Curating History and Race

In this first episode of our new miniseries, Erica Moiah James introduces the 18th-century pastel Portrait of a Young Woman, shares her experience first encountering the work at the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), and explains how she has tackled the process of unravelling this woman’s identity. She speaks with Judy Mann, the senior curator of European art to 1800 at SLAM, discussing the acquisition of the work, its provenance, its role within the collection, and the ways in which the museum thinks about curating history and race through the care and exhibition of this portrait. Erica and Judy explore what it means to name an individual who has historically been unnamed in the history of Western art and how museums and publics might attend to the presence of Black and Brown people in historical images.

Transcript

Erica Moiah James 
I am Erica Moiah James, an art historian, curator and associate professor at the University of Miami. I was previously the founding director and chief curator of the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas when it was founded in July of 2003. Over the next five episodes, I will discuss Portrait of a Young Woman and reflect on what it means to search for the name of a historical individual in the archive. What tools might I, as a contemporary art historian, use to uncover the possible history and life of the woman who remains unnamed? In this process, I'm using the traditional methods of art history to think about how art history as a discipline has historically and structurally made it both difficult to name unnamed figures of color within historical portraiture and also has used representations of Blackness such as this as evidence for claims to deny the presence and vitality of Black life in the early modern world.

I do not know if I will ever find this particular woman in the archive, but in my search, I make a claim that this work is both necessary and that it begins to do reparative justice within a discipline that has all too frequently settled for assuming absence in the archive instead of doing the essential historical work to illuminate Black lives.

In this first episode, I will share how I first encountered this portrait; how I've tackled this process of unraveling her identity. I will also speak with the curator of the Saint Louis Art Museum, Judy Mann, about the acquisition of this work on paper, its provenance, its role within the collection, and the ways in which SLAM thinks about curating history and race through the care and exhibition of this portrait. 

As art historians, we're often encouraged the moment we arrive at graduate school to decide on our research focus and the period that work will be centered on. But if you're interested in the Caribbean, those parameters, those frames, often dissolve very quickly. This idea, this obsession with periodization might not be applicable in the development of Caribbean art history. It allows us to—while focusing on modern and contemporary for instance—it allows us to, in a sense, think of the full arc of history in relation to a present. Notions of time tend to sort of dissolve. Caribbean art history can be described as a very nonlinear practice. This encourages scholars focused on the region to really open themselves up to curiosity, and oftentimes there are works of art that stimulate that curiosity that allow us to sort of think across time, across space, and open up our discipline in ways that are entirely unexpected.

What this meant for me was that though I am a contemporary art historian—I think of myself as a contemporary art historian—I also work on the modern Caribbean. And for me, modernity in the Caribbean begins the moment of contact in 1492, and my training in every way reflected that. It also meant that I, though focusing on the contemporary, am open to surprise. In my career, I had a really important moment in that curiosity. Opening that curiosity occurred several years ago at the Saint Louis Art Museum, where a remarkable late eighteenth century portrait of a young, unnamed, and unknown Black woman was on exhibition. How she came to reside in Saint Louis is documented, but who created the portrait, and the identity of the sitter remain unsettled. 

What tools might I, as a contemporary art historian, use to uncover the possible history and life of a woman who remains unnamed within the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum? In engaging with questions of materials, connoisseurship, and the art market, I'm using the traditional methods of art history to think about how art history, as a discipline, has historically and structurally made it both difficult to name unnamed figures of color within historical portraiture, and also has used representations of Blackness, such as this as evidence for claims that deny the presence and vitality of Black life in the early modern world. 

I do not know if I will ever find this particular woman in the archive, but in my search, I make a claim that this work is both necessary and that it begins to do reparative justice within a discipline that is all too frequently settled for assuming absence in the archive instead of doing the essential historical work to illuminate.
And when I entered the Saint Louis Art Museum all those years ago now, and I encountered this remarkable late 19th century portrait of this young and unnamed and unknown Black woman, I was smitten. And I had to know. It catalyzed something in me, and I think that is what this research is about. What to do, how to do, how to respond to an object or image that catalyzes one's imagination, one's need to know one's art historical work.

