The Met fumes that the model for Carpeaux’s bust is unnamed. A wall text observes that though “real people posed” for the artists in the show, the “names and biographies of these individuals were disregarded or lost, their likenesses recast into exoticized symbols.” The identity of the vast majority of models who have sat for artists over the centuries is also unknown, unless the artist was creating a commissioned portrait. The models’ names we do know are due to research into an artist’s working (and often romantic) life and only rarely to the works themselves. What is the “name and biography” of the white male adult who sat for Carpeaux’s massive composition Ugolino and His Sons? We don’t know, beyond Carpeaux’s reference in an 1858 letter to a “seaman of rare beauty” whom he had spotted in Rome. What street urchin sat for Carpeaux’s neoclassical Fisherboy with a Seashell? We don’t know. Who were Vermeer’s, Veronese’s, and Fragonard’s white models? We don’t know.
Yet a young newcomer to art who visits Fictions of Emancipation with his high school class will come away with the impression that Carpeaux and the other artists in the show were engaged in an unprecedented erasing of their black models’ identities, violating a long-standing artistic tradition. That wildly incorrect understanding has been deliberately created by the Met’s curators, our supposed guides to the history of art, and it will only increase black students’ sense of victimhood and animosity toward the Western cultural tradition.
(via Instapundit)
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