Whether a prophecy of doom or emancipation, the clash seems the cultural moment writ large

We, who were once symbolically remanded to the racial Salon des Refusés and exhibited as animals at the colonial fairs, have stormed the palace of the Occident and crowned ourselves victorious in that gilded place.

Houston Baker Jr. came up with a pithy chiastic phrase to describe how black artworks and writings negotiated this tension: “the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery.”

For Foucault, Las Meninas is much more than a simple representation of the infantas and court attendants of Velázquez’s royal patron, the king of Spain, Philip IV. It expresses the rise of European Man as a sovereign subject at the height of imperial and colonial power. Its famous trompe l’oeil presents Europe’s monarchical and aesthetic regimes simultaneously. Politics and art become overlapping and interchangeable expressions of absolute power. In this conception, Las Meninas isn’t merely an impressive painting of a powerful subject by a masterful painter; it is also symptomatic evidence of a historical process then unfolding. And that process was the arms race among Europe’s royal houses in their bid to plunder the Americas, initially via campaigns of extermination and the enslavement of indigenous peoples, and subsequently through the enslavement and deportation of Africans to the New World. Velázquez took a selfie of the entire idea of European mastery as it clicked into place. In his masterpiece, we see the rulers discovering how to make their own project legible to themselves. This is the nature of my power, the painting says, I am the natural subject of history, the center and master of the universe.

There is a common misconception that Foucauldian critique is a reductive reading of a work of art to show how it is merely a product of its time. It’s just the opposite: the idea is to show how time itself, historical epochs, or epistemes, are produced and organized by (and through) the language of art, science, and culture. Las Meninas is not simply a representation of sovereignty—it is a moment in the construction of the sovereign, of the entire Spanish empire. Consider this: a billionaire stamping his name on the outside wall of a museum doesn’t merely represent a philanthropic donation but expresses and justifies (one might even say launders) the sovereignty of the unregulated accumulation of private wealth. The contemporary art museum, with its wings and rotundas named for robber barons, is itself a keystone in our own aesthetic regime, one that mandates, reproduces, and further consolidates the nature of sovereignty, the order of things in our society.

I’m not simply interested in reminding the world of Pareja’s existence, or in complicating our reception of Velázquez, although those might be excellent ancillary benefits. Nor am I suggesting that Pareja’s painting is necessarily a neglected masterwork that secretly rivals the image of the Old Master. My question is this: Even if we wanted to, do we know how to read a slave’s “masterpiece”? I’m not asking whether a slave is capable of producing one, but rather what kinds of rhetorical and aesthetic claims such a work can make. What does it mean to apply the word “masterpiece,” originally referring to the culmination of a journeyman’s apprenticeship and acceptance into a commercial guild, to a black journeyman who knew the guild he was seeking admittance to existed in the first place by profiting from the fungibility of his own humanity, from the enslavement of his people? What did Juan de Pareja imagine he was doing when he painstakingly contributed his own entry to the history of European oil painting? Can we make sense of him in that moment? And further down the corridor of time, what can he tell us about our own?

Suppose I were to read Juan de Pareja’s Saint Matthew as carefully as Foucault does Velázquez’s Las Meninas. What can I say? Where will my discourse fit, or fail to fit? Foucault recognizes that a tour de force requires its analogue in writing, and dutifully obliges. What would be my mirroring gesture given the failed reception of my subject? Certainly, I’m not able to emulate an art historical discourse of hagiographic adulation. Such a move would already be understood as belated and therefore derivative. Moreover, it would be slotted neatly into a contemporary notion of redress or reparation. It would risk the whiff of appealing to white liberal guilt. Such readers would concede to my claims as a matter of tacit etiquette, a small price to pay for a relieved conscience. To put it another way, even if I were able to muster the rhetorical force of a T. S. Eliot rescuing a John Donne whose talent he believed had been unfairly discarded by his tradition, my claims would be suspect. Donne was never a slave, except to his appetites. The negligence Eliot had to overcome was essentially evaluative; it presented no fundamental epistemological or ontological difficulty. Pareja, by contrast, spent the greater portion of his life an African slave in Spain, owned by an ambitious artist who in life and in death overshadows him. Pareja presents complications before his brush even touches the canvas.

Only when we have raked the image over in this way can we allow ourselves to focus on the most obvious feature, one of undeniable interest: the presence of the slave in his own work. For Juan de Pareja (in a move from the master’s repertoire familiar in figures as distant as Giotto and as recent as Hitchcock) inserts a self-portrait in his work. We know this is an image of Pareja because of its obvious resemblance to the portrait of him that Velázquez originally produced in 1650, the one that now resides at The Met. On one level, in Saint Matthew, Pareja records for posterity his own impression of his likeness in the otherwise imagined biblical scene, a practice Renaissance painters indulged in typically on behalf of wealthy patrons who were duly inserted into the works they had commissioned the way stadiums and sporting events are “brought to you by” such and such corporate conglomerate.

The calling of Matthew is also known as his “vocation,” a word that reminds us here of the original etymological significance of a sacred interpellation, literally a calling from the divine.

Toni Morrison’s apothegm that “the function of freedom is to free someone else”?

THE TOOLS BELONGING TO what Audre Lorde called “the white fathers” are master frameworks that continue to shape the world we live in. But those same tools are always being picked up by others, by people who have stories to tell that their masters never suspected and audiences the masters don’t know how to reach. Lorde may be right that those tools will never be sufficient to accomplish a total revolution or completely dismantle the order of things. But the hand of the slave who wields the master’s tools inevitably transforms them. New keys can unlock new doors that open onto unsuspected basements. Something always changes even if it’s not always obvious at first sight. Juan de Pareja’s painting of Saint Matthew of Ethiopia may not be a masterpiece in the way that Las Meninas is. But these two artists thought about mastery in different ways, learned different lessons, sought out different conceptions of the truth in painting. Pareja, I am convinced, was attuned to some very subtle questions about the relationship between freedom, art, and the divine. He was driving at questions that Velázquez never even contemplated. Brilliant though he was, Velázquez was nonetheless limited by his position as master. There were some things very near to him, things in fact essential to his own success, and indeed to that of his royal patron, that he could not see. Velázquez had the tools of a master. He didn’t have the vision of the slave.