Portrait of a Young Woman is roughly a 16 by 13-inch pastel. It is exquisitely preserved. The colors remain vibrant and almost jewellike. The size makes the experience of viewing this painting an incredibly intimate and precious one. The SLAM website identifies the portrait date as late 18th century and of its artists it says “unknown, previously attributed to Jean-Etienne Liotard, Swiss, 1702 to 1789.” The sitter is a very young woman, no more than 16 or 18 years old. She's pictured straight back and self-aware as she stares directly at the viewer, confident and self-actualized. She wears what appears to be a cotton muslin dress with a filigree-type detailing around the collar. She also wears small hoop earrings, a necklace, and a head tie. 

Erica Moiah James 
Judy, I want to begin by just you sharing a bit of general information about the piece that is the focus of all these years of research for me. Tell us a little bit about the acquisition of that work, the portrait, in the context of the museum's mission at the time. I mean, what did the Saint Louis Art Museum want to be in the 1950s, and how did the acquisition of this portrait, in a sense, extend that mission?

Judy Mann 
You know, the museum, and really Saint Louis as a city in a way, kind of modeled itself on larger institutions on the East Coast. And I do think particularly in the forties and fifties, Perry Rathbone was the director, and the attempt, at least in my department, was to acquire things of known artists, major artists that they thought were important. And the motivation for acquiring this wonderful pastel was really about getting a Liotard into the collection. It was sold at Christie's in London in 1948, and it was presented there as a Liotard, and that attribution had not been questioned for quite a long time. You know, it was proudly presented not as this fascinating portrait of this unknown woman, but rather as a result of what we understood Liotard to be. And there were sort of two key factors here, I think. One would be that Liotard did have Turkish imagery, had, you know, these kind of exotic themes. So, it was seen in that context. And secondly, slightly erroneously, the pastel was understood to have been in a collection in Amsterdam prior to going to sale. That was actually wrong; it was at sale in London. It had been an English collection. We're not quite sure how long. In fact, this podcast has prompted me to do this necessary research that was never done. But it then went to a dealer in Amsterdam after the Christie's sale.

Erica Moiah James 
Oh my goodness. That's exciting! I mean, every little bit counts, but that shift actually opens things up in really interesting ways and introduces new questions for me as a researcher. So, thanks for that. I mean, wow!

I first saw this portrait when I was a postdoc at Wash U. My office was across the park, and I walked over to SLAM and I walked in and I was blown away by this portrait. And my curiosity for it grew from that moment. I have used quite a bit of technical art history in my research, and I think the scans that the Saint Louis Art Museum provided really opened up certain possibilities for me in really interesting ways. A major part of this podcast is to really follow methodology, to really think of the ways in which art historians, curators, the way we study objects today and how technical art history can be of value. I want you to talk a little bit about that in terms of your own work. Just for me, you’re providing me the scans made me realize it was Dutch blue paper, I found out where that paper was made, the dates of production in that space, all of that, which coincided with the dating of the work, which was very important to me to authenticate it.
But how has technical art history helped you as an art historian and curator, and in a sense, informed your practice as a museum curator today? 

Judy Mann  
It's extremely important and we're at a moment where it really is increasing in importance all the time. Many museums now are looking to add labs that can do more complicated things. For a long time Kingston, in Ontario, and at Harvard, there have been very active technical art history labs, but now we're seeing it, you know, many museums. Indianapolis has one doing some interesting work on the components of watercolor, for example. So yes, it's really important.

