![Jean-Baptise Carpeaux's "Why Born Enslaved!" with the text "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast"](https://www.metmuseum.org/_next/image?url=https://metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2022/carpeaux/carpeaux_landscape_ph_3360x1720.jpg&w=640&q=75)
![Jean-Baptise Carpeaux's "Why Born Enslaved!" with the text "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast"](https://www.metmuseum.org/_next/image?url=https://metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2022/carpeaux/carpeaux_square_ph_2048x2048.jpg&w=640&q=75)
Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast
Visiting Guide
Introduction
This exhibition centers around the artwork Why Born Enslaved! by the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Created in 1868, twenty years after emancipation was achieved in the French Atlantic, the sculpture debuted in Paris a year later against the backdrop of European colonialism, imperialism, and the recent end of slavery in the United States. Carpeaux’s bust of a Black woman whose bare arms and torso are bound with rope is well known to Western audiences through the many versions produced during and after his lifetime. While the subject’s resisting pose, defiant expression, and accompanying inscription have long been interpreted as conveying a powerful antislavery message, the bust also visualizes longstanding European fantasies about the possession of and domination over Black people’s bodies.
The artworks presented in this gallery illuminate the aesthetic and colonialist influences embodied in Why Born Enslaved! Some works reveal the contradictions that emerge when abolition and emancipation are represented by the captive body. Others show how the depiction of the Black figure as an exoticized “type” was informed by the development of nineteenth-century ethnographic studies and France’s imperial ambitions in Africa. Together, these objects offer viewers an opportunity to reflect on the formative role visual art has played in shaping abiding misconceptions, or fictions, of racial difference, as well as the crucial role it still might play in dismantling them.
This project was realized through sustained collaboration between curator Elyse Nelson and guest curator Wendy S. Walters. Its planning was further enriched in consultation with numerous other contributors, and with the assistance of Rachel Hunter Himes; The Met gratefully acknowledges their participation. You are invited to join the conversation by sharing your reflections in the contemplation and response space nearby.
The exhibition is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.
Additional support is provided by Allen R. Adler and Frances F. L. Beatty.
![Exhibition promotional graphic for "Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast" with Carpeaux's sculpture "Why Born Enslaved!"](https://www.metmuseum.org/_next/image?url=https://metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2022/carpeaux/audio-guide/530_carpeauxag_2048x2048.jpg&w=1080&q=75)
530. Introduction: “Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast”
Becoming Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved!
Designs for Why Born Enslaved! were developed from Carpeaux’s studies for a full-length allegorical figure of Africa for a monumental fountain sculpture. Drawing on classical archetypes, the bust continues a visual tradition of captive or enslaved Black figures that had long populated European art. Carpeaux, who was celebrated for the animacy of his sculptures, imbues his subject with intense emotion. The works in this section reveal the artist’s creative process as he arrived at his final composition through a series of sketches of kneeling and bound captive figures featuring the Black model who posed for him.
The name of the woman who posed for Why Born Enslaved! is unknown, as was the case with most Black models working in Paris at the time. Yet her powerful presence in the artist’s studio undoubtedly contributed to the sculpture’s astonishing immediacy. Carpeaux’s portrayal bears a resemblance to Louise Kuling, a free American woman who was photographed in Paris as part of an ethnographic portrait series for France’s National Museum of Natural History in 1864, but this identification remains a speculation.
Louise Kuling, 1864. Jacques-Philippe Potteau (French, 1807–1876). Albumen print. Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (SAP 155 [7] / 63). Image: Archives de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, déposées au Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle
![Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's marble sculpture "Why Born Enslaved!"](https://www.metmuseum.org/_next/image?url=https://metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2022/carpeaux/audio-guide/531_carpeauxag_2048x2048.jpg&w=1080&q=75)
531. Elizabeth Colomba on Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
Selected Artworks
View allFiguring Abolition and Emancipation
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, abolitionist movements gained prominence across the Atlantic world following rebellions of enslaved populations in the British West Indies and Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). Entrepreneurial artisans like Josiah Wedgwood created decorative objects featuring antislavery images and slogans for supporters of abolition to display at home or to wear on their bodies. These works, which circulated widely across Europe and the United States, often featured enslaved figures pleading for freedom in positions of submission, thus reinforcing the link between Blackness and subjugation.
