On the Money: Presidential Portraiture and Power in D.C.
KEHINDE WILEY’S PORTRAIT of Barack Obama is in various respects quite different from the procession of presidential countenances in the National Portrait Gallery that you must traverse to get to it.
For one thing, it’s more popular with museum-goers. For another, it’s the only one that’s a picture of, and the only one that’s a picture by, a black person. And it feels very much of its moment—post-postmodern, we might say. Wiley’s complex repertoire of techniques and meanings—figurative, collage like, unrelentingly concerned with identity politics, stylistically eclectic but also coherent—is a pretty good summary of where art is now.
Despite the nowness, however, the Obama portrait also serves the same function as Gilbert Stuart’s full-length George Washington: rendering a person into a symbol of state power.
WILEY’S PRE-PRESIDENTIAL WORKS criticized inequalities and hierarchies of power as well as the way such hierarchies are frozen into the history of art. His 2005 painting Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps is a pointed critique of Jacques-Louis David’s heroic, neoclassical take on the same subject matter. The French emperor is replaced in the familiar equestrian composition with a black man.
Upstairs at the Portrait Gallery, near Amy Sherald’s image of Michelle Obama, is a huge Wiley painting of LL Cool J enthroned, almost