Turning heads

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS ARE TRADITIONALLY ABOUT OBJECTS. But in a provocatively commentated show of Black portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries, the Met confronts itself. Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast centres on Why Born Enslaved!, the bust that Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux modelled in 1868 and produced in popular editions thereafter. Life-size, she is bound at the chest with rope, glowering upwards in knowledge and pain – a captive with no doubts of the crime she’s been dealt.

The Met already owned Carpeaux’s terracotta version of the famous work. Then a rare marble (one of two from his studio) went on sale in 2018. “When the opportunity to acquire this bust came up,” Elyse Nelson, the conceiver and co-curator