Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History

Denise Murrell will present an overview of her 2018 exhibition "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today," and its iterations at the Musée d’Orsay Paris and at MACTe Guadeloupe. She will discuss the project’s representation of the Black presence in the artistic milieu of late nineteenth century Paris as central to the development of early modern art. She will explore the legacy of this iconographic linage  for successive generations of artists from the early twentieth century modernists of the Harlem Renaissance and the School of Paris to the global contemporary art of today. She will conclude with observations on the project’s relevance for curatorial practice in the current moment of renewed focus on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in art history.

[Image: Jean Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies," 1870, Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.]

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Denise Murrell, PhD, is an Associate Curator, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York  (January 2020-present). She was the curator of the 2018 exhibition "Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today" at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery, as the Wallach’s Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar.

She was a co-curator of the exhibition's expansion at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, as "Le Modèle Noir de Géricault à Matisse" and a guest lecturer for a final tour as "Le Modèle Noir de Géricault à Picasso" at the Memorial ACTe, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.

Denise is the author of the "Posing Modernity" exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press and Wallach Art Gallery, 2018), which was based on her 2014 PhD dissertation at Columbia. The catalogue received CAA and Dedalus Foundation book awards. She was an essayist for the related Orsay exhibition catalogue. She held a Mellon pre-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University Art Museum (2012-2013) and taught art history at Columbia University in New York and in Paris.

She previously received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and had an extended career in finance and consulting.