At Home He Feels Like A Tourist

Part 3 of 7

A canter through the history of luxury, consumption and desire

The White Marble Lie

How an aesthetic myth became a racial ideology — and what Kara Walker did about it

There is a museum in Frankfurt — the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung — that has spent the better part of four decades doing something deeply inconvenient to the history of Western art. Under the direction of Vinzenz Brinkmann, its researchers have been using ultraviolet light, X-ray fluorescence analysis, and raking light photography to reconstruct what ancient Greek and Roman sculpture actually looked like. Not what we imagine it looked like. Not what eighteen centuries of artistic tradition have taught us it looked like. What it actually, demonstrably, pigment-traceable looked like.

It looked vivid. An archer from the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina, reconstructed in full polychromy, wears a tunic of vivid scarlet and blue, armour decorated in gold and green, with skin tones corresponding to the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean. The Apollo Belvedere — celebrated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in 1764 as the pinnacle of human aesthetic achievement, the very image of serene rational beauty — would have been painted in warm ochres and reds, his hair touched with gold, his eyes a specific shade of dark brown. The Parthenon sculptures, so beloved in their current pallor, would have blazed with colour across the Athenian skyline. The ancient world did not do minimalism.

This is not a minor revision to art history. It is a foundational one. And the question it forces — why did we not know this, and why did those who suspected it stay quiet for so long — is the subject of this essay.

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The cleaning that wasn’t

The colours did not simply fade. Some survived, in traces, in protected recesses, in the microscopic analysis of stone surfaces, for centuries — visible to anyone who looked carefully enough. What happened to them was not the inevitable entropy of time. It was, in significant part, active removal.

Renaissance collectors, acquiring classical sculpture in Italy, encountered pieces that retained traces of their original pigment. These traces were understood as dirt — as the accretion of centuries that obscured the true beauty of the marble underneath. The cleaning of sculpture was not conservation in any modern sense. It was the pursuit of an aesthetic ideal that the sculpture itself, in its original form, did not share. The collectors were not finding the true thing beneath the corruption. They were creating a new thing and calling it the true thing.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the great age of the Grand Tour, when wealthy young Englishmen and Germans made their ritual pilgrimage to Rome and Athens and returned with sculptures, casts, and memories that formed the aesthetic sensibility of their class — the white marble had become a received truth. This was what ancient beauty looked like. This was the standard against which all other aesthetic traditions would be measured. And it was, as we now know, a fabrication. A beautiful, influential, consequential fabrication.

The pristine white was not found. It was made. And then it was used.

Winckelmann and the foundation of a lie

Johann Joachim Winckelmann is not a household name outside the history of art, but he should be. His 1764 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums — History of the Art of Antiquity — is the founding text of art history as a discipline, and it is built on the white marble that wasn’t there.

Winckelmann was a German scholar of modest origins who made his way to Rome, converted to Catholicism for the professional opportunities it offered, and spent the rest of his life in rapturous contemplation of classical sculpture. His prose, when describing the Apollo Belvedere or the Laocoön group, achieves a pitch of aesthetic ecstasy that reads, to a modern eye, as barely sublimated erotic feeling — which is, scholars now agree, exactly what it was. He was a gay man in a century when that was not survivable as a public identity, and classical sculpture provided an outlet.

But his emotional investment in these objects does not explain the influence of what he wrote about them. What made Winckelmann foundational was his argument that the white marble of classical sculpture embodied a specific set of values — serenity, rationality, harmony, the subordination of passion to reason — and that these values were both aesthetically supreme and culturally specific. They were the achievement of the Greeks and Romans. They were, by implication, the inheritance of the Europeans who had rediscovered and preserved them. And they were defined, above all, against what they were not: the colourful, the ornate, the emotional, the barbaric.

The non-European world — which used colour extensively, which did not share the particular Greek preference for idealised human proportion, which had entirely different and entirely sophisticated aesthetic traditions — was, in Winckelmann’s framework, primitive. Not yet arrived at the pinnacle that Greece represented. Looking at African sculpture, Indian temple carvings, or Chinese ceramics through his lens, you saw the absence of classical restraint, the absence of classical whiteness, as evidence of cultural inferiority. This is not a peripheral implication of his argument. It is central to it.

And Winckelmann’s argument was not made in a vacuum. It was made in the mid-eighteenth century, precisely when the transatlantic slave trade was at its peak, when European colonial empires were expanding across the globe, and when the ideological justification for the subordination of non-European peoples was being urgently required by the systems that were profiting from their exploitation. The aesthetics arrived at exactly the right moment to do exactly the right ideological work.

The colour that was scrubbed away

The Greeks and Romans did not have the same colour-based racism that emerged in early modern Europe. Their categories of human difference were based on geography, climate, and custom — not on skin colour as a fixed biological marker of worth. Homer uses the adjective white-armed to compliment aristocratic women, marking indoor femininity against outdoor masculine darkness. The Roman emperor Septimius Severus, born in Leptis Magna in modern Libya, was darker than most of the people he ruled. Nobody at the time appears to have found this remarkable.

