Painting

The Campaign to Remove a Shocking Painting from the French National Assembly

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The first time the French filmmaker and student Mame-Fatou Niang encountered “L’histoire en Peinture de l’Assemblée Nationale,” a massive portray placing inside the National Assembly in Paris, she was “prise aux tripes”—grabbed by the guts. It was March of remaining yr, and she changed into within the midst of what become supposed to had been a massive day for her on the Palais Bourbon, which houses the lower chamber of the French legislature. She was invited there to screen “Marianne’s Noires,” her documentary approximately Afro-French girls—“women who are perceived as having come from someplace else, but whose hearts beat first for France,” as one reviewer wrote.
The painting, by using the French artist Hervé Di Rosa, accommodates nine panels, every depicting a key moment inside the annals of French lawmaking: the group of paid vacations, the recuperation of Alsace-Lorraine. Since 1991, it has hung in a hallway out of doors of the Assembly’s auditorium. Each year, lots of travelers and schoolchildren skip with the aid of the paintings, as do their elected representatives.

 

The Campaign to Remove a Shocking Painting from the French National Assembly 1One panel is meant to commemorate the abolition of slavery in France, in 1794, however, to Niang and different observers, it perpetuates grotesque racial stereotypes. It functions “two massive black faces, with bulging eyes, outsized bright red lips, carnivorous teeth, in an imagery borrowing to [sic] Sambo, the Banania classified ads and Tintin within the Congo,” Niang and Julien Suaudeau, a white French novelist, wrote closing week, after they released a petition to have the paintings eliminated. “I became just bowled over,” Niang recalled. “I’m a French black character. The piece tells me that this is how my usa sees me.”

The petition, which calls the painting “a humiliating and dehumanizing insult to the millions of victims of slavery and all their descendants,” has to date garnered about twenty-5 hundred signatures on Change.Org. With the hashtag #unautrefresquepour1794 (#anotherfrescofor1794), Niang and Suaudeau are asking human beings to make suggestions for a greater appropriate piece of art to replace it. One younger woman wrote to Niang on Twitter approximately a faculty subject experience she went directly to the National Assembly, in the course of which she’d encountered Di Rosa’s portray. “I become embarrassed to ask approximately it in the front of my classmates,” she recalled. “My trainer said that she’d asked the guides approximately it, but that they didn’t know the way to reply. It didn’t appear to bother anybody. Some human beings have been even laughing.”
Di Rosa made the paintings almost three decades ago, for a competition sponsored with the aid of the R.A.T.P., the general public-shipping authority of Paris. It become originally set to be housed in a metro station that serves the National Assembly. But the government feared that it might attract graffiti, so it went to the Palais Bourbon as a substitute. Di Rosa, who is white, changed into the main parent of Figuration Libre, a French art movement of the 19-eighties that aimed to shake up cultural hierarchies. The motion was an aggregate “of history and the road, of the noble and the trivial,” the curator Suzanne Pagé wrote, in a catalog for a 1984 exposition in which Di Rosa’s works had been proven alongside those of American counterparts together with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. When I exchanged e-mails with Di Rosa this week, he instructed me that he intended for his painting to bring an experience of exuberance. “I became thirty years vintage, it became the give up of the eighties, I recollect having wanted to change the route of the iconography, to appearance toward the future in place of the beyond,” he wrote. “I turned into part of an antiracist era that certainly believed that we had gotten rid of the antique French racists. It turned into a moment within the records of France where we have been constructive, in which we concept . . . That the resentments had been beyond and we ought to construct an international collectively.”
Di Rosa appeared incredibly baffled with the aid of the criticisms of his paintings, even as he refuted them. He pointed out that the Museum of Modest Art, which he based, in 2000, in his home city of Sète, is currently holding an exhibition of seventy artists from Kinshasa. “In my career I’ve additionally labored for years with artists and craftspeople from Ghana, Benin, South Africa, Ethiopia, Tunisia, and Cameroon, and additionally from Mexico, Vietnam, etc., but that doesn’t hobby the defamers,” he wrote. When I requested him if he changed into familiar with the records of colonial iconography—and, in that case, if he concept approximately it while he become deciding on a way to illustrate the abolition of slavery—he answered, “I realize of course all the colonial iconography but I don’t discover that my artwork resemble it. I therefore didn’t take it into attention.” Di Rosa says that his fashion is motivated by way of popular culture: comedian books, technological know-how fiction, and punk. He frequently paints white people with in addition exaggerated capabilities and considers “massive red lips” a signature of his mythological international. “I have the affect that all of my characters are similarly mistreated,” he stated.

