Tuesday, March 26, 2019

"French art masterpieces have been renamed after their long-overlooked black subjects in a ground-breaking new Paris show"

Guardian:
Edouard Manet’s Olympia, the scandalous painting of a naked reclining prostitute that marks the birth of modern art, has been renamed Laure after the woman who posed as her black maid.

...

Murrell and her fellow curators have revealed the subjects’ real names in new titles for the show, “which would have been the case if they had been European”, she added, with the historic titles relegated to the second line.

The tone is set from the stunning opening Portrait of a Negress – renamed Portrait of Madeleine for the show