What the early modern European collectors and scholars did was to retroject a modern binary — the white/black distinction that the Atlantic slave trade had made central to its moral economy — onto the ancient world. If the Greeks were the pinnacle of civilisation, and civilisation was now being defined as white, then the Greeks must be imagined as white. And the sculpture, stripped of its colour and gleaming in the galleries of Rome and London and Berlin, provided the visual confirmation.

The mechanism is precise and devastating: the colour was scrubbed from the statues in the name of revealing their true beauty; the true beauty was defined as white; the whiteness was then read back as evidence of the racial character of the civilisation that produced it; and that racial character was used to justify the subordination of colonised peoples who were building European wealth. A loop of self-confirming ideology, anchored in an object that had been physically altered to support the conclusion.

Brinkmann’s research at the Liebieghaus found that some sculptures appear to have had their pigment traces removed in the nineteenth century — not in the Renaissance cleaning, but later, when the ideological stakes of the white marble had become fully apparent. If this is correct, the cleaning was not merely an aesthetic preference. It was suppression of evidence.

The white marble is Benjamin’s commodity fetish at its most powerful: it conceals not just labour but ideology. The cleaning that produced it was not conservation. It was the construction of a racial aesthetic, dressed as the recovery of antiquity.

Paul Gilroy and the Black Atlantic

Before we get to Kara Walker, we need the intellectual framework that makes her work legible. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) is one of those books that, once read, makes it impossible to see the history of modernity in the same way again.

Gilroy’s central argument is that modernity — not just Black modernity, but modernity itself — was forged in the crucible of the slave trade. Between 1492 and 1820, roughly two-thirds of the people who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas were African. This was not a peripheral event in the history of the modern world. It was constitutive of it. The industrial capitalism that produced the wealth of the North Atlantic societies, the philosophical Enlightenment that provided their self-understanding, the aesthetic traditions that gave them their sense of beauty — all were produced in conditions that included, at their foundation, the systematic enslavement and exploitation of African people.

But Gilroy’s argument is not simply that the West was built on slavery — though it was. His more subtle and more productive point is about what was created in the process. The enslaved people who were transported across the ocean brought knowledge, languages, musical traditions, spiritual practices, aesthetic sensibilities. They encountered the cultures of their enslavers. Out of the forced encounter, something new was produced: a Black Atlantic culture that was neither simply African nor simply Western, but a hybrid forged in the specific conditions of the middle passage and the plantation.

And that hybrid culture — the music, the literature, the art, the philosophy of double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois named and Gilroy extended — is not a marginal addition to Western modernity. It is one of its central achievements. Jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop: these are not folk traditions that the mainstream was generous enough to notice. They are among the most significant artistic innovations of the twentieth century, produced by people whose ancestors were brought to the Americas in chains, and whose cultural contribution has been systematically undervalued, appropriated, and exploited by the mainstream that absorbed them.

We will return to that story of appropriation in Part Six, which deals specifically with Black music and the white industry that packaged and sold it. Here, the relevant point is this: the history of luxury goods cannot be told without telling the history of the people whose labour and whose culture made it possible. The white marble that celebrated the civilisation those systems served was not a neutral aesthetic tradition. It was part of the same argument.

Kara Walker and the dialectical image

In 2014, the Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — a decommissioned industrial building awaiting redevelopment as luxury condominiums — hosted an installation by the artist Kara Walker that put all of these threads together in a single image of such force that it has not left this author’s mind since first encountering it.

The installation was called A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. The full title is itself a work of art: dense, ironic, historically precise, and politically explicit in a way that the installation itself — which worked through image rather than argument — could afford not to be.

The centrepiece was a thirty-five-foot sphinx, coated in white sugar and sugar paste, dominating the vast dark space of the refinery. The figure combined two iconographic traditions that had no business being in the same body: the sphinx of Egyptian and Greek mythology — the most powerful, dangerous, and enigmatic figure in the classical bestiaries — and the Mammy figure of American racial caricature — the over-worked, hyper-sexualised, de-individualised Black woman who served at the centre of the plantation economy and whose image circulated through American popular culture from minstrelsy to Hollywood.

The sphinx was simultaneously the most powerful mythological figure in Western art history and the most degraded caricature of Black femininity. Both at once. In the same body. Coated in white.

Around the base of the sphinx were smaller figures — boy attendants made of resin and molasses, carrying baskets. They were deteriorating in real time: the heat of the building meant that their features were melting, their surfaces running, their forms becoming indistinct over the course of the installation. The figures that labour at the base of the monument are the ones who disappear. The monument remains.

The walls of the refinery were coated with ancient molasses — dark, thick, sweet-smelling, the residue of a century of sugar processing. The air smelled of burnt sugar. This was not a gallery space that had been neutralised to foreground the art. It was a space saturated with its own history, its own smell, its own residue. The building itself was the context.

