Dan Morrell: In October of last year, curator Denise Murrell’s (MBA 1980) exhibition opened at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery, most of it now on display at Paris's Musée d'Orsay. The Wallach exhibition, titled Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, focused on the portrayal of black figures in modern and contemporary art. The New Yorker called the show “a memorizing display, deeply felt, accurate, and necessary,” while the Wall Street Journal deemed it “sweeping, ambitious, and absolutely imperative.”

For Murrell, who spent 25 years working in finance before earning her PhD in art history, it is a culmination of her second career. And in this episode of Skydeck, Murrell talks to associate editor, Julia Hanna, about what drew her to the arts, how her work brought some of these forgotten figures to light, and how her finance career prepared her for assembling an art exhibition.

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Julia Hanna: Denise, can you just tell me about the process by which you began thinking about a career in art history? You worked in finance for 25 years. I just wondered, could you give me a sense of that journey? That's quite a transition.

Denise Murrell: It is definitely a transition, but it wasn't a sudden transition. I actually think it was pretty organic and it unfolded over time. I finished HBS in 1980 and worked for the first seven years of my career at what was then known as Citicorp Investment Bank, first in New York, then in London. Then I came back, and for over 15 years, I worked at Institutional Investor. The last 10 of those years were as managing director of a research group that I helped to launch. By the time I was at Institutional Investor, I was not working for a financial institution, but our clients were the heads of equity, the heads of sell-side research, sales and trading in investment banks.

So, you have this career, which I really enjoyed. There were a couple of transitional points with the anxiety of restructurings, etc., but for the most part, the content of the work, the context in which I worked, the issues that I was dealing with, the unfolding of the global financial markets, as well as the political and economic situation that shaped especially the emerging markets of Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia. And the last big project that I worked on was in the aftermath of the first election of Mandela in South Africa.

So, all of that was exhilarating to me in many ways. I traveled extensively. So, one way that I became intrigued with art was that perhaps 30%, 40% of the year for over a dozen years, I had two- to three-week trips in Europe, Asia once-a-year, Latin America once a year, etc. And with that type of extended travel, you do have downtime on weekends, during weekdays, and browsing museums was one of my favorite things to do. Spending time repeatedly, several times a year, and then over a period of a number of years, in the major museums of London, Paris, most other countries, of Europe, and then elsewhere across the US. And just kind of having this dawning awareness of this episodic presence of portrayals of people of color in the permanent galleries, then seeing very intense treatments of various aspects of these portrayals in temporary exhibitions.

The Studio Museum in Harlem was the first museum that I actually had a paid membership in, but also MoMA, the Whitney, the Met, there are groups in these museums where the members are able to do things like visit artist studios, especially studios of emerging artists, go to the art fairs with a curator who points out the rising stars, the blockbuster hits, etc, guided tours of exhibitions in museums with the curators. And that was, to some extent, just social, but many of us did become very engaged with the artists that we met, the collectors. It was my first exposure to curators and how they work and how exhibitions come together. All of these things just kind of fed into a growing curiosity, spending more and more of my free time participating in these activities on a very limited basis, buying the work of emerging artists, especially emerging African American artists at the beginning of their careers in, say, the early 90s, and then watching them become global superstars. And all of that led to a mounting curiosity that by the late 1990s, I decided I wanted to study art history informally.

Hanna: Murrell enrolled in a few evening classes at Hunter College. After realizing how much she enjoyed sharing her love of art with others, she began to earn credits toward a master's degree, giving gallery talks and lectures along the way, even as she continued to work full time. When a restructuring at Institutional Investor offered the opportunity to think about what she might want to do next, Murrell took the plunge, applying to the PhD program at Columbia University and beginning her studies in the fall of 2007.

Sitting in a darkened auditorium, Murrell had a flash of insight when Éduoard Manet's 1863 painting Olympia flashed on the screen. Considered a foundational painting for a new era of modern art, it portrays a nude white prostitute reclining on her bed, while off to the side a black servant holds a bouquet of flowers, presumably a gift from one of Olympia's clients. The discussion focused on the white prostitute, but nothing was said about the black woman off to the side. Murrell would later discover the model who posed for the painting had a name, Laure, as noted in Manet's journal.

In that moment, Murrell found the topic of what would become her dissertation and later an international exhibition.

Murrell: It's like I saw an opening. I saw an opportunity to contribute to the field and work in a way that no one else had done before me to an extent that could potentially change the way that we thought about that particular period.

