Maudelle: An Artist’s
Model
published in Fotophile: The Journal for Creative Photographers, no. 41, 2002.
© 2002 Carla Williams. All rights reserved. Cannot be copied without permission.
Maudelle can be an elusive subject, and like many African Americans her life wasn't very clearly documented or preserved (but she did try, thankfully) so I wanted to put it out there in case anyone knows anything about her life and career, has any suggestions, etc. If anyone does, please e-mail me. I would be very grateful!
According to Donna Wells,
Prints and Photographs Librarian at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at
Howard University, there is an emerging school of study called photobiography,
which looks at photographs not from the perspective of the artist and her
career but rather from the significance of the subject depicted. Such is the
focus of this essay, which is an introduction to the career of Maudelle Bass
Weston (1908 – 1989), an African American dancer and artist’s model known
professionally as Maudelle.[1]
Over the course of her career Maudelle posed for painters
Diego Rivera, Abraham Baylinson, Nicolai Fechin, and Robert M. Jackson; sculptor Beulah Woodard
(before taking up sculpting herself in
1976), and photographers Johan Hagemeyer, Sonia Noskowiak, Edward Weston, Weegee, Carl
Van Vechten, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, and Lola Alvarez Bravo. It is through her
dual role as performing artist and photographic subject that Maudelle employed
an expressive strategy that influenced the development of black women’s
representation in mid-twentieth century art.
Born in Early County, Georgia, Maudelle moved to Los Angeles around 1933 to study the "newer and freer" methods of dance being taught there. She studied the Wigman and Mensendieck techniques, and became the first black dancer to study modern dance with choreographer Lester Horton in Los Angeles, where she later danced with the Lester Horton Dance Group and the Fowler School of African Culture. Maudelle also attended the Gray Conservatory of Music in South Central Los Angeles. She performed solo “Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, Egyptian, and American” dances in recitals throughout the United States and Mexico.
1939
was a significant year for Maudelle as model; it was during that one year that
she posed for Hagemeyer, Noskowiak, Weston, and Rivera. In 1939 Maudelle began
a study tour of Mexico where she taught and danced with the Arte Folklorico De
Mexico. It was there Rivera began a series of drawings and paintings of
Maudelle, whom he is said to have considered “the embodiment of ideal beauty
and sensuality.”[2] During her
year there Rivera made at least three paintings of her including Dancer in
Repose (1939), which was exhibited throughout Mexico and in Stockholm,
London, Paris, and Leningrad. Of her dance Rivera remarked, “I found in the
dances of Maudelle not only a full compensation of the African feeling of
rhythm but also an original and individual power of creation and expression.”[3]
In
July 1939 Maudelle went to northern California in order to perform a series of
African dances in Carmel, San Francisco, and elsewhere.[4]
Johan Hagemeyer, a Carmel-based portrait photographer originally from
Amsterdam, made his living at the time photographing celebrities and artists
that passed through Carmel. He produced sixteen head-and-shoulders portrait
studies of Maudelle. Photographed from below with strong directional lighting,
she is monumentalized, the gravity of her expression matching the serious
consideration paid to her as a subject. Sonia Noskowiak, who was at one time
Hagemeyer’s studio assistant,
also photographed Maudelle, making four dramatic portrait studies of the
artist. In November Noskowiak entered all four images into the San Francisco
Society of Women Artists’ Fourteenth Annual Exhibition. Art and music critic Alfred Frankenstein
wrote admiringly of the Maudelle portraits in his November 12 review in the San
Francisco Chronicle, which mentions only two other works in the show.[5]
Like the Hagemeyer image, these portraits are dramatic and expressive,
befitting Maudelle’s status as a performer.
In
1931, Edward Weston wrote in his journal, “If I had a nude body to work with—a
Negress, a black fat Negress, then I could have worked! This desire keeps
popping into my mind.”[6]
Eight years later in 1939 he found Maudelle, who did not exactly adhere to his
corpulent ideal, yet she was the only black woman whom Weston would thus photograph.
Maudelle posed for at least eighteen photographs with Weston in Carmel,
California, in July at Weston’s father-in-law’s home and in August on the sand
dunes at Oceano. These were the first nudes that Weston made in this setting,
Carmel Highlands, where he had recently settled with his new wife Charis
Wilson. According to Wilson, Weston never posed his subjects, instead allowing
them to arrange themselves for the camera and responding accordingly. Included
among the images of Maudelle were two conventional clothed portraits, one of
which was published in U.S. Camera in
1941 (for which Edward Steichen had selected the images).[7]
Maudelle is shown seated on the grass against a flowered bush, her legs folded
to the side, wearing a polka-dotted dress; this was, perhaps, the first frame
that Weston exposed as he became acquainted with his subject. She is
photographed in this same setting, unclothed, lying with her right arm upraised
over her head. In another view, Maudelle is photographed kneeling on the grass
against a forest of ferns, her arms upraised as if in surrender, looking
directly at the camera. As Wilson has recalled, Weston did instruct Maudelle for this particular pose.
