afforded but also because the imagery of the eyewitness was more credible than sketches and paintings created by the "armchair traveler" at home. Full of original insights that cast a new light on these highly charged images, this volume reconsiders how slavery was depicted within a historical context in which truth was a deeply contested subject. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century

Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: AdrienneL. Childs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351573497

Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like ?negative? and ?positive? that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-si?e photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from G?cault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Committed to Memory

Committed to Memory
Author: Cheryl Finley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2018-07-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 069113684X

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was—shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance. Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film—and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors. Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary Black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.

Slaves Waiting for Sale

Slaves Waiting for Sale
Author: Maurie D. McInnis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2011-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0226559335

In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Visualising Slavery

Visualising Slavery
Author: Celeste-Marie Bernier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2016
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1781382670

The purpose of this book is to excavate and recover a wealth of under-examined artworks and research materials directly to interrogate, debate and analyse the tangled skeins undergirding visual representations of transatlantic slavery across the Black diaspora. Living and working on both sides of the Atlantic, as these scholars, curators and practitioners demonstrate, African diasporic artists adopt radical and revisionist practices by which to confront the difficult aesthetic and political realities surrounding the social and cultural legacies let alone national and mythical memories of Transatlantic Slavery and the international Slave Trade. Adopting a comparative perspective, this book investigates the diverse body of works produced by black artists as these contributors come to grips with the ways in which their neglected and repeatedly unexamined similarities and differences bear witness to the existence of an African diasporic visual arts tradition. As in-depth investigations into the diverse resistance strategies at work within these artists' vast bodies of work testify, theirs is an ongoing fight for the right to art for art's sake as they challenge mainstream tendencies towards examining their works solely for their sociological and political dimensions. This book adopts a cross- cultural perspective to draw together artists, curators, academics, and public researchers in order to provide an interdisciplinary examination into the eclectic and experimental oeuvre produced by black artists working within the United States, the United Kingdom and across the African diaspora. The overall aim of this book is to re-examine complex yet under-researched theoretical paradigms vis-à-vis the patterns of influence and cross-cultural exchange across both America and a black diasporic visual arts tradition, a vastly neglected field of study.