Victorine Meurent, performance, 2009-2010
Victorine Meurent was my M.F.A. thesis performance that I performed in a 19th-century gallery space in the National Gallery of Canada in 2010.
Victorine Meurent is a performance designed to tell a story about a white French model and painter, Victorine Meurent. Meurent was one of two models in Édouard Manet’s once-notorious painting Olympia. The black woman, Laura, who appears in the painting as a black maid was also hired as a model. More can be learned about the representation of the maid in Lorraine O’Grady’s essay titled, “OLYMPIA’S MAID: Reclaiming black female subjectivity, “The Feminnist and Visual Cultural Reader, Routledge, 2003, pg 174-187.
In my performance I investigated the symbolism of the semi nude model, a sex worker figure through the use of personal narrative. In art history the term, “odalisque” is still used. Sexism, homophobia and racism are so embedded into the European and North American cannon of art history making it a difficult terrain to navigate. The “odalisque” figure is usually a woman, or girl, lying on a couch or bed, and is traditionally assumed to be a mistress, prostitute, slave or concubine of a wealthy man.
This performance allowed me to tell a story about Victorine Meurent who modeled in many other of Manet’s most celebrated works. Victorine Meurent was a painter herself. Meurent exhibited in a 19th-century salon as a portrait-painter, but she had to have a man accompany her to her own exhibition opening! At the time women were not allowed to go to Paris Salon by themselves. Nudity, ironically, was thought too much for rich, white women to experience. Victorine Meurent was poor but as a painter she crossed a class divide.
In the performance, I attempted to inhabit and animate the life of a nineteenth century queer artist while investigating my own experience living as a queer woman in 2009.