Untitled

In those two works, a naked woman is depicted lying down, half covered by a white sheet. In the first one, she appears comfortable, her gaze fixed, almost defiant. In the other, she is lying on her stomach, her face buried in the pillow. It is impossible to penetrate her thoughts; despite her relaxed posture, her inner world remains inaccessible. Rendered in ink, the Black body shines like metal and takes on an almost sculptural dimension, while the sketched background dissolves.

Kerry James Marshall places the Black woman at the center of the composition, critically shifting the canons of Western painting. The pose refers to Goya's The Nude Maja (1795-1800), which caused a scandal under the Spanish Inquisition for its erotic audacity. It also evokes Manet's Olympia (1863): where the central figure is white and accompanied by a Black servant, here, the servant disappears, and the Black figure alone occupies the space of the representation. This shift aims to fill what the artist calls a “void in the image bank,” reminding us that, in representations of ideal beauty and humanity, white figures are so omnipresent that the image of a Black figure “can never serve as a substitute for what is beautiful.”

These works are held by the Pinault Collection and were presented for the first time at the « Corps et âmes » exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in 2025.