Abolitionist imagery that represented Black personhood as inseparable from the ropes and chains of enslavement remained popular long after slavery had ended in England (1833), France (1794 and 1848), and the United States (1865). This theme is evident in commemorative works produced after emancipation, many of which retain attributes and gestures of Black subordination despite their celebrations of freedom. Carpeaux’s Why Born Enslaved! belongs to the tradition of artworks that conflate Black personhood with depictions of captivity.
What is abolition?
Antebellum abolition philosophy started with the simple proposition that a person could not also be a chattel available for sale. At its most ambitious, it broached an ideal we are still striving toward: the radical premise of human equality. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and, the Supreme Court held, gave Congress the power to eradicate all remaining “badges and incidents of slavery.”
The modern movement to abolish the police and prisons argues that these institutions, too, fail to respect the humanity of people of color and that our reliance on them entrenches inequality in our society. Today’s abolitionists ask the provocative question: Where “badges and incidents of slavery” remain, can we say that the work is truly finished?
– Farah Peterson, Professor of Law, University of Chicago
Who narrates history?
Works of art reflect the perspectives of their makers, who, in the nineteenth-century Western tradition, were almost exclusively white men. Against all odds, Edmonia Lewis pursued her artistic career with unrelenting courage. The emancipated figures in Lewis’s Forever Free are imbued with power, dignity, and spirituality—human traits they share with their creator. Prior to sculpting this work, Lewis survived the loss of her parents in childhood, racially motivated false accusations of attempted murder while a student at Oberlin College, a trial for this alleged crime (for which she was exonerated), and a near-fatal beating by anonymous locals. None of these obstacles stalled her determination to sculpt—something almost no Black people and very few women were able to accomplish. Never looking back, she traveled to Boston to further her training and eventually settled in Europe, safely away from the brutality of Jim Crow America.
– Lisa Farrington, Associate Dean of Fine Arts, Howard University
![Josiah Wedgwood's "Antislavery Medallion" and glass cologne bottle with Encrusted Antislavery Image](https://www.metmuseum.org/_next/image?url=https://metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2022/carpeaux/audio-guide/534_carpeauxag_2048x2048.jpg&w=1080&q=75)
534. Fabienne Kanor on the Antislavery Medallion and Cologne Bottle
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534. Fabienne Kanor on the Antislavery Medallion and Cologne Bottle
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535. Elizabeth Colomba on Edmonia Lewis
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536. Fabienne Kanor on the French Revolutionary Playing Card
Playlist
Selected Artworks
View allAllegories of Empire
Carpeaux created Why Born Enslaved! while working on The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Globe, a monumental fountain sculpture representing Africa as a female figure alongside Europe, Asia, and America. From the Renaissance onward, such personifications of the continents offered viewers a Eurocentric vision of empire. Early examples circulated widely in prints and the decorative arts, asserting the presumed supremacy of European civilization through symbols that represented the other continents as bountiful regions available for Western cultivation.
In the nineteenth century, France expanded its empire into North Africa and Southeast Asia and enlisted new forms of coercive labor in the West Indies following the abolition of slavery. A new technique for ordering the world emerged: ethnography attempted to classify human “types” via physical characteristics, which were presented as evidence of differing intelligences and abilities. This pseudoscience was used as justification for maintaining a racialized hierarchy at home and in the colonies. Physical traits also served as a shorthand for categories of racial difference in the work of artists like Carpeaux, whose Why Born Enslaved! reflected the moral currency that abolition lent to French imperial power.