For my own work, two things: One, I have done a number of projects that required careful scrutiny of drawings, and so we are really trying to use as many analytical tools as we can on drawings. Before, it was more of a connoisseurship eye—to look even from photographs was regarded as equally important in rendering attributions as it was in the investigation of the actual thing itself.
But now we look at the back, we try to—when things have been laid down that is, sort of glued or in some manner adhered to another surface—we try to remove them so we can see the full object: the back, the front, everything. And so obviously, black lights are a pretty simple technique, but scrutiny, analyzing pigments, taking works out of their frames. A simple thing, but it does speak to the materiality of the object to recognize that a lot of times a work on slate was actually on several layers of slate, that artists would back them because they understood the fragility of this material. So, it really is critical. Even people who do things that are strictly iconographical, who may not feel they need to understand the object, the materiality of the object, so often may be making a case on an object or a position of a foot or a hand or something, and they've never seen the actual object or realized that that was overpainted in, you know, 1950. And that's not the work of the artist. So, we really do pay attention. So much more attention, and curators work with conservators much more because those are the ones who really know how to read and interpret a lot of the technical information we're able to glean from our close looking and using various kinds of equipment to understand paintings and drawings. 
 
Erica Moiah James 
That's wonderful because technical art history is one of the reasons I started to question Liotard as the author of this portrait. He's an extremely noted pastelist from that period; it would've been wonderful for a museum like SLAM to have a work by him…But the fact that it was on blue paper and not vellum, not parchment, you know, the sort of matrices he tended to work on raised questions for me. So, even though I think it's not him, I am still not a thousand percent sure that it is de La Tour, even though I've argued for it. But technical art history was one of the ways that questions started to emerge in my approach to this particular portrait.

I'm fascinated though by your recent research that you mentioned a little earlier that, in terms of the provenance of the painting, it arrived from Christie's, not from Amsterdam, but from London. Can you share or a little bit more about that juicy little tidbit there?
 
Judy Mann   
Only that I went in the files and realized that we had the catalog from the Christie’s sale, and it identifies very clearly the collection that was being sold at that sale and it was an English collection of an A. L. Nicholson. I've been in touch with Christie’s, so we're going to try to find out more about this person but thinking that the pastel came originally from Amsterdam kind of was used to buttress, as I said earlier, the Liotard attribution because he was known to have worked in Amsterdam. We get there. But now, we don't know if Amsterdam really is an important part of the story or not. Obviously, the person who bought the pastel at that sale thought that he might have a client in Amsterdam 'cause it was a gallery in Amsterdam that bought it. But otherwise, Amsterdam may or may not be an important component right now. We don't know. We don’t know.
 
Erica Moiah James 
Yeah, that's the sleuthing part of art history. That's fantastic. 

What has been the response? Are you aware of the response to this portrait when it has been on display? What has been the public's response to her?  

Judy Mann  
Unfortunately, our records don't really document the number of times that she has been on view. But interestingly enough, the reason that the portrait was on view when you came to the museum, Erica, was because of a program. We run a fellowship program, the Romare Bearden Fellowship, and the person who was our fellow at that moment really took to this portrait. She had seen it, I think she had gone through, pulled up some things in the collection of prints and drawings and she was particularly struck by this. And she came to me, and she said, “I’d like to do a project around this wonderful portrait,” 'cause obviously what engaged her was the person who's represented there.

So that's what prompted us to put it back out in the galleries. As you know, pastels can't go out for long periods of time, and they have to rest. So that was a nice kind of reason to have it. And I have to say, when it was out, I would see more people looking at that portrait than the others in the gallery.
So, I do think it is a draw. She just is a commanding presence, the way she holds herself. I mean, it's a beautiful portrait, and you do immediately want to know more about this woman. 
 
Erica Moiah James 
How common is it for the museum to invite scholars and individuals like Neil Jeffares and others to come and really study the collection? I think it's him—if I remember correctly—he came in and he did an extensive sort of review of the portrait. Is that common or was it because of his personal interest? 
 
Judy Mann
Well, he was compiling a dictionary of pastelists. And in fact, I'm not sure whether he contacted us first or we contacted him first because my first communication with him was back in, I think 2005, and he already knew of the portrait then. 

To answer your question about how often we bring scholars in, we budget every year to bring consultants in to look at the collection for a variety of reasons. But often it is to bring a specialist to look at a particular work so we can fully understand it. And I think no one has seen more pastels than Neil. He is sort of “Mr. Pastel,” and I've had probably five or six occasions to write to him to ask questions about works that I've seen or have been brought into us. So, he really is very knowledgeable, and I think he'd always questioned whether this could possibly be a Liotard, you know? But he didn't have any better attribution for it yet. And you might have also encountered, one person has thought that it might be the father of Vigée Le Brun, a major 18th century French portraitist. And her father, who helped teach her a bit, has put forth that idea. But we don't know.  

