Not only that, but dozens of compelling objects were added in Paris — particularly memorable was a suite of stunning busts. These immaculate statues, executed by artists deliberately working in the French Salon, state-sanctioned style, utilize a dark bronze patina to render black men and women, both in stereotyping costumes and in the exacting likenesses of lost models.

The Museé d’Orsay’s sprawling collection of 19th century academy art emphasized the tradition of exoticized, colonial representations of black people. These images reveal the way in which only a culture devoid of the values of eros — connected to the body, nature, inclusivity, relatedness, love — could subjugate and dehumanize people based on skin color.

Ultimately, a meditation on this show calls for a profound undressing of Western culture’s lost values of eros, synonymous with the archetypal feminine. Only then do we see that healing our collective wound means not only recognizing the pain of racial subjugation, class oppression and repressive social constructs, but also the recovery of our relationship to nature, earth, body and a basic appreciation of all humanity.

However, there are many intelligent reactions to the show that don’t tend to penetrate down into the unconscious psyche and deal with archetypes. In fact, various conversations prior to my trip to Paris ran the gamut of perspective.

In Conversation

For instance, Omeed Goodarzi, a well-read philosopher and musician living in rural Massachusetts, argued vehemently a broad reaction to Jungian cultural analysis: “When white men harp of the ubiquity of inner experience, human potential — these are the words of colonialists, men who tame savages.” In response, a young woman at the forefront of contemporary Jungian thought, pointed out that this approach is “one of the only psychologies of liberation which points us back down to the soul and the archaic being outside of colonization.”

In conversation with a social worker, I was encouraged to examine the White Western male psyche, and especially to scrutinize the male artist and exotic muse. We discussed the value of examining my role in writing about these topics, and how I can support the voices of marginalized groups that have wrote and talked about these issues previously, rather than risk “mansplaining.”

Over drinks at the Orsay (a spoof-style French café on Lexington Ave., Manhattan) a female graduate student of psychology at Columbia University — very rational and curious — also wanted to hear more about the specific concern of the male artist and the exotic muse. I understood the way in which the artist’s immortality fantasy and inner existential conflict drives him to create, and the muse is his vehicle towards this necessity of production. Importantly, though, the attraction to the exotic muse, in particular, reflects Western man’s loss of soul — the neglected feminine within his own psyche.

For a short time, I considered that an analysis of this problem would be useful; the hope was that shedding light on the pattern could help contemporary artists overcome such tendencies.

But this focus quickly broadened as I saw that the lost soul, projected by the artist, points to a more general loss of eros in Western culture. One of the West’s oldest stories, the allegory of King Solomon and Queen Sheba, expresses a fascination with the exotic woman.[1] The early fascination, seen in the Biblical story, later became a dehumanizing hatred in the European slave trade. Wherever there is projection, there is loss, for all people involved.

What I call a “lack of eros” in Western culture, was described by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as capitalism's schizomania. As explored in Murrell’s historical documentation, the men within such a schizoid culture projected repressed values of body, sexuality and nature onto the black woman. Artist’s such as Manet and Matisse, through increasingly sensitive contact with the individual women, as model and collaborator, as well as a social context of emerging ethnic pluralism in France, played a crucial role in breaking through stubborn social mores.

An art history and philosophy professor, named David Carrier, formerly of Carnegie Mellon University, found a correspondence of my developing thoughts interesting, but noted that this latest approach was far too abstract, almost unrelated to the art exhibit itself. Maybe so, I thought; but it seemed that it was the objects and historical documentation that curator, Denise Murrell hoped would generate conservation and transformation. [2] Was I not following the collective dialogue as deeply as I could?

All of this began to pile up — a stack of material related to this “Black Models” show.

And so I carried all of this baggage to Paris.

In Paris

On the plane flight I reflected on a dream I had in 2016: Three women struggle to hold-up and carry a black woman who is severely wounded. Then I remembered how the “Portrait of Madeleine,” by Benoist (a rare Salon style painting of a black model, by a French woman) had moved me to tears when I first read Murrell’s book. I had cried for the suffering of black people and for the pain of women in history; I cried for the ignorance of the Western, schizoid man, who had neglected his own inner feminine so severely, and acted viciously towards others, by way of an antagonism towards a denied part of himself. I cried for the wounded woman, the feminine in us all, the one who must be redeemed — socially, politically, environmentally and individually.

It was this stunning portrait that was the first object displayed in the Orsay’s “Black Models” galleries. I had come with a group, which included an American artist who was in residence, named Devon and his girlfriend Amy, an emerging artist in her own right. My companions stood baffled, not understanding why I might stare, unmoving for so long, at this realistic portrait. They couldn’t see the baggage I carried with me.

Johannes, a philosophy and theology student from Germany could instantly understand much of the 19th Century work — boasted by the institution’s collection — as a sort of “cultural propaganda.” He also had an inherent distaste for the bizarrely schizoid painting, “La Toilette,” by Bazille. Johannes could also perceive the shift from stark stereotype, to a modern individuality, and autonomy represented in “Young Woman with Peonies,” which the young artist painted after his encounter with Manet.