Jay-Z’s 2013 video for his single ‘Picasso Baby’ was filmed at New York’s Pace Gallery, and starred Marina Abramović among other art world celebrities. Nor is it the first time that they have used the gallery as a filming location. It’s not the first time the couple have posed in front of the Louvre’s paintings – in October 2014 they were photographed with their child Blue Ivy alongside several museum pieces by the artist Awol Erizku (many of which return again in the video).
The video returns to the Mona Lisa for a final time, before the duo turn around to face it. This deeply ambiguous portrait of an unknown black woman, wearing a hooped earing with a white scarf veiling her head (the video crops out her bare breast) is a rare work in the Louvre’s collection – painted by a woman after the first abolition of slavery in France, and featuring a sole person of colour. While Beyoncé sings ‘I can’t believe we made it,’ the video surveys a whole host of other celebrated works, including Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), depicting French soldiers struggling for survival after being shipwrecked off the coast of Senegal, and perhaps most intriguingly, Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress (1800). ‘Apeshit’ also lingers on the architectural details of the museum itself, from the ceiling of the regal Apollo gallery to the controversial pyramid courtyard designed by I.M. The video takes in millennia-old masterpieces – the Hellenistic marble sculpture The Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BCE) is a recurring point – as well as a granite sphinx from ancient Egypt (c.2600 BCE) and the iconic Venus de Milo (100 BCE), in front of which Beyoncé sways in a nude bodysuit. And a shot of his Portrait of Madame Récamier (1800) – a depiction of a famous Parisian socialite – with two black women in headwraps seated beneath, is also included.
David’s works Oath of the Horatii (1784) and The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) are both nodded to. The official court painter to Napoleon features heavily elsewhere in the video. Meanwhile dancers form a line in front of Jacques-Louis David’s The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine (1805–07) – with the empress’s crown hovering just above Beyoncé’s own head.īeyoncé and Jay-Z, ‘Apeshit’, 2018, film still. ‘Apeshit’ begins with Jay-Z and Beyoncé, dressed in silken, pastel green and pink suits, posing in front of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c.1503–06) – the piece returns throughout the video, including a shot behind a woman combing a man’s hair with an afro pick. Taking in the Louvre’s iconic masterpieces over the course of six minutes, through synchronized dance sequences and long camera pans, the film isn’t just a tour of art history’s greatest hits, but makes a deeper political point about the marginalization of bodies of colour in the Western cultural canon.ĭirected by Ricky Saiz (co-head designer of Supreme), the video tracks across the Louvre’s galleries and plaza, constantly drawing attention to the artworks’s (and elite institution’s) celebration of the white, largely male genius – and the choreography of bodies of colour beneath. But the accompanying music video is even more surprising. Beyoncé and Jay-Z shocked fans when they released the album Everything is Love over the weekend, while kicking off their world tour in London. Given free reign of the Louvre, you’d hope the Carters would have had more adventurous taste.In another heartstopping moment for pop culture, pop music’s power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z (the Carters) have released a music video for their latest album’s lead single ‘Apeshit’ – filmed in complete secrecy last month at Paris’s Louvre Museum.
How much more compelling and challenging would it have been to see shots of Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the Pavillon des Sessions, where the Louvre lumps together artifacts from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania? Or amid the Assyrian reliefs in its Department of Near Eastern Antiquities at a time when the Assyrian artistic heritage continues to be threatened in Iraq and Syria? It’s indisputably striking (and amazing) to see Beyoncé at the center of a line of dancers moving in perfect synchronicity beneath David’s “Coronation of Napoleon,” but it also seems like a pretty obvious pick. Rather than familiar examples of European painting and Greco-Roman statuary, why not pose more difficult questions about what’s in the coffers of European museums? The shots of Benoist’s “Portrait of a Black Woman” and those in which the couple flanks the Great Sphinx of Tanis begin to hint at such issues, but more could have done in this vein. Beyoncé and Jay-Z in front of the Great Sphinx of Tanisīut the video also represents something of a missed opportunity.