Barbara Chase-Riboud

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

Fifty years after her most recent solo exhibition in France, a survey of the artist’s commanding oeuvre shows concurrently in eight Paris institutions.

Barbara Chase-Riboud: Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré (Every Time a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released), installation view. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Pictured, left and right walls: White Drawings, 1973–2023. Center, foreground: Black Standing Women of Venice series, 1969–2020.

Barbara Chase-Riboud: Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré (Every Time a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released), curated by Erin Jenoa Gilbert and Donatien Grau, multiple venues, Paris, France,
through January 13, 2025

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Late one morning on a Wednesday in October, blazing sunshine filled the gallery where eight of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s delicately embroidered drawings are hanging in the Palais de Tokyo—one of many institutions in Paris currently hosting a wide-ranging survey of the artist’s oeuvre. Chase-Riboud began making these drawings in 1973, taking rectangular sheets of thick watercolor paper, pricking small holes in them to create geometric grids, and then stitching lengths of silk thread to create loops, tangles, and meandering lines. Patterns in the material seem to appear and break apart, like lines of text trailing off, trees in a vanishing forest, or forms of elongated human figures taking shape but just as soon disappearing. Made of white thread on white paper and titled White Drawings, they run no risk of fading from the exposure to blasts of near-winter sunlight. But their beauty in the face of harsh conditions perfectly captures what a public encounter with Chase-Riboud’s work can do. It can change with the weather. It can take you in one direction or another depending on the clues in the room.

The White Drawings (which span up to 2023) are placed on black-painted walls surrounding seven of Chase-Riboud’s Black Standing Women of Venice (1969–2020), a series of regal bronze sculptures arranged on the floor in a pyramidal formation. Each is tall and rippled, with four rectangular slabs stacked in a vertical column and variations on a central crevice running through them from top to bottom. All are dedicated to female poets, from ancient to medieval times, most of them forgotten. Taken together, the forms nod to Egyptian obelisks, Chinese funerary steles, Alberto Giacometti, and Constantin Brâncuși. In conversation with the drawings, they might lead you to think about materials, abstraction, the politics of memorialization, or the balance struck by a visual artist who is also an accomplished novelist and poet. The strength of this particular pairing raises inevitable questions about the exhibition overall. Is this the show Chase-Riboud deserves? Or do so many locations spread her work too thin, diminishing its power by severing the connections among pieces?

Barbara Chase-Riboud: Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré (Every Time a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released), installation view. Courtesy Musée du Louvre. © Musée du Louvre, A. Viger. Pictured: Cleopatra’s Bed, 1997.

Named for both a single poem and a collection published in 2014, Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré (Every Time a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released) has scattered Chase-Riboud’s poems, sculptures, and works on paper to eight sites in six arrondissements of Paris. Two large pieces from her Cleopatra series (1973–2003), presenting a cascade of tiny cast-bronze plaques wired together but draped like supple fabric, have been tucked into different parts of the Louvre. One is in the Egyptian galleries, the other in the Greco-Roman rooms, not far from the Venus de Milo. Another sculpture, Colonne d’or (1973), has been raised high above the Louvre’s courtyard to sit on a plinth beneath I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid. At the Musée d’Orsay, in the Salon de l’horloge, located not far from Édouard Manet’s epochal Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), a grouping of aluminum and silk wall works circle an installation of Chase-Riboud’s Les baigneurs (Bathers) (ca. 1972). That installation echoes back to the tall black steles at the Palais de Tokyo, except that here, the slabs are gleaming silver and laid out four-by-four on the floor. Another configuration of sculptures, ranging from the art historical Matisse’s Back in Twins (1967/1994) to the explicitly political Malcolm X #19 (2017), is on view at the Centre Pompidou. The Philharmonie de Paris is showing her 2021 tribute to Josephine Baker, featuring muscular red cords strung from an armature of black bronze.

