Paris honors Barbara Chase-Rebaud as never before

The Salle des Caryatides Gallery at the heart of the Louvre is home to the museum's finest examples of Greek and Roman sculpture. And, through January, it also showcases a brilliant 1997 sculpture titled “Cleopatra's Bed.”

The sculpture, made of polished bronze plaques, is by Barbara Chase-Ribaud, an African American artist, novelist and poet who has lived in Paris since 1961 and is now a dual French-American citizen. He is being honored this fall with an exhibition staged at eight major Paris museums—a first for a living artist. Through January 13, he is showing three works at the Louvre and three dozen more at institutions including the Center Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay.

The multi-museum tribute is part of a push by French museums to correct centuries of underrepresentation of women and non-white artists. The effort is being led by the Louvre and its first female president, Laurence des Cars, who, in her last job running the Musée d'Orsay, staged a major exhibition focusing on people of color in 19th-century art.

“Barbara's work is underrated,” said Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, which is sponsoring the Chase-Reboud show. He said he hoped the exhibition would “elevate excellence that has sometimes been overlooked, sometimes erased, by critics, curators and cultural elites.”

France has honored artists with multisite exhibitions before, but posthumously — for French artists Christian Boltanski and Claude Rutault. Leaders of the Louvre and the Pompidou Center wanted to celebrate a living French artist, and Donatien Grau, head of the Louvre's contemporary program, suggested Chase-Ribaud, who had not done a Paris show since 1974.

Chez-Riboud – fashionably dressed in black leather – said in an interview at the Louvre that the tribute “makes me quite happy, and it gives me a sense of completion.”

Why didn't it happen sooner? “This is a question for the international art industry in general” and “not for France in particular,” he replied. The world, he said, was still dominated by the West, and as for the art world, it was “completely white European”.

Chase-Ribwood is known for abstract sculptures that combine a bronze element with materials such as silk, wool and synthetic fibers. For its Paris show, each museum is presenting works that resonate with its collection, said Erin Genoa Gilbert, a curator. Another Cleopatra sculpture is displayed in the Louvre's Egyptian antiquities department, for example, and Chase-Ribaud's 2007 sculpture “Mao's Organ”—a monumental invention of China under Mao Zedong—is in France's Musee Nationale Guimet.

The exhibition also presents related poems by Chase-Ribaud as wall texts, highlighting her parallel career as an acclaimed poet whose first editor was Nobel-prize winning author Toni Morrison.

Born in Philadelphia in 1939, according to the exhibition biography, Chase-Ribaud began making sculptures at age 7 and at age 15 created a woodcut that was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. She became the first black woman to earn a master's in fine art from the Yale University School of Art and Architecture.

There, she met British architect James Stirling and they became engaged, but she married photojournalist Marc Riboud, a scion of a family of French industrialists. He settled with Ribaud in Paris, where he joined the city's vibrant post-war intellectual scene.

“It was like walking into an encyclopedia,” he said.

Married to a man who was always on the move and obsessed with world history, she started “turning her back,” traveling the world and leaving a “big gap” in her own career, she said.

Following was Riboud's reward. When she was assigned to photograph a literary award ceremony in Spain, she had the opportunity to hang out with Henry Miller and dance with James Baldwin. (Baldwin was “one of the nicest and sweetest men I've ever met,” she said. “You just wanted to take him in your arms and say, 'It's not that bad!'”)

In Paris, he was sometimes taken by Ribbaud's mentor, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, to Alberto Giacometti's ramshackle home-studio in the Montparnasse district, where he would “listen but not speak,” he said, and see the sculptures “as they were.” If only it were another world I could never enter.”

Sculpture became his world, and Giacometti was a primary source of imitation. “For me,” she said, “she was the only one.”

His earliest sculptures were thorny bronze figures that resembled him. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Chase-Ribaud began to move away from figuration and create tall abstract slabs that recalled the funerary stele of ancient Egypt.

After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, he decided to name a series of these sculptures after him, creating a group that is a career highlight. (A work by “Malcolm X” is currently on display at the Center Pompidou.)

The artist reconnects with her African American roots through writing. Her best-selling 1979 novel “Sally Hemings” — the story of a slave woman who bore Thomas Jefferson's child — was hotly contested by some historians until it was validated much later by DNA testing.

Although Chase-Ribaud's international art world recognition did not come until later in his life, it is building from a 2022 exhibition at London's Serpentine Gallery. His first exhibition in Asia is planned for next year at the Rockband Art Museum in Shanghai. The museum's artistic director, X Zhu-Nowell, said some of Chase-Ribaud's poems will also be translated into Chinese for the first time to coincide with the exhibition.

When it comes to preserving Chase-Ribaud's legacy, publications will be important, said Matilda Taszicka, head of research at AWARE, the Paris-based women's art archive, which awarded Chase-Ribaud a lifetime achievement award in 2021. Research will be needed, too, he said — “the kind of work that's less visible and less spectacular.”

Curator Gilbert said a comprehensive retrospective was also essential, as all exhibitions so far, including the Paris show, have featured pieces of Chase-Ribaud's work.

“Barbara deserves to be seen in her entirety,” he said. “The work never ends.”