The Salle des Cariatides gallery at the heart of the Louvre is home to the museum’s finest examples of Greek and Roman statuary. And, until January, it’s also the showcase for a gleaming 1997 sculpture titled “Cleopatra’s Bed.”
The sculpture, made of polished bronze plaques, is by Barbara Chase-Riboud, the African American artist, novelist and poet who has lived in Paris since 1961 and is now a dual French-U.S. citizen. She is being honored this fall with an exhibition staged across eight major Paris museums — a first for a living artist. Through Jan. 13, she is showing three works at the Louvre and three dozen others at institutions including the Pompidou Center and the Musée d’Orsay.
The multi-museum homage is part of a push by French museums to correct centuries of underrepresentation of women and nonwhite artists. Leading the effort is the Louvre and its first female president, Laurence des Cars, who, in her last job running the Musée d’Orsay, staged a major exhibition focusing on people of color in 19th-century art.
“Barbara’s work has been underappreciated,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, which is sponsoring the Chase-Riboud show. He said he hoped the exhibition would “elevate the excellence that has been sometimes ignored, sometimes erased, by critics, curators and cultural elites.”
France has honored artists with multisite exhibitions before, but posthumously — for the French artists Christian Boltanski and Claude Rutault. Louvre and Pompidou Center leaders wanted to celebrate a living French artist, and the Louvre’s head of contemporary programs Donatien Grau suggested Chase-Riboud, who hadn’t had a Paris show since 1974.
Chase-Riboud — fashionably outfitted in black leather — said in an interview at the Louvre that the tribute “makes me quite happy, and it gives me a sense of completion.”
Why didn’t it happen sooner? “That is a question for the international art industry in general” and “not particular to France,” she replied. The world was still dominated by the West, she said, and as for the art world, it was “totally white European.”
Chase-Riboud is known for rippling abstract sculptures that combine a bronze element with materials like silk, wool and synthetic fibers. For her Paris show, each museum is presenting works that chime with its collection, said Erin Jenoa Gilbert, one of the curators. Another Cleopatra sculpture is displayed in the Louvre’s Egyptian antiquities sections, for example, and Chase-Riboud’s 2007 sculpture “Mao’s Organ” — a monumental evocation of China under Mao Zedong — is at the Musée Guimet, France’s national museum of Asian art.
The displays also present related poems by Chase-Riboud as wall texts, highlighting her parallel career as an acclaimed poet whose first editor was the Nobel-Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.
Born in Philadelphia in 1939, according to the exhibition biography, Chase-Riboud started making sculpture at age 7 and produced a woodcut at 15 that was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. She went on to be the first Black woman to get a master of fine arts from the Yale University School of Art and Architecture.
There, she met the British architect James Stirling, and they got engaged, but she ended up marrying the photojournalist Marc Riboud, the scion of a family of French industrialists. She settled with Riboud in Paris, where she joined the city’s pulsating postwar intellectual milieu.
“It was like walking into an encyclopedia,” she said.
Wedded to a man who was always on the move and obsessed with world history, she began “trotting behind him,” traveling the world, and leaving “big gaps” in her own career, she said.
Trailing Riboud had its rewards. When he was assigned to photograph a literary awards ceremony in Spain, she got the opportunity to go for a walk with Henry Miller and dance the twist with James Baldwin. (Baldwin was “one of the prettiest and sweetest men I’ve met,” she said. “You just wanted to take him in your arms and say ‘It’s not all that bad!’”)
In Paris, she was sometimes taken by Riboud’s mentor, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, to Alberto Giacometti’s ramshackle home-studio in the Montparnasse district, where she would “listen but not speak,” she said, and look at the sculptures “as if this was another world that I would never penetrate.”
Sculpture became her world, and Giacometti was, initially, a source of emulation. “For me,” she said, “he was the only one.”
Her early sculptures were spindly bronze figures that resembled his. From the mid-1960s onward, Chase-Riboud started to break away from figuration and make tall abstract slabs that recalled the funerary steles of ancient Egypt.
After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, she decided to name a series of these sculptures after him, creating a group of works that are a career highlight. (One of the “Malcolm X” works is currently on show at the Pompidou Center.)
The artist also reconnected with her African American roots through writing. Her best-selling 1979 novel “Sally Hemings” — the story of an enslaved woman who had children with Thomas Jefferson — was fiercely contested by some historians until it was validated by DNA testing much later.
Though the international art world’s recognition of Chase-Riboud was intermittent until later in her life, it has been building since a 2022 exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London. Her first exhibition in Asia is planned for next year at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai. The museum’s artistic director, X Zhu-Nowell, said that some of Chase-Riboud’s poetry will also be translated into Chinese for the first time to coincide with the exhibition.
When it comes to preserving Chase-Riboud’s legacy, publications would be key, said Matylda Taszycka, the head of research at AWARE, a Paris-based women’s art archive, which gave Chase-Riboud a lifetime achievement award in 2021. Research would be needed, too, she said — “the kind of work that’s less visible and less spectacular.”
A comprehensive retrospective was also vital, said Gilbert, the curator, because all the exhibitions so far, including the Paris show, have just shown part of Chase-Riboud’s body of work.
“Barbara deserves to be seen in her entirety,” she said. “The work is not done.”
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