Beyoncé’s “Apeshit”: How the Artist Reframes Black Women’s Presence at the Louvre
Lisa Vicini - February 10, 2023
Beyoncé and Jay-Z (The Carters) in Apesh*t. Image: BeyoncéVEVO, YouTube.
In the music video for their song Apesh*t, Beyoncé and Jay-Z (or, The Carters) introduce Black bodies into the Louvre, a museum that rejected Black people from participating in the spectacle of art for centuries. However, Black people have been present on the walls of the Louvre for years prior: Marie-Guillermine Benoist’s Portrait of Madeleine (Fig. 1) stands as a prime example. Produced during a short period in France where slavery had been abolished, Portrait of Madeleine constitutes a common trend for portraiture during the time.1 Artists depicted Black people as heroic figures in order to transmit monolayered ideas of the success of the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the liberty and equality it gifted, particularly for White audiences. However, this illusion of ideals crumbles as racist pictorial tropes in portraiture reflect the true inequality of the time: notions of liberty and equality, as well as the promise of emancipation, did not hold true for people of color in France.
Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine, 1800, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, Louvre Museum, Paris, France.
Although Benoist’s portrait can only be seen in the final shots of The Carters’ Apesh*t, the painting's essence—and more so the strong presence of Madeleine at the Louvre—manifests itself throughout the entire music video. Beyoncé purposefully utilizes iconography that destabilizes the way Black women had been included in the Louvre’s visual narrative. Throughout Apesh*t, she renders concepts in Madeleine’s portrait that had traditionally worked to depict Black women in a derogatory state, and reconstructs them into symbols of power.
Madeleine was believed to be born as a slave in the French colony of Guadeloupe, brought to mainland France, and thus freed in 1794 when French revolutionaries decreed the abolishment of slavery.2 However, Madeleine’s skin color meant that France—a country drunk on Revolutionary ideas of equality and liberty—was a liminal place for her. Although Madeleine’s status as a slave might have been questioned, she still did not have the autonomy that a White woman would have in France.3 She thus lived in a limbo of fictitious freedom and simultaneous prejudice. One of the ways this prejudice manifests is through White artists’ depictions of Black bodies. For instance, in Benoist’s depiction of Madeleine, the artist assumes complete creative agency, thus undermining her sitter.
Benoist produces Madeleine’s portrait in the popular neoclassical aesthetic that governed portraiture production as the elite form.4 Madeleine sits in an ornate chair, her body facing the left of the portrait. Although her stance is angled, Madeleine faces the viewer with a serious gaze. Benoist follows the language of portraiture that had been dictated by Jacques-Louis David, portraying her sitter with a white, neoclassical-inspired garment and a bare, monochromatic background. Madeleine’s hair is concealed by an intricate white head wrap, yet her right breast is completely exposed to the viewer. Blue fabric drapes the back of Madeleine’s chair, and a red sash wraps around her waist.
Benoist’s inclusion of the headwrap denotes Madeleine’s womanhood as different from white womanhood. Although headwraps' purpose in the colonies cannot be attributed to one function—it might have been used to prevent scalp diseases like lice or absorb sweat—White Europeans saw it as a symbol of labor, servitude, and thus inferiority.5 Thus, the headwrap not only exoticizes Madeleine, but also evokes messages of poverty and servitude that were associated with Black women in the colonies.6
Beyoncé, however, foils this depiction of Black women by using headwraps in Apesh*t as a symbol of femininity and celebration of Black identity. Throughout the video, the singer sports various headpieces; most notably, she wears a Versace head scarf and matching outfit, as well as an MCM cap and matching leotard.
Beyonce’s Versace headscarf and outfit. Image: BeyonceVEVO, YouTube.
The artist purposefully wears these brands, whose iconic prints render their status as luxury goods. By wearing these expensive headpieces, Beyoncé deconstructs the traditional associations made around Black women wearing head scarfs. The singer takes a garment used to undermine Black women in eighteenth and nineteenth-century France and modifies it into a symbol of wealth and power.
Right before Jay-Z’s rap verse, where the song has a natural offset, Beyoncé takes off her hat. She is about to throw it before the video cuts to two Black women, both wearing long white head scarfs, sitting below Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Madame Recamier.
Dancers posed beneath Portrait of Madame Recamier. Image: BeyoncéVEVO, YouTube.
This powerful moment, where Beyoncé takes off her hat and two Black women sit below Madame Recamier’s portrait, re-establishes the rejection of the head piece as a way of othering Black women. The two women standing below Recamier challenge David’s artistic genius as they pose gracefully and create a symmetrical composition with their bodies. Through Beyoncé’s masterful incorporation of the headpiece, she revokes its derogatory connotations by reclaiming and posing it as an opulent, and even regal, accessory.
