ISSUE: Fall 2023
after The Negro Scipio
I’m lonely and the only Black person inside the paid Cézanne
exhibit today. I’ve been traveling the world solo for six months
trying to record and reckon with beauty. Maybe it’s more
precise to say that it feels like I’m the only Black person
besides Scipio, hanging on the wall. I was surprised to see
him there. I was expecting white people, flowers, and fruit.
I stand in front of your back, examining. Are those scars, Scipio,
from the slave breaker’s whip or just juicy slashes of thick oil paint
slathered in smudgy light layered across your spine like a spatula
stirring brown butter? We see what we want to see. You lean
on a glob of whiteness. The museum label suggests it’s a cotton
bale. Is that so? To me, you look like you are resting or sleeping.
You look like you are tired of being consumed, but I still can’t
keep my eyes off you. I’m staring just like the older white people
crowding around us, peering. Encircling the magnetic orb
your image ignites. We all are trying to get closer without
touching your heat or sounding the alarm. Hunger configures
our proximity. What are the white people around me seeing
and thinking to themselves about the story of your back?
Perhaps there is no narrative other than a study of anatomy
or practice for the Mary Magdalene or Sorrow that Cézanne paints
two years later. Next to your bent-over body, the museum label
has a picture of Gordon, the infamous formerly enslaved Union
soldier with the scourged back trashed with vicious scars
in a triptych from the July 4th issue of Harper’s Weekly from 1863.
The galvanizing power of the mutilated Black body. Does horror
compel us more than beauty? A picture of Gordon’s back is next
to your back on the wine-deep wall of the museum, which looks
like old, dried blood. Back-to-back becomes an equation,
implied context creates correlation. So, if a rose is a rose, is a back
just a back unless it’s Black? Outside, a convenience store sells
packs of cigarettes with graphic images of diseased lungs, holes
in throats, and rotting teeth to shock smokers. Studies show
the visual message is clear, striking, and more successful
than the words on the warning label. What else is there to say
or assume as Cézanne’s famous blues swirl with white whirls
of clouds swooshing up and down Scipio’s pants with whimsy.
Another museum label shares thoughts from Ellen Gallagher,
an American artist whose work investigates race and repetition
through visual language, consumerism, and Afrofuturism. She
imagines that Cézanne “has used the language of painting
to bring us back in time before the keloid scarring… The back
of Scipio, layered in thick black and umber slabs of paint with
the faint presence of red that seeped from the edge of the brush.”
Her work also hangs in the Tate with a piece titled Esirn Coaler
on level four. The plasticine and aluminium contain phrases
and ailments from the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which invents
a fictional “witness to the abolition of pain.” She is also one
of the four Black artists who bought Nina Simone’s dilapidated
childhood home in Tryon, North Carolina, because they wanted
a “living past that we can take care of.” Scant research exists
about the real back that posed for Cézanne. All we know is that
he was a model from the Académie Suisse. All I know is that
a Black man’s back is before me, and for once, I am not trying
to think about the transference of trauma that may or may not
have been there as my body percolates. Scipio, why do I want
to take you and Gordon off the wall? Perhaps I’ve missed
Gallagher’s point entirely about an “unfixed body in time.”
Perhaps Gallagher is positioning Gordon in a place of mutable
beauty before and beyond the pain, a mythic place like Drexciya,
an imagined Black Atlantis in her Watery Ecstatic series, an undersea
kingdom inhabited by the West African women and children
who were thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade.
Perhaps she was pointing to a portal through the painting
where I could see Gordon’s back before the damage. Perhaps
I wasn’t calm enough to see that kind of care in the curation.
Perhaps the way I metabolize beauty has been shaped by violence
for so long that I forgot what beauty could reveal and give back
to me as preservation. Either way, I want to look at both of you
without having to think about or be grateful for the aims
of abolition. Why does it feel like we are the only Black
people here except for the man working the front door?
Instead, I imagine at night, when the museum is closed,
you come alive without our constant looking. You come
alive without my transgressive need for the ekphrastic mode.
I imagine you stepping out of the wooden frame, walking
around, and eating all the still-life apples and peaches, which
are forever ripe and holy glowing, sniffing the translucence
around the Grand Bouquet of Flowers, walking around the trees
inside The Avenue at the Jas de Bouffan. You stand with your back
to Cézanne’s self-portrait with the dreamy pink background
all around you like a sky of cotton candy. I see you looking
back at all the white people on the wall, imagining their inner
worlds as I imagine you as The Bather facing forward without
allegory. Before this, Monet kept you close in his bedroom
until his death, saying you were “a work of the greatest strength.”
How exhausting to be this durable, to magnifically hold all
of this international meaning and implication, even mine.
You push the tall, heavy doors open and leave the exhibit.
You float down the steady stream of escalators and marvel
at the long, knotted threads in Cecilia Vicuña’s Brain
Forest Quipu before you step outside into the cold,
wet bite of January’s nearly dead maw, walking toward
the Thames, which looks like a weird brown tea. Smoke
billows from the top of a building. Construction exposing
the guts of another high-rise in media res as you walk in mist
across the Millennium Bridge, looking up at the grandeur
of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The cross at the top of the dome
is blurred by the dense fog, and I can’t see you anymore.