A Subtlety refers to subtleties — the sugar sculptures made for the tables of the medieval and early modern wealthy, luxury table decorations enabled by enslaved labour. The white sugar is the white marble. The refinement is the erasure. The luxury object, sparkling and pure, is the product of a process that required the destruction of colour, of particularity, of the human presence of the person who made it.

And then there was the audience. Walker had anticipated and incorporated the response of her visitors into the work’s meaning. Many people — predominantly but not exclusively white visitors — responded to the figure’s exposed buttocks and breasts with selfie-taking, with cupping gestures, with poses of mock-sexual engagement. They photographed themselves groping the statue. They shared the photographs on social media.

Walker has said that this response did not surprise her. It was, she suggested, the work doing what it was designed to do: making visible the normalised sexual objectification of Black women’s bodies, the casual entitlement that the history of slavery had produced and that persists in different forms to the present. The visitors who took those photographs were not monsters. They were people responding to a figure in ways the culture had taught them were acceptable — and in doing so they were demonstrating precisely the argument the work was making.

The installation lasted five weeks. The building became luxury condominiums, as planned. The sugar sphinx was demolished. The molasses was cleaned from the walls. The site of a century of sugar processing — and, behind that, of centuries of the slave economy that made sugar processing profitable — became expensive apartments. The erasure was completed.

The connection — luxury, race, and the concealment

What Walker’s installation reveals, and what the white marble argument confirms, is that the luxury goods conversation cannot be separated from the racial history that produced the conditions for it. This is not a fashionable addition to the history. It is the argument itself.

The lapis lazuli, the Tyrian purple, the Venetian glass, the colonial spices, the Caribbean sugar — all produced through systems of coercion and exploitation that required, as their ideological foundation, the belief that the people doing the producing were less fully human than the people doing the consuming. The luxury object’s beauty was always, in part, beauty purchased at the cost of someone else’s dignity. The commodity fetishism concealed not just labour but the specific violence done to specific bodies.

And the aesthetic tradition that celebrated the beauty of the white marble — that built a discipline, a canon, an entire conception of what civilisation meant, on the fiction of classical whiteness — was doing the same concealment work in the cultural realm that the colonial economy was doing in the economic realm. Both required that the contribution of non-European people be made invisible. Both required that the product be presented as arising naturally from European genius rather than from the enforced labour of people who were not permitted to be geniuses.

The Liebieghaus exhibitions — Bunte Götter, Painted Gods — are doing something politically significant when they restore colour to the white marble. They are not merely correcting an art historical error. They are dismantling an ideology — showing that the aesthetic tradition used to define Western civilisation and justify its claims to superiority was built on a falsification. The statues were never white. The civilisation they were conscripted to represent was never as pure, as unified, as simply European, as the tradition claimed.

Walker’s sugar sphinx does the same thing from the other direction. She does not correct the historical record in the manner of the art historians. She uses the images — the sphinx, the Mammy, the sugar, the refinery — to make visible what the record concealed. She puts the concealed thing right in the middle of the room, thirty-five feet tall, coated in white, and invites you to look.

Benjamin would have recognised this as a dialectical image. The sugar sphinx arrests time — makes the 1820s and 2014 and the present moment flash against each other, illuminating a connection that the normal flow of history keeps separate. You stand in front of it and you understand something about the relationship between luxury and race and the beautiful thing and the enslaved person who made it possible — something that no amount of historical argument could have produced as efficiently, or as uncomfortably.

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The white marble was never white. The sugar was never pure. The luxury object — from the lapis lazuli to the Birkin bag — has always carried within it the history of who made it and under what conditions. The beauty is real. The concealment is real. Both things are true simultaneously.

The question of what we do with this knowledge — as consumers, as citizens, as people who like beautiful things and live in a world that produces them through systems we would prefer not to examine — is not one that can be answered here. It is one that this series will circle around, from different angles, without fully resolving. Full resolution would be dishonest. The history is too long and the present is too complicit for clean conclusions.

What can be said is this: the luxury object that conceals its conditions of production is doing something actively dishonest, in a way that goes beyond the ordinary dishonesty of commerce. It is trading on the concealment of specific human suffering. And the aesthetic tradition that provided the vocabulary for judging beauty — that told us what is refined and what is primitive, what is classical and what is barbaric — is not a neutral tradition. It was built, in significant part, to serve the interests of the people who were profiting from the system that produced the beautiful things. The white marble is not just a mistake. It is an argument. And the argument is still running.

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A NOTE ON METHOD

This essay draws on conversations with Claude (Anthropic’s AI) as the research and synthesis engine, and on: Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944); Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity (1764); the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung polychromy research project, Frankfurt; Kara Walker, A Subtlety, Domino Sugar Refinery, Brooklyn (2014); and scholarship on the racial politics of classical reception. The thinking is collaborative; the voice, selection, and responsibility are the author’s own.

Next: Part Four — The Reckoning: LVMH’s fall, the superfake Rolex, and what happens when the phantasmagoria fails.