After she has so convincingly retold his life story, you can’t help but see what she considers obvious: In his famous 1863 painting “Olympia,” Manet wanted the black maid to stand out. Ms. Murrell was working as a business executive when, in 1999, she started taking art history classes. She wasn’t interested simply in identifying black figures in art. She wanted to contextualize their presence, focusing on periods in which the black model remained woefully underexamined. “During the Renaissance, there is ‘The Adoration of the Magi,’ and there is always an African king,” she said in a recent interview.

Source: New York Times December 26, 2018 22:35 UTC