Fountain of the Observatory, featuring The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere, 1867–74. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875) and Emanuel Frémiet (French, 1824–1910). Bronze. Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris. Photo: Steve Cadman
![Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi's bronze sculpture "Allegory of Africa" and Fulda Pottery and Porcelain Manufactory's "Africa, from Allegories of the Four Continents"](https://www.metmuseum.org/_next/image?url=https://metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2022/carpeaux/audio-guide/533_carpeauxag_2048x2048.jpg&w=1080&q=75)
533. Elizabeth Colomba on Allegories of Africa
Selected Artworks
View allLiving Models
Black figures appeared regularly in nineteenth-century European painting and sculpture. While these representations were often naturalistic, they rarely portrayed individuals. More often, artists depicted Black figures as racialized “types” intended to stand in for ideas, peoples, or entire continents. Such works of art were closely associated with the growing field of ethnography, which sought to classify humans according to physical appearance and thus gave birth to the fiction of racial categories.
Yet real people posed for the artists who created these images. Some of the models who sat for the works in this section were recent immigrants to Paris from North Africa or from the French colonies in the West Indies. Others were people whom artists encountered while traveling abroad. The names and biographies of these individuals were disregarded or lost, their likenesses recast into exoticized symbols. Similarly, Carpeaux used the likeness of the free Black woman who modeled for him to represent enslavement.
What is representation?
As a child growing up in France, I watched the television series La Noiraude, named after its protagonist, a black cow, who was always in trouble. Her whole life was a failure. She called her vet every day to complain and to tell him how unlucky and cursed she constantly felt. That story did not take place a long time ago in a kingdom far, far away. It happened every night, on the television screen. Like millions of French people, I listened to the black cow’s laments, and I laughed. I laughed at her. I laughed to tears until some white schoolmates decided to baptize me “La Noiraude.” And then the TV screen became a mirror. And then I became La Noiraude. And then I became a problem. Representation is not something to be taken lightly. When it is false, it is heavy, like shackles or a rope around the neck. It stops us from flying toward our authentic selves.
– Dr. Fabienne Kanor, Writer, Filmmaker, Performer, and Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University
![Charles Cordier's sculpture "Woman from the French Colonies"](https://www.metmuseum.org/_next/image?url=https://metmuseum.org/-/media/images/exhibitions/2022/carpeaux/audio-guide/532_carpeauxag_2048x2048.jpg&w=1080&q=75)
532. Delphine Diallo on Charles Cordier
Selected Artworks
View allReplicating Carpeaux
Marble and bronze versions of Why Born Enslaved! debuted in Paris in 1869, the same year Carpeaux established a commercial enterprise dedicated to producing replicas of his most famous sculptures. The reproduction of the bust in multiple media at varying price points enabled the artist to market his sculpture to a broad range of consumers, from the Emperor and Empress of France, who owned a version in bronze, to members of the middle class. As a commodity, this bust of an enslaved woman symbolically echoed the objectification of people of African descent, embodying a practice the sculpture was ostensibly designed to critique.
Replicas of the sculpture continue to be produced today, from editions in resin to luxury candles in wax. Its appearance in a recent marketing campaign for Beyoncé’s Adidas x Ivy Park clothing line further attests to its prevalence in popular culture. Yet its reproduction has also opened the door for contemporary artists to intercede in this continuous cycle of commodification by reimagining the bust. Kehinde Wiley’s and Kara Walker’s works on view here recast and transfigure the sculpture to confront and defy—but not resolve—the hierarchies of race underlying Carpeaux’s creation.
What is the legacy of the Black figure in Western art?
We gain insight into the nineteenth century when we see the period’s representation, commodification, and fetishization of Black females and the disproportionate amount of attention aimed at their bodies. These representations articulated notions of a French national identity while affirming the concept of the “other.” Carpeaux’s interpretation of freedom, of the injustice of enslavement, remains embodied in a bound woman. Despite his best intentions, as a white male artist Carpeaux is only able to convey his perception of a world about which he has only an idea. It’s crucial to contextualize his imagery, for it affects our collective psyche. If we don’t, the bust allows us to accept that the Black female body can still be collected and consumed, be gazed at, desired, despised, dissected, and distorted by all. To quote James Baldwin: “You have to impose . . . you have to decide who you are, and force the world to deal with you, not with its idea of you.”
– Elizabeth Colomba, Artist