In choosing to do this, the artist again masks prejudiced concepts underneath a seemingly empowering portrait.
Moreover, Benoist hypersexualizes Madeleine by exposing her right breast. Through Beyoncé’s masterful incorporation of the headpiece, she revokes its derogatory connotations by reclaiming and posing it as an opulent, and even regal, accessory. The two women standing below Recamier challenge David’s artistic genius as they pose gracefully and create a symmetrical composition with their bodies. This powerful moment, where Beyoncé takes off her hat and two Black women sit below Madame Recamier’s portrait, re-establishes the rejection of the head piece as a way of othering Black women. Throughout the video, the singer sports various headpieces most notably, she wears a Versace head scarf and matching outfit, as well as an MCM cap and matching leotard. 6īeyoncé, however, foils this depiction of Black women by using headwraps in Apesh*t as a symbol of femininity and celebration of Black identity. 5 Thus, the headwrap not only exoticizes Madeleine, but also evokes messages of poverty and servitude that were associated with Black women in the colonies. Although headwraps' purpose in the colonies cannot be attributed to one function-it might have been used to prevent scalp diseases like lice or absorb sweat-White Europeans saw it as a symbol of labor, servitude, and thus inferiority. Blue fabric drapes the back of Madeleine’s chair, and a red sash wraps around her waist.īenoist’s inclusion of the headwrap denotes Madeleine’s womanhood as different from white womanhood. Madeleine’s hair is concealed by an intricate white head wrap, yet her right breast is completely exposed to the viewer. Benoist follows the language of portraiture that had been dictated by Jacques-Louis David, portraying her sitter with a white, neoclassical-inspired garment and a bare, monochromatic background. Although her stance is angled, Madeleine faces the viewer with a serious gaze. 4 Madeleine sits in an ornate chair, her body facing the left of the portrait. For instance, in Benoist’s depiction of Madeleine, the artist assumes complete creative agency, thus undermining her sitter.īenoist produces Madeleine’s portrait in the popular neoclassical aesthetic that governed portraiture production as the elite form.
One of the ways this prejudice manifests is through White artists’ depictions of Black bodies. 3 She thus lived in a limbo of fictitious freedom and simultaneous prejudice. Although Madeleine’s status as a slave might have been questioned, she still did not have the autonomy that a White woman would have in France. 2 However, Madeleine’s skin color meant that France-a country drunk on Revolutionary ideas of equality and liberty-was a liminal place for her. Madeleine was believed to be born as a slave in the French colony of Guadeloupe, brought to mainland France, and thus freed in 1794 when French revolutionaries decreed the abolishment of slavery.
Throughout Apesh*t, she renders concepts in Madeleine’s portrait that had traditionally worked to depict Black women in a derogatory state, and reconstructs them into symbols of power. Beyoncé purposefully utilizes iconography that destabilizes the way Black women had been included in the Louvre’s visual narrative. However, this illusion of ideals crumbles as racist pictorial tropes in portraiture reflect the true inequality of the time: notions of liberty and equality, as well as the promise of emancipation, did not hold true for people of color in France.Īlthough Benoist’s portrait can only be seen in the final shots of The Carters’ Apesh*t, the painting's essence-and more so the strong presence of Madeleine at the Louvre-manifests itself throughout the entire music video. 1 Artists depicted Black people as heroic figures in order to transmit monolayered ideas of the success of the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the liberty and equality it gifted, particularly for White audiences. Produced during a short period in France where slavery had been abolished, Portrait of Madeleine constitutes a common trend for portraiture during the time. However, Black people have been present on the walls of the Louvre for years prior: Marie-Guillermine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine (Fig.
In the music video for their song Apesh*t, Beyoncé and Jay-Z (or, The Carters) introduce Black bodies into the Louvre, a museum that rejected Black people from participating in the spectacle of art for centuries.