Black Female Subject in  Neoclassical Sculpture

"The Greek Slave", Miriam Powers, 1851
Writing in Forever Free: Art by African American Women 1862-1980 (1980), Jacqueline Fonvielle-Bontemps proclaimed that Edmonia Lewis never sculpted a black figure. However, this problematic claim is clearly contradicted by Lewis's oeuvre. Lewis, a black and Native female sculpture, produced several ideal works to commemorate Emancipation -  works which included freedmen and women. I would argue that since the racial identification of blackness was the fundamental physical mark of the slave body, Lewis could not have sculpted slaves without sculpting blacks. What  Fonvielle-Bontemps's claim did not account for was the prolific nature of miscegenation within the practices of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, an oversight which lead to her misinterpretation of  inter-racial bodies as white bodies. My paper will explore the limits of black female identification within nineteenth-century Neoclassical sculpture, interrogating the racialization of sexuality and the implications of intersectionality.

My focus upon the black female subject locates my desire to explore the cultural and social consequences of multiple and simultaneous marginalizations, but my post-colonial and (black) feminist approach has obvious and profound implications for the representation of any-body. Significant art historical texts and art exhibitions have discussed the black subject, but  have consistently ignored the importance of sex and gender for the signification of race. By concentrating on a sex and race specific subject, I wish to extract representations of black female subjects from universalizing categories of femaleness or blackness which, dependant ultimately upon exclusive categories of whiteness or maleness, continue to facilitate patriarchal and colonial art histories. I am pursuing the black female subject and the (im)possibilities of racial identification within nineteenth-century Neoclassical sculpture.

Nineteenth-century Neoclassical sculpture is easily identifiable not only for its obvious veneration of ancient Greek sculpture, but for its faithful adherence to one material. As various nineteenth-century cultural sources attest, the Neoclassical insistence upon white marble was not a consequence of material availability but one of ideological choice. I will explore the implications of representing black bodies in white marble, arguing that Neoclassicism's fealty to marble at a time when contemporaneous sculptors were practising applied and material polychromy located a colonial anxiety about the representation of black bodies and their proximity, racial and physical, to white bodies. Miscegenation is a critical issue to be explored, not just the physical act of inter-racial sex and the prolific rape of black women institutionalized within Trans Atlantic Slavery, but the corporeality of miscegenated bodies, and the cultural meanings and aesthetic possibilities of their racially hybrid bodies.

The (e)racing of the black body within Neoclassical sculpture reveals the investment of the visual languages of "classicism" in the racial differencing of bodies and the extent to which the white body was accepted as the unquestioned aesthetic paradigm of Beauty. I shall discuss the whiteness of Neoclassical sculptures as a part of the abstraction of the biological body, a fetishization which privileged whiteness as a universal signifier of race, suppressing the possibility of racial difference at the level of skin/colour.

While I am interested in exploring the material specificity of Neoclassicism and its racial limits, I will also contemplate the limits of the Neoclassical subject. As a style and practice which flourished throughout the nineteenth-century, Neoclassical sculptors, many of them abolitionists or so inclined, were attracted to anti-slavery themes best embodied by black subjects. However, for the mainly white artists, patrons and audiences who produced, collected and viewed these art works, the prolific aesthetic identification of blackness with the grotesque, the sublime and the ugly reduced the imaginary scope of the representational possibilities of the black body as a suitable subject of ìhigh artî.

Some of the sculptures under consideration will include: Hiram Powers's Greek Slave (c. 1843), John Gibson's Tinted Venus (c. 1851-56), John Quincy Adams Ward's Freedman (1863), Edmonia Lewis's Morning of Liberty/Forever Free (1867) and John Bell's Octoroon (c. 1868).


by: Prof. Charmaine Nelson
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