I love old dead white guy art so much, I got a Ph.D. in the subject.
But even though I adore the Sistine Chapel and the sumptuous oils of Titian, I know that these artworks aren’t free from the all-too-human problem of racism. The Sistine Chapel employs anti-Semitic imagery. Titian slots Black figures into servile roles. These are just two of countless examples, but we rarely mention these issues. Instead, we often prefer to focus on beauty or the artist’s biography. Too often we believe that acknowledging the harmful content of great works of art will diminish our ability to appreciate them. So we sidestep their racist content.
As an art history professor since 2015, I had addressed race as part of the curriculum before, but never as the main event. That’s when I decided to experiment with the standard Eurocentric art history survey course through the lens of critical race studies. This was new territory. I didn’t know what we would discover or what the effects might be. Would we all be able to get through it? Me, my students, art history itself?
I called the course “Race and European Art,” and I embarked with trepidation and doubt that I was the right person to teach it. Although I was raised by parents in a mixed-race marriage, they fed me a diet of great books and white American culture. I was taught to revere classical white marble statues like the Apollo Belvedere and to trust that the British Museum legitimately rescued the Elgin Marbles from Turkish hands.
What can Bay Area museums do to avoid becoming unwitting vehicles of racism?
My love for European art was genuine. Happening upon a photograph of Michelangelo’s “Pietà” at age 11 sealed my fate to become an art historian. My childhood was not easy, but the beauty of that sculpture stood as a promise that somewhere out in the world was something worth surviving for.
I never fully embraced my parents’ beliefs in the superiority of white culture, and I quit them for good when I left my parents’ house as a teenager. But by becoming a specialist in Renaissance art, I joined a field that had grown out of those very beliefs. Art history as a discipline bloomed in 19th century nationalism and its misbegotten ideas of race. While corrections have been made since then, art history and I found ourselves in the same pickle: trying to overcome the racism we were raised in.
So despite my terror, it’s possible that I was indeed the right person to teach this course. My ambiguous Otherness can set people at ease when I discuss race; at times, students assume someone who is neither white nor Black has no ax to grind on this subject. However, too many encounters have demonstrated that I don’t occupy the neutral racial ground one might have expected. Once after I gave a paper at the University of Notre Dame, a medievalist cornered me demanding I explain why I didn’t study Chinese art. As a nonwhite person, my claim to European art — even the study of it — is available to question.
Race and European Art set out to examine our racial history clearly, without sidestepping the ugly and uncomfortable parts of our heritage. I got lucky, because the students who signed up wanted to do the same work. And boy, was it depressing. I joked that I had become the professor of “Bum You Out Studies.”
We slogged through the ancient Greek figures of Black people museums had labeled “slave” without a second thought. Medieval anti-Semitic caricatures in Nuremberg scarcely differed from their 20th century counterparts. After a class on Renaissance anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, a visiting Fulbright student from France bemoaned the gaps in her education on these subjects; her classmates assured her that American education was no better. Then we were all bummed out.
But there was hope amid the reckoning and the horrifying discoveries. I, for one, was relieved we made it through the semester without any racist incidents among the diverse students. Perhaps the most revelatory moments came when students visited “Gauguin: A Spiritual Journey” at the de Young Museum to analyze how race was positioned in the retrospective of an artist who created Primitivist works portraying nonwhite cultures as undeveloped and naive.
One of my students, photographer Trisha Brown, documented her changing impression of Gauguin’s “Tahitian Woman With a Flower” from an ordinary portrait of a Tahitian woman wearing a European dress to evidence of colonialism. Brown wrote, “My first read of the painting in person was that Gauguin had painted what he saw, and I didn’t see anything to criticize in this.” That might have been the end of her inquiry, but Brown noted that the assignment required students to address race. So she researched Tahiti and French colonialism and went back to the show.
At the time, the de Young had invited Samoan interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara to provide a video piece offering a Polynesian view of Gauguin’s Primitivist artworks. Kihara, who is fa’afafine, a Samoan third gender, invited other members of the fa’afafine community to join her in making “First Impressions: Paul Gauguin.” The group sat around an easel with a Gauguin painting, responding and critiquing the work from an unabashedly Polynesian point of view with little reverence for a European artist regarded as a master. Watching Kihara’s critique a second time provoked a revelation from Brown, both of a Polynesian perspective and that of her own whiteness.
No matter our race, whiteness lodges in our heads, shaping not only what we see but also what we permit ourselves to see. There’s a danger, after all, in looking too closely at the full history of the art we love and acknowledging the awful parts of its content. Despite dedicating my life to the study of European art, I still wasn’t sure it was mine.
Unexpectedly, I finally found that connection through the course. As my students and I sat with the pain of the terrible intertwined history of European art and race, we realized it was the pain itself that proved the art was ours. We were the inheritors of its legacies, both healing and destructive. I knew that I belong to European art as much as it belongs to me.
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