Let's take a look at the character of Mickalene Thomas.

Who is she?

Why did she want to come face to face?

Mickalene Thomas was born in 1971, in New Jersey - "on the same day as Alice Neel", January 28 -.

A quick aside - if you haven't yet seen Alice Neel's exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it's not too late, although you can of course watch the video I devoted to it.

Mickalene Thomas, develops a work where questions of gender and race, and artistic questions are inseparable.

Known for addressing black beauty, desire and power in her art, her work frequently critiques the white male-dominated art historical canon.

The artist has developed a very personal vocabulary of Black eroticism, a vision of Black sexuality and Black queer aesthetics centered on happy themes of leisure, joy and thought.

Mickalene Thomas' work blends art historical rereadings, a taste for pop culture and a strong political dimension.

Using a variety of technical processes, she composes scenes - sometimes with references to painters of the past, from Ingres to Picasso - that she installs in reinvented domestic environments.

Mickalene Thomas replaces the African-American woman in paintings and collages made of juxtapositions and materials with an assumed Baroque and Rococo approach. The artist claims both the legacy of the posed models and portraits of 19th century painters including Ingres, Courbet and Manet, as well as the ancestry of 20th century painting; Picasso and Matisse at the beginning of the century, and later David Hockney. His paintings are preciously adorned with rhinestones (rather kitschy) and enamel paint; afros hairstyles architect the makeup and jewelry of the models, acrylic laid in transparency glosses the black skins and makes the forms abstract when it is in flat. The collages were developed from personal photographic resources and scanned images

So why did she want this face to face?

Her stay in Giverny was an eye-opener. "Giverny gave her the opportunity to reflect on Monet's compositional work and to study landscape, which was not a central genre in his work...The painter's biography also offered her a story of freedom, of rebellion against the norms of his time 
Each of her works draws from art history and popular culture, while critiquing its assumptions to offer a more complex representation of femininity, sexuality, desire and power in a dialogue with Monet's work.
But why did you decide to come here in 2011?
"One: to go to a country I didn't know.
Two: to go where Manet, Monet or Matisse painted and feel the light and the landscapes they painted.
Three: for the happiness of a "black American woman" who comes from the United States to Paris, where so many African American artists came in the 20th century, were accepted and were able to work. And that's what happened to me. During that time, I was free to create in a peaceful environment without having to justify my identity, my gender or my life. I was free to look out the window and make a landscape if I wanted to. Free like Monet. So she offers her own personal vision of the spaces the Impressionist artist designed for himself - the house, the dining room, the water garden - and her own contemporary interpretation of the famous Déjeuner sur l'herbe, first painted by Manet and then reinterpreted by Monet.

For this contemporary counterpoint, Mickalene Thomas offers three new large-scale collages, a monumental painting, and a site-specific immersive installation that reprises her 2016 video/sculpture, "Me As Muse." These works represent the breadth of the visual language the artist has developed over the past twenty years while revisiting her time as artist-in-residence at Claude Monet's home in Giverny, France, in 2011.

In the collages, Thomas makes herself at home in the rooms and outdoor environments that Monet designed and was inspired by. Adding his trademark rhinestones and other shiny elements, Thomas transforms Monet's spaces by making them his own.

Photographs of Monet's garden form the background for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe: les Trois Femmes avec Monet (2022), Thomas's radical and celebratory response to Déjeuner sur l'herbe, first painted by Édouard Manet in 1862-63 and then reinterpreted by Monet in 1865-66. Thomas replaces the white figures with three black women who look confidently at the viewer. Their hair is proudly worn au naturel or coiffed in intricate braids, while their clothing evokes the 1970s - the height of the civil rights and Black is Beautiful movements in the United States.

The garden reappears when Thomas updates "Me as Muse" (2016) with photographs and faux floral arrangements, providing a backdrop for video screens on which the artist uses her own naked body to critique the odalisque tradition in Western art. Recordings of the birds of Giverny are combined with the voice of singer Eartha Kitt, an inspirational figure for Thomas, enumerating the mistreatment she has suffered throughout her life.

Thomas' innovative and very personal response to the man Monet and the artist Monet can only be his own, and I respect that view, as I do everyone else's.

So it is fortunately not a face to face, but a personal reflection of the artist in relation to his stay in Giverny.

 My residence in Giverny has marked me a lot," she reports.  I perceived essential notions on how to compose a painting, and especially how to translate this feeling of rebellion that animates artists.

Transcending her aesthetic influences and evoking the invisibility of black bodies in a subjective art history, Mickalene Thomas' work is politically involved by placing the body of the black American woman as the central object at the heart of the painting. The figure occupies the entire space to assert itself with panache as one of the essential components of American society. In addition to these rigorously framed postures, the artist instills in these women a dynamic of seduction and attraction that passes through a formal approach of great precision: the complex mastery of rhythm, form, color and pattern manages to build a space to immediately deconstruct the possibilities of reality.

In my opinion, it should not be seen as an exhibition but rather as an essay.  I see this artist as a researcher. Contrary to the Joan Mitchell exhibition, which proposes a real face to face, which was not desired by the artist herself: the abstract expressionist artist Mitchell has always been reluctant to any association with Monet.

This exhibition is the result of the will of the artist Mickaele Thomas.

This is why the term "contemporary counterpoint" is so apt, and the term "with Monet" in the title indicates the recognition of Monet's legacy in his artistic rebellion and all that he brought to the artistic transmission.

Elodie Couturier, Expertisez.com

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