Portrait Symbol Analysis

Axel Olsen’s portrait of Helga Crane symbolizes the way in which European people often treat blackness as an exotic sexual commodity. Axel, a wealthy and eccentric artist, paints Helga’s portrait while Helga is living in Copenhagen with her Danish family. Helga is a mixed-race woman who spends her life seeking a place to fit in. After living in Harlem for a while and suppressing the white side of her identity, she moves to Copenhagen, but soon finds that her family only want to exoticize her blackness. The portrait is a highly objectifying depiction of Helga as a voluptuous black woman and reflects Axel’s attraction to Helga, which is bound up with the idea of wanting to possess something dangerous, sexual, and rare. Axel is convinced he has captured Helga’s true likeness, but what he captures is actually a representation of Helga that she wants to escape. All she wants to do is fit in—but among the white community, she’ll always be an outsider, a “tragic mulatta” who will never be seen as white and will be exoticized and objectified by white people.