Her direct engagement is disarming and is somewhat
unique in Weston’s nude studies. “The response to this photograph reveals how
sensibilities and taste can change over time. Fifty years ago this image was
exhibited without a murmur of protest apparently at the Museum of Modern Art
and toured internationally in the World
of Weston, an exhibition sponsored by the State Department,” notes Weston
scholar Amy Conger. “This photograph of a black woman as if in a jungle with
hands raised, surrendering, is often found offensive today by people who are
sensitive to exploitation.”[8]
An image of “Maudelle on Dunes” was also exhibited in World of Weston. Conger wrote: “Weston was primarily interested in
the contrast between the background and her black and shiny skin.”[9]
The dunes images are the only ones that suggest the photographer’s formal
concerns.
In
September Maudelle wrote to Weston from San Francisco, stating that she was
“wild with delight” when she saw the proofs that Brett Weston had sent her,
three of which she planned to use “for advertising.”[10]
It is not clear which three images she selected, nor if they were ever used,
but it is significant to know that she was not only pleased with the results
but also planned to use them to represent herself when promoting her career.
Her intent is extraordinary given the predominance of nudes that Weston made at
their sittings—in the 1930s nudes by Weston and others were still subject to
confiscation by the U.S. Postal Service who deemed them obscene.
It
was also in 1939 that Hattie McDaniel won an OscarÒ for portraying the stereotypical character of
“Mammy” in the film Gone with the Wind. Maudelle clearly saw her image
and her career as quite apart from the dominant representation and, indeed,
there was an audience for them. In January 1940 Cedric Gibbons, the Academy
AwardÒ-winning head of art direction for the Metro
Goldwyn Mayer film studio (who designed the OscarÒ statuette), inquired to Weston about obtaining prints of the
Maudelle nudes, “having heard that he had photographed ‘that negress dancer who
is a friend of the [Miguel] Covarrubias’.’”[11]
The following month photographer Faurest Davis wrote to Weston from Tucson that
he “HAD to have the print of the Negro nude sprawled out in one corner of a
dune.”[12]
This indicates that the images of Maudelle were known and collected in artistic
circles.
In
1947 Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographed Maudelle in Mexico, titling the image he
made and published of her Espejo Negro,
or “Black Mirror.”[13]
In the photograph, Maudelle sits on a crumpled cloth against a wall in bright
sunlight. “…[I]nspired by the myth of Tezcatlipoca, Lord of the Smoking
Mirror,” this image of Maudelle’ glistening, almost polished black skin is
meant to reflect the world—“the symbol of the espejo humeante (Smoking
mirror)”—just as her black body is meant to symbolize “a Black Eve, mother of
humanity.”[14] The
photographer’s then-wife, Lola Alvarez Bravo, also photographed Maudelle at
this sitting. Her image, taken from the side, differs little from that of her
husband except for the thin line of perspiration trickling down Maudelle’s side
from her breast. It is in this small detail that Lola Alvarez Bravo’s image
reveals the process of a model sitting naked in the Mexico sun, of the heat and
her sweat, in contrast with her husband’s idealized fictionalization.
As
a member of the American Ballet Theatre’s short-lived “Negro wing,” Maudelle
danced the role of “Black Priestess” in choreographer Agnes DeMille’s “Black
Ritual,” staged with an “all-Negro” cast, where she was photographed in
publicity and performance shots by Carl Van Vechten. Maudelle also appeared
with dancer and choreographer Pearl Primus in the 1950s and later traveled
throughout the world giving recitals, teaching, and studying various forms of
dance. Interestingly, Maudelle played a key role in the establishment of the
NBC “Peacock” logo and the development of color television—she was commissioned
to choreograph and perform a dance set to Ravel’s Bolero for some
television executives. Wearing a brightly colored costume Rivera designed for
her, Maudelle resembled a peacock in her performance and the image stuck,
though she was not used again. Maudelle continued to perform into her
seventies, and in 1983 she was honored in “A Celebration of Women in Dance” at
the Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center in Brooklyn, New York, for her life’s
achievement. She died at age eighty-one in 1989.
Maudelle was exceptional in
that she is the only black female model that appears with such frequency in the
work of so many well-known artists from this period. She had a successful
artistic career in her own right and was sympathetic to—and cognizant of—fellow
artists in other media. Given her status as a performing artist and her
response to the Weston images it is fair to say that Maudelle was at least an
active contributor to those images that survive of her. Her legacy in
photographs provides a glimpse into a period of this century in which one black
female body came to represent an ideal, a fantasy, and ultimately, herself.