Erica Moiah James  
No, we don't know. And I think that’s part of the excitement and the reason why I continue the work. I constantly ask myself, why? Why is it so important for this attribution to be approved? But I think it just opens up something else. It opens up another door, another way to see, another pathway for us to engage the portrait itself, and maybe lead us to who she is. And for me, that's important. 
 
Judy Mann  
I think that it gets to a really important idea that museums have treasured the hand more than the person represented. I think nowadays we're also very interested in who we're bringing into our galleries, who our visitors can look at. But that's equally important; they're not coming to see a work by something, they're coming to see a work of an interesting individual or someone who helps us understand better a particular moment in time because this person existed there. That kind of thing. So, I think there's been a shift and a bit less, I mean, not entirely I would be overstating it to say this, but you know, there is this kind of trophy idea that I think we're getting a little bit away from. Which is a nice thing.

Erica Moiah James 
That's an important thing for the museum to notice and respond to because these objects have their own lives, and I think the ways in which publics experience them or question them and engage them, change, you know? And for the Saint Louis Art Museum to be responsive to that, I think is critical. It tells me that you're very much grounded in the community in which you serve, the primary community, but also larger questions that I think are facing the museum world right now.
 
Judy Mann
No, it's been a profound change. I'm sort of at the end of my career, but things we've been giving lip service to for a long time are finally now front and center. So, we're speaking to our community in a way that we haven't before. 

Erica Moiah James 
When I first saw the portrait on the walls of the Saint Louis Art Museum, what pulled me in but also bothered me was her familiarity. She was like someone I knew but couldn't quite place or remember. This ignited feelings and thoughts that were both personal and art historical because when it comes to the image archive, the ability of African descended people to tether themselves to the past is even more tenuous. Memory is in history, but in the African diaspora, the two co-mingle and undergird a kind of longing, which this portrait made me come to terms with as a scholar.

As much as we take photographs today, it’s hard to believe that many of us do not have images of grandparents, much less great grandparents and beyond. Using myself as an example of this, I can go as far as my great grandmother but can go no further. So, when I saw this portrait, I thought of this trio of family portraits that I have. These portraits are of my great grandmother, Josephine, my grandmother, Mary, and my mother. We have a passion for genealogy in my family, and there was something about this portrait at SLAM that reminded me of a picture of my sister. It’s a typical photograph which many school children take when they're in elementary school, but there was something about this portrait of my sister that was triggered when I encountered the portrait at SLAM. It was as if they were related in some ways right? The features, the way my sister's face is shaped, the brightness of her eyes, the shy smile, in some ways they were tied to each other, even though they had been created and imagined 250 years apart. How does one attend to this odd sense of familiarity and the accompanying longing to know? The specificity and detail attended to in the representation of the figure in Portrait of a Young Woman gestures towards something.

But what is that something? She emits what Kevin Quashie has described as “Black aliveness.” When I saw and encountered her portrait in Saint Louis, all I could think about was life. And Quashie's description of Black aliveness really summed up all that emanated from that painting, for me.

Several years ago, the producers of the British film Belle traveled to the museum hoping to establish the work as a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle, mixed race daughter of Sir John Lindsay and Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman born in the West Indies. Brought to England by her father as a toddler, from the age of five Dido lived at Kenwood House, the home of her father's uncle, Sir William Murray, Earl of Mansfield.

Sir William had gained a name for himself in Britain as a jurist. His role as the presiding Lord Chief Justice in the insurance case concerning the slave ship Zong, wherein 1781 its Liverpool based captain ordered that 142 enslaved Africans be thrown into the sea as the ship ran out of water. The captain claimed that he took this action to ensure the crew's survival, but it also enabled him to claim an insurance payout on the lost cargo and thus turn a profit on the voyage. That Sir William would become the guardian of his Black grandniece in 1766 added a degree of poignancy to his final ruling in 1783 against the slavers. Though the ruling was based on Sir William's unwillingness to complicate maritime insurance laws rather than any personal view on the inherent humanity of the Africans, it nevertheless benefited the abolitionist cause, leading to the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, though not ending Britain's involvement in slavery.
So, the prospect of the Saint Louis portrait also representing Dido Belle was compelling, but alas, the connection could not be confirmed. As I will show, fundamental aspects of the Saint Louis portrait denied the tie. 

