Hello readers. Welcome to the 7th edition of my newsletter—Pursuit.
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This essay will plunge into racist American history through a modern artwork— Behind the Myth of Benevolence by Titus Kaphar.
America has charmed me since my childhood. When I was 25, I traveled to the UK from India. My first international trip. The western experience and lifestyle attracted me more than ever to visit America once in my lifetime. I had this notion that it is the most idealistic country in the world.
Guess what?
My American dream did come true. However, the idealistic notion was crushed into bits within no time.
I mean how naive and ignorant I was.
When I started reading and writing about American history, some gut-wrenching stories swept the rug from under my feet.
Kaphar is an American contemporary artist who experiments with shrouds, cuts, breaks, tears and turns them into paintings and sculptures, twisting them into works that reveal some unsettling truths about American history.
When I saw this artwork for the first time, it immediately stuck with me. A fusion of contemporary elements with historical context. The peeled canvas, the gentle folds caught my attention.
But whose canvas is getting peeled? Thomas Jefferson, right. The third president of the United States and one of the founding fathers of the American constitution.
You might be curious about the naked African American woman behind the peeled canvas. So I was.
Let’s unravel this.
Historical context
The Black woman behind the canvas is Thomas Jefferson’s concubine Sally Hemings, an African American slave. Jefferson had illicit sexual relations with her and together they had at least six children. Four survived to adulthood.
This affair caught the public eye when Jefferson became the president of America and it has become the subject of agreement and disagreement for over two centuries.
When Hemings was 14, she was chosen to be a maid for Jefferson's family in Paris. When Jefferson came back to America, Hemings had to come to America. However, she negotiated a few “extraordinary privileges” and future freedom for her children.
During that period, enslaved women had no legal authority to consent. Their masters owned their labor, bodies and their children.
Behind the Myth of Benevolence
In this composition, the naked woman confronts the audience with a somber gaze. The green and golden scarf on the woman’s head and the golden jug on the blue pedestal give a contrasting tone to the complete portraiture.
The silvery bowl near her feet might represent that she is about to bathe. Symbolically, it means that her privacy is barged and she is repressed.
The painting gives an allusion that the iconic portrait created by Rembrandt Peale in 1800 is exposed to the public by Kaphar and thus peeled off.
Lastly
Like many other 18-century intellectuals in Europe and North America, Jefferson believed blacks were inferior to whites.
According to the artist Kaphar, the woman featured in the painting is not exactly Sally Hemings as she was 1/4 black and 3/4 white.
But the woman represents all those African American women whose liberty was stolen during slavery. Their stories were shrouded by the narratives of the founding fathers of America who had power and influence.
Kaphar, speaking about the painting and its subject, Sally Hemings, said, “This painting is about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and yet it is not. The reason I say, ‘And yet it is not,’ is because we know from the actual history that Sally Hemings was very fair. Very, very fair.