Maudelle Bass: A Model Body
T hroughout art history, the artist's model has been the unsung , uncredi ted collaborator in countless works on canvas or paper, in stone or metal. This essay focuses on the career of Maudelle Bass Weston (1908-1989) , an African American artist's model and dancer known professionally as Maudelle . 1 It is th rough her dual role as performing artist and model that Maudelle employed an expressive strategy that influenced the development of black women's representation in mid-twentieth twentieth-century art. Beginning in the 1930s, th rough the figuring of her mostly nude body, she enacted and defined a new, m o d ern definition of the black w o m a n that moved beyond the discourse of slavery, sexual degradat ion, and s te reo type and an t ic ipa ted black women's self-portraiture of the late twentieth century. Emerging out of both the New Negro period and the Modernis t movement in art, Maudelle exists within a cultural framework as a bridge between the two extremes of representat ion for black women in the United States—the nineteenth century, in which black w o m e n had little or no control over their representat ions, and the late twent ie th and early twenty-first centur ies , in which their decisions about how they "choose" to be depicted call into quest ion the pr imacy of agency as a defense against self-exploitation. Maudelle lived and worked in a per iod of the twentieth century dur ing which black women's bodies were not a part of the mains t ream dialogue. The dominan t image of African American women in the United States was the mammy, a large, dark-skinned, desexualized, loyal caretaker perpetuated by Hollywood and advertising, epitomized by the character of Aunt Jemima. 2 In 1939, actress Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for portraying the stereotypical character of " M a m m y " in the film Gone with the Wind, embodying what was then the most indelibly popular image of black women in American culture. Inscribed on that image were not ions of sexuality (the neutered m a m m y versus the sexualized, fair-skinned Jezebel with more European features), class, and labor (domestic w o r k ) . 3 Maudelle conformed to none of these. Though there were movements by artists from the Har lem Renaissance through the New Negro period who actively sought to present a more complex picture of African American life and culture, Maudelle did not precisely fit their model of black w o m a n h o o d and femininity either. It is necessary to foreground the difference between model ing and portrai ture. Modeling is largely anonymous ; the model is not so much meant to represent herself but rather is there to enact a posture or embody an ideal. However, the motivat ion for the model can be quite personal. According to Elizabeth Hollander, a former art