The Uses and Abuses of Manet’s Olympia

A critic once told Henri Matisse that if he met one of his models on the street he would “run away in terror.” To which Matisse said, “I do not create a woman; I make a picture.” Paintings, in other words, are not documentary photographs. We are now accustomed to look through paintings into the lives of the model, to ask seemingly burning questions about the artist’s moral attitude toward his subjects. Part of the interest in Laure is less about Laure’s life (about which we know very little) than about the discerning the artist’s moral attitude toward his subject — what did he think of her?

We have become highly sensitized to these moral questions, as though probing the artist’s soul through their pictures and handing out judgments. Within the small cottage industry of race studies around Laure, the latest wrinkle in the debate is that she is not simply black, but “mixed race,” a Creole. Laure now takes her place in a lineage that goes back to figures like the Caribbean-born artist Guillaume Lethière, the subject of a major retrospective currently on view at the Clark Art Institute, from which it will soon travel to the Louvre.

Laure figures centrally in Darcy Grigsby’s new book, Creole: Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century (2022). For Grigsby, to see Laure as black is to distort our understanding of race both past and present. Grigsby is nothing if not sensitized to the variety of ways of construing race in the nineteenth century. Her aim is to root out past and present “pretenses to blindness” to the variety and complexity of racial thinking around the notion of Creole, something that goes well beyond the black and white binary.

According to Grigsby, a “Creole” is someone born in a French colony “of either European, or African, or mixed European and African ancestry”; it’s a matter “of birthplace, not race.”…