For African diasporic people, paper archives that might tell you where and from whom you descend enter the abyss of slavery and the Middle Passage in 1870, the year Henry Louis Gates marks as the temporal border of history and archive for Black people in America. This is because the 1870 census was the first to record the majority of African Americans as individuals and as citizens with two names rather than as property. Before then, most Black people in the United States, if not the entire Americas, were listed as “slave inhabitants,” according to their racial configuration, age, and gender, usually without names, or in rare cases, a single name.

The Middle Passage and subsequent enslavement became a kind of abyss where Black people's generational ties to Africa were severed, and they emerged on the other side unnamed and recorded as property rather than as persons. In terms of archive, one can think of it as the place where Black people, as the artist La Vaughn Belle recently reminded me, “begin to lose their memories.”
Over the last few years in writing and speaking and thinking about the Saint Louis Portrait of a Young Woman, I found myself in this unsettled place on the boundaries of this abyss between identification and recognition, opacity and unknowability. And what I found is that a study of a Portrait of a Young Woman explores the potentialities of nontraditional archives and methodologies when transatlantic art histories imbricate with Black representation.

Too often representations of Black people cannot be seen as a portrait of a person, but a depiction of a type. It is notable how even in portraiture, so often representation serves everyone but the subjectivity of the represented subject. This approach affirms a method, indeed a finite way of seeing, that epistemologically and therefore historically negates Black representation, and with it, Black presence and life in art history. The concept of loss is baked into Caribbean archives built on colonial models and is also present within histories of Black representation. Rather than ceding history to the limits and authorial intent of colonial paper archives, how might the visual grammar of the Caribbean, the material and visual archive that colonizers also sought to appropriate but could not control, help write history?

In what ways does visual culture operate outside of epistemologies or technologies of rule in art history? How does one attend to the presence of Black and Brown people in historical images before us? The work of Roshini Kempadoo, author of Creole in the Archives, has been a touchstone for me with regard to this research and work and how I literally approach it. She speaks of colonial ecosystems formed within colonial archives and the need to, in a sense, disrupt those ecosystems in order to see anew.

Thank you for joining us today as we introduce SLAM's portrait of a woman of African descent. In the next episode, I will talk with Amelia Rauser, Charles A Dana Professor of Art History at Franklin and Marshall College and historian of fashion, in order to better understand the tools of fashion, dress, and jewelry that this young woman employed to claim power over her self-representation as a Caribbean born woman of color moving through the 18th century world.

Caro Fowler   
Thank you for listening to In the Foreground Conversations on Art and Writing. For more information and links to the resources referenced in this episode, please visit clarkart.edu/rap/podcast. The Clark's Research and Academic Program would like to thank Erica Moiah James for her collaborative role in crafting this special iteration of the podcast.

In the foreground was co-created and produced by Caroline Fowler and Caitlin Woolsey, with editing by Caitlin Woolsey and Chase Bradshaw, sound mixing by CJ DeGennaro, an additional support from Shawnette Smalls and Noelle Derksen. Our intro music is by lightchaser and the music excerpts used in this special season are by Tomas Aquino and Maria Isabel Trinidad from the Smithsonian Folkways compilation Music from the Dominican Republic Volume 2, The Island of Espanola, released by Folkways Records in 1976, with more details about the songs featured available on our podcast webpage.

The Clark Art Institute sits on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people. We acknowledge the tremendous hardship of their forcible removal from its homelands by the colonial settlers, a federally recognized nation. They now reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee community. As we learn, speak, and gather at the Clark, we pay honor to their ancestors past and present, and to future generations by committing to build a more inclusive and equitable space for all.