A Black Life Mattered: Jeanne Duval Then and Now

Abstract

ABSTRACT Critics and art historians writing about Jeanne Duval, the subject of Édouard Manet’s 1862 La Maîtresse de Baudelaire, have provided multiple reactions to her, many of them viciously racist. Contemporary novels and short stories have appeared that counter the negative constructions of Duval, casting her not as la muse malade of Baudelaire’s poetry, but using her as a stimulus for their creative inspiration as Baudelaire himself had done. Recent efforts by artists such as Maud Sulter and Lorraine O’Grady have dismantled the scaffolding of contempt that has distorted Duval’s reputation by appropriating nineteenth-century images within a twenty-first-century context.