Complementing and intersecting with this work is a body of scholarship that calls into question how some of the materials and aesthetic categories so central to the art world have shaped, and been shaped by, slavery and the slave trade. Two recent books—Henry Sayre’s Value in Art: Manet and the Slave Trade (2022) and Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (2021)—consider how these histories inhere in the word “value,” which is fundamental to the intertwined discourses of aesthetics, race, and economics. How is value accorded to people, things, and ideas? How, and to what ends, have critics, artists, and viewers variously evoked the term? How are these operations embedded in the violence of slavery, racial capitalism, and white supremacy? And finally, what kinds of approaches do scholars take to understanding these processes?
Sayre begins his narrative of value in 1865—the year Édouard Manet exhibited his famed canvas Olympia at the Paris Salon. The painting depicts a white woman and a Black woman side-by-side: the white woman, a courtesan, lies nude on a bed, while at right the Black woman (presumably a servant or attendant) seems to have just entered the room, bearing a large bouquet of flowers. Sayre aims to understand anew the oft-studied Olympia by analyzing it in relation to Émile Zola’s 1867 pamphlet “A new manner of painting: Édouard Manet,” in which Zola argues that the painter’s art is above all guided by a “law of values.”
Sayre is especially interested in value as a property of color—lightness and darkness, to be exact. His argument hinges on the double meaning of “value,” and Zola’s description of Manet’s concern with “the right relations” (les rapports justes) between tone and color is understood to have both formal and moral implications. Sayre uses Zola’s remarks as a driving force for his book’s central claim that, in Olympia and in his broader artistic practice, Manet uses the materiality of paint and its contrasting effect as veiled metaphors for a critique of race relations and the aftermath of racial slavery in Second Empire France.
This argument is provocative, but the book’s subtitle is somewhat misleading. Sayre seems less interested in parsing Manet’s specific relationship to the slave trade—a term whose parameters are never fully defined in the text—than in speculating about the artist’s attitudes toward race, slavery, and empire more generally. Manet’s work has often been read as an autonomous art of form and surfaces, sealed off from the world around it: Michel Foucault famously regarded the artist’s canvases as “painting-objects” that were about the act of painting itself, and art historian Jean Clay wrote of Manet’s ability to distinguish form from referent. Sayre seeks to draw out the politics that animate and subtend those surfaces.