Hanna: Talk a little bit about what it's like to meet with folks at other museums and ask them to loan you a painting for an exhibit. I imagine that being challenging. In some ways, you're kind of asking them to release this very valuable baby in their collection to you.

Murrell: The process of convincing museums to lend major works of art is very much analogous to the work I did first in finance where you are proposing transactions, acquisitions, private placements, public offerings, etc, to corporate clients. It's a process of long-term relationship building, but it is first a process of upfront confidence-building. I thought very carefully about how I approached each major institution. I sought out introductions. I was very fortunate that I was able to pull together a small group of very senior curators who had deep experience in this particular field, who were willing to make these introductions.

And then the whole process of presenting. I try to think about ways of presenting the most compelling images upfront and defining them or presenting them in juxtapositions and scenarios that could allow the potential lender to visualize how exciting this display could be in the galleries. Also, trying to articulate a vision for the exhibition that would help to draw broader audiences for their works.

Hanna: In 2018, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today opened at Columbia's Wallach Art Gallery. After years of work, Murrell could watch as visitors from the Wallach's Harlem neighborhood and others from across the country studied and discussed the works of art she loved and had thought about for so many years.

When the show closed in February, over 90% of the art Murrell had selected for the Columbia show traveled to France for an extended exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay. There, they joined other works selected by the Paris museum's curators. When the exhibition opened in March, officials announced that some of the paintings portraying supposedly anonymous figures had been retitled with the names of their models. The French artist, Marie-Guillemine Benoist's Portrait of a Negress, for example, became Portrait of Madeleine. "For more than 200 years, there had never been an investigation to discover who she was, something that was recorded at the time," Murrell told the press.

Murrell: The portrait, which is now titled Portrait of Madeleine, that opens the Orsay show is a direct precedent for the images of Laure by Manet that opened the show in New York. Formerly, it's a visually compelling painting, but it was also the beginning of this project of renaming these portrayals of black women that I had developed around Manet's portrayal of Laure in New York. This is the portrait that he made of the model who posed as the maid in Olympia, and I used a lot of formal and social analysis to suggest that the name of that painting, which is Portrait d’une négresse, négresse bring the French word for black woman, a term that is a racialized, generic, and in many ways pejorative term.

I pointed out that Manet himself had told us who Laure was, had described her as une très belle négresse, a very beautiful black woman. And he had painted her in a way that picked up on a lot of the painting style that ultimately became Impressionism of a very specific individual. Orsay embraced that idea at the very beginning of their show with this very well-known portrait by Benoist that came to them from the Louvre. There had been some recent scholarship that showed that the artist had in fact indicated in the household journals of her family that she had named two of her servants and mentioned that one of them had been sitting for this picture that she was making.

So, the Orsay president actually called the Louvre president by her own account at this opening event, and they discussed it and they decided, okay, let's move away from the racialized term négresse or femme noire, the more recent term used to describe a black woman in French, and simply rename this painting Portrait of Madeleine. The was done for a number of other prominent black models throughout the 19th and early 20th Century, and I think that's one of the most lasting impacts of the show.

Hanna: Yeah. And hearing you talk about your work and all of these paintings that you get to interact with on a daily basis and really dive into, I can imagine the answer to this question, but I'd be curious to hear it in your own words. What is it that you find especially rewarding about this career change that you've made?

Murrell: What do I do as a curator? It is your job to see new exhibitions, to visit museums not just in your city, but around the country, throughout the world, really, to gain an understanding of what images are there and how they're presented, and to have a professional view of to what extent does this reflect my understanding of the full reality of the societies that these images represent? And what knowledge, what experience, what perspective can I bring to broaden these presentations? That's what I do. That's what my job is. It's just something that is endlessly interesting to me.

And then there's also the sense that I can really make a contribution to developing the values of tolerance of people from disparate backgrounds, finding a common language, a common way to value and respect and appreciate our pluralistic societies, and to help people find a way to move forward both in their lives and in their career choices around this set of values of inclusivity and diversity as a strength. I just think that the work made by artists can contribute to this kind of common understanding, and I just feel very privileged to be able to help advance that type of common understanding and appreciation.

Joy. The joy of learning, the joy of education, the joy of pursuing ideas, of admiring beauty but also accepting the challenge of difficult ideas as presented over the ages by artists.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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