Category Archive

In this final installment of the trilogy we consider Bélizaire’s legacy and that of his portrait. Does the debonair boy of 1837 have an afterlife ahead of him?

Last week we took a close look at Bélizaire the person, and his tortured life-path through antebellum Louisiana society. This week we examine the painting that is the reason anyone knows Bélizaire’s name in the first place, and follow the twists and turns by which it traveled from the studio of Jacques Amans in 1837 to the collection of Jeremy Simien today.

This is Bélizaire, and at some point around the turn of the twentieth century—for reasons unknown—his portrait was covered up…

In this special bonus episode of Curious Objects, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Abraham Thomas, ceramist Roxanne Jackson, and painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins join host Benjamin Miller onstage at the 2022 edition of the Winter Show to grapple with the legacy of Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”