Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires, Mickalene Thomas 2010 Rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel, 120 × 288 × 2 in., The Rachel and Jean-Pierre Lehmann Collection. © 2024 Mickalene Thomas.
Édouard Manet’s painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) has inspired multiple homages since its scandalizing debut in 1863. You’ve seen it: two overdressed men (dandies) join a totally nude woman/prostitute (likely the model, muse, and artist Victorine Meurent) for a picnic while another woman/prostitute in a slip crouches behind them in knee-high water. The male figures gaze into an indeterminate distance, but our nude looks at—or at least toward—the viewer with a wry almost-smile. She is relaxed in the plein air.
In 2010, for a Museum of Modern Art commission, Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) installed Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe: Les trois femmes noires, a photograph in conversation with Manet’s picnicking trio. All three of the languorous Black women in Thomas’s saturated photograph meet our eyes with their own.
That work iterated further into a large-scale collage that is peaceful yet electric, incorporating the accessible materials like rhinestones and fabric that Thomas has used since her art school days and fabulously gathered in her solo show currently at the Barnes in Philadelphia, All About Love (the title is a nod to bell hooks, 1952–2021), and co-organized by The Broad in LA and The Hayward Gallery, London. As mysterious and mesmerizing as Manet’s threesome, Thomas’s Les trois femmes noires is three friends hanging out together, harmonizing with hooks’s oeuvre as much as (more than?) the history of Western painting. These women are not consumed by our gaze, not victims, not on the clock, and not in service of anything other than their own beauty and selves. They are women in the throes of just . . . being.