“We’re completely tired of his intentions,” Suaudeau informed me. “The best component that topics to us are become this a realistic and sensitive element to do, to use that piece, no matter the artist’s motivations, to have a good time the abolition of slavery?” In raising the question, Niang and Suaudeau have knowingly trespassed upon France’s conception of itself as a bastion of shade-blind universalism. There is a commonplace belief that there can’t be racism in France because in France there’s, formally, no such aspect as a race. The country, working beneath coverage of “absolute equality,” does now not collect any facts on race or ethnicity; last year, the word “race,” that’s related to Nazi Germany, turned into eliminated from the French charter. The updated record promises equality irrespective of “gender, beginning or faith.” Niang said, “We have this tremendous republican narrative. However it turned into made by way of cutting out huge chunks of our history.”
France’s race-blind policy excises a long culture of colonial regulation, which includes the Code Noir, which ruled slavery in France from 1685 until the Revolution, and the Police des Noirs policies of the seventeen-seventies, which covered a special identity card that black humans in eighteenth-century Paris have been required to hold. In 1794, the French Empire included Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guiana, in the Caribbean; the slave-buying and selling ports of Gorée Island and Saint-Louis, in West Africa; and islands in the Indian Ocean. During the direction of the eighteenth century, French slave buyers imported more than one million people to Haiti. It became a rebellion of enslaved people—the “actual sans-culottes of the colonies,” in keeping with one French Republican leader—in Saint-Domingue that forced the 1794 abolition of slavery. (In 1802, Napoleon reinstated it.) Laurent Dubois, a professor of history at Duke University who specializes within the Atlantic global, advised me, “The French Revolution came about as a lot within the Caribbean as it did in Europe.” Colonies remained critical to French records within the 19th and twentieth centuries, with the conquest and administration of big territories within the Maghreb, Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. “For a good deal of France’s present day colonial history, greater human beings lived under French rule in colonial territories than in metropolitan France,” Dubois said.
Niang and Suaudeau’s final goal, they say, “is to elevate French people’s focus of the colonial wound.” Both of them live inside the United States. She is an accomplice professor of French research at Carnegie Mellon; he’s an instructor inside the French and Francophone studies application at Bryn Mawr. Their insistence that a black girl’s experience of a piece of art is as critical as a white guy’s ambitions in making it—their insistence on acknowledging context, subjectivity, and identity—has been taken through some French commentators as an try to inflict American notions of political correctness upon French subculture. On social media, the two had been inundated with vitriolic comments (greater frequently targeting her than him, as is the custom). In the French press, they’ve been depicted as, at excellent, “fervent promoters of the black identification,” and, at worst, “fans in want of exposure.”

It is genuine that the records of slavery and racism in America aren’t similar to that of slavery and racism in France, and that the symbolic taboos that America enforces in the location of sizeable redress are not always meaningful. But it’s miles disingenuous to deal with the censure of work like Di Rosa’s as bewildering or to assert that its hurtfulness isn’t without problems comprehensible. Last 12 months, the French soccer participant Antoine Griezmann published a picture of himself sporting black make-up, dressed as a Harlem Globetrotter. “I recognize it’s miles clumsy on my component,” he wrote, after first defending the gown as a tribute. “If I have hurt everyone, I make an apology.”

A spokesperson stated remaining week that the National Assembly has no present-day plans to take down the painting. When I asked Di Rosa if he popular that the paintings had precipitated people ache, and, if so, what he concept might be the proper recourse, he replied via bringing up a regulation that was passed in 2016, within the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Its first article reads, in its entirety, “Artistic creation is loose.”
In Di Rosa’s view, a painting is inseparable from the intentions of the person that created it. But a public piece such as “L’histoire en Peinture de l’Assemblée Nationale” in the end leaves the surroundings wherein it becomes conceived and is going out into the arena, for all kinds of people to come upon, voluntarily or now not. It starts to speak for itself, saying things that its writer might not have imagined and possibly does not countenance. It takes a peculiar form of innocence to insist that the artist’s heart have to remember for more than the viewer’s intestine.

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