Barbara Chase-Riboud: Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré (Every Time a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released), installation view. Courtesy Musée d’Orsay. © Barbara Chase-Riboud / Cnap. Pictured: Les baigneurs (Bathers), ca. 1972.

Chase-Riboud was born in Philadelphia in 1939. Despite a harrowing case of polio that briefly landed her in an iron lung, her early life was a litany of achievements. Raised by her mother and paternal grandmother, she was homeschooled for a time. Then she went to art school, graduate school, and, in 1957, won a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome. There, she met an eccentric couple who convinced her to venture beyond Europe. She agreed to accompany them on a voyage, but as soon as they pulled into the port of Alexandria, the couple ditched her, leaving Chase-Riboud to explore Egypt on her own.

In Cairo, she met the Magnum photographer René Burri. He took an indelible portrait of her—chin leveled, gaze steadied, arms crossed Wakanda-style—in the Valley of the Kings. When Chase-Riboud moved to Paris in 1961, Burri introduced her to his Magnum colleague Marc Riboud. Within a year, they married and traveled extensively together to India, China, Russia, Cuba, and then to Algeria, in 1969, when Riboud was sent on assignment to photograph Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers during the first (and only) Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. If Egypt represented the first major breakthrough in Chase-Riboud’s work—adding monumentality to the small-scale bone sculptures she was making in the late 1950s, influenced by Giacometti and Surrealism—then Algeria represented the second. It was there that she connected lost-wax casting—a technique she had learned at art school in the US and played around with at a foundry in Italy—to its origins in the Kingdom of Benin.

From that point on, Chase-Riboud’s sculptures have articulated a bold, clear language of abstraction to address the messiest of traumatic and violent histories. Like her best-selling novels about historical figures such as Sally Hemings or Sarah Baartman (better known as the Hottentot Venus), or her poems paying tribute to everyone from enslaved sisters in Zanzibar to the modernist sculptor Louise Nevelson, Chase-Riboud’s artworks are powerfully revisionist histories in the best possible sense.

Barbara Chase-Riboud: Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré (Every Time a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released), installation view. Courtesy Palais de la Porte Dorée. © Anne Volery. Pictured, center: Zanzibar Gold, 1974–75.

That may be one reason why Quand un nœud est dénoué, un dieu est libéré, despite the logistical nightmare of diffusing such art so far and wide, somehow succeeds. For anyone else, it would have been a disaster, and a missed opportunity to present the full spectrum of an artist’s work in a concentrated blockbuster retrospective. But according to the curators, the idea stemmed from Chase-Riboud herself. She’s been visiting these museums for sixty years and knows their collections thoroughly. For her, the dialogue is intense and ongoing. For them, the eight-institutional-treatment is new, another first for Chase-Riboud’s record, and a baldly strategic attempt to bend contemporary art to issues of cultural patrimony. Clearly, the exhibition is corrective, honoring an artist in her eighties who has lived in France since 1961 but hasn’t had a solo museum show in the country since 1974. More importantly, it demonstrates the extreme self-confidence that underlies everything Chase-Riboud does.

Consider the demands she is making here. Viewers must plow through the Louvre, Pompidou, and the Musées d’Orsay, Guimet, and Quai Branly. To do so means taking in, along the way, the abject cruelties of colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, courtesy Quai Branly’s parallel (and impressively self-critical) exhibition on zombies from French West Africa to Haiti to schlock Hollywood horror. It means cringing through the Musée d’art moderne’s show on art in the atomic age, adjacent to the Palais de Tokyo, including images of how France used Algeria as a nuclear test site well past independence. It means sifting through the discomfiting politics of the encyclopedic museum and the wildly reductive stories of modernism told by national collections. At the Palais de la Porte Dorée, built for the colonial exhibition of 1931 and karmically tainted since, it means slogging through brutal histories of emigration and immigration, from and to France, cueing all manner of racism, sexism, and religious strife, and from there, tarrying with two commanding sculptures from Chase-Riboud’s Zanzibar series (1970–75). She is there and everywhere, having her say.

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic based in Geneva.