Posing Modernity: Wallach Gallery Rethinks the Black Model’s Role in Modernism

In late 1862, the French painter Édouard Manet recorded in his studio notebook that the model Laure posed for a portrait in his Paris studio. A few months later, she returned to pose for the maid in Manet’s master work, Olympia, which portrays a naked prostitute propped on pillows and staring brazenly at the viewer as her servant brings forth a floral offering.