Moreover, Benoist hypersexualizes Madeleine by exposing her right breast. In choosing to do this, the artist again masks prejudiced concepts underneath a seemingly empowering portrait. Due to the Caribbean heat, it was customary for women to be bare breasted in a non-sexual manner in the French colonies.7 However, stripped from this context, the Black woman’s exposed breast is subject to whatever the European, artist or viewer, projects on to her. Her anatomy is therefore eroticized, and her sexuality exploited. The hyper-sexualization of Black women, however, was not something Benoist instigated; nor was she the last to do it.
Beyoncé, aware of the evident hypersexualization of Madeleine, and the hypersexualization of Black women in general, manipulates the expression of her and her dancers’ sexuality throughout the music video. The women in Apesh*t become clear agents of their own bodies, especially through movement and dance. Beyoncé chooses to have her and her dancers wear figure-hugging clothes, specifically when they dance in front of David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. Although these outfits highlight the women’s bodies, the clothes serve a functional purpose: to allow them to dance comfortably and freely, and to accentuate the way their bodies beautifully move. Although the dance might be considered “sexy,” the women are not sexualized; they become active creators of art through their dancing at the Louvre.
Over Beyoncé’s famous lines, “I can’t believe we made it…,” viewers witness shots of a Black dancer performing a solo. As she dances, her body alludes to Madeleine's portrait: the dancer’s nipple sticks through her top. Unlike Madeleine, whose entire breast was exposed for the viewer, the dancer’s breast is obscured, yet its presence is undeniable. Instead of sexualizing her, this manifestation of the hidden yet present breast materializes notions of femininity, plenty, and liberty, which were traditionally common tropes surrounding White women’s exposed breasts.8 Therefore, it becomes more powerful that when Portrait of Madeleine appears in Apesh*t, Madeleine’s breast is obscured from the audience.
Besides including these derogatory tropes to depict Madeleine, Benoist utilizes Madeleine’s Black skin to demonstrate her own artistic abilities. Because 19th-century French artists were usually only trained to depict White skin, the rendering of Black skin became a foreign “skill” for the artist to master. Benoist accentuates Madeleine’s skin to demonstrate her skill and further exoticize her. Madeleine, therefore, becomes a vehicle of Benoist’s artistic exploration, a means towards becoming a better artist, and not an agent of her own portrait.
Beyoncé, however, works to accentuate and celebrate Black skin. The presence of whiteness governs the opening shots of the music video: a pale head draped by white fabric, white skin folds up close, and strands of white hair. The highlight of this whiteness is intentional; guiding viewers toward understanding an aesthetic and lack of color that dominates art. Additionally, Beyoncé chooses to dress the Black women in her music video in clothing that matches their skin. Instead of being highlighted by whiteness and exoticized like Madeleine, the women become one with their garments. Their clothes become an extension of their skin that celebrates them instead of othering them. Black skin, therefore, is exhibited freely at the Louvre by the dancers.
Beyoncé and the creative team behind “Apesh*t” clearly grasped the power imbalance between Benoist and Madeleine. They understood that although the painting was produced to transmit ideas of liberty in France, Madeleine became an instrument of a political agenda and not an esteemed sitter. Visual examination of Madeleine’s portrait reveals belittling tropes commonly associated with Black women. Nonetheless, Beyoncé—a monumentally successful Black female artist—uses her talent to subvert these messages and present Madeleine in a way that Benoist never could: as an active agent of her own portrait.
1 Alicia Caticha, “The Haitian Revolution: Art, Race, and Slavery”, (presentation, art history 350, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, October 6, 2021).
2 Susan Waller, "Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine," Smarthistory, September 26, 2018, Accessed October 28, 2021, https://smarthistory.org/benoist-portrait/.
3 Waller, "Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine."
4 Caticha, “The Haitian Revolution: Art, Race, and Slavery.”
5 James Smalls, “Slavery is a Woman: "Race," Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist's Portrait d'une négresse (1800),” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring04/286-slavery-is a-woman-race-gender-and-visuality-in-marie-benoists-portrait-dune-negresse-1800.
6 Smalls, “Slavery is a Woman: "Race," Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist's Portrait d'une négresse (1800).”
7 Smalls, “Slavery is a Woman: "Race," Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist's Portrait d'une négresse (1800).”
8 Smalls, “Slavery is a Woman: "Race," Gender, and Visuality in Marie Benoist's Portrait d'une négresse (1800).”
