The White and the Black

Half a century before this, Manet's Olympia had scandalized Paris with a nude white woman attended by a Black maid bringing flowers. In 1913 Vallotton took that familiar arrangement and rearranged the roles. The white woman lies asleep and undressed. The Black woman sits upright beside her, clothed in blue, smoking a cigarette, studying her companion with a cool, appraising look, or gazing just past her. The one who had been a background servant now holds the attention and the gaze. Vallotton, a Swiss painter who had spent his career in Paris making cold, precise pictures of bourgeois life, kept the whole scene deliberately still and flat. He left almost nothing to tell you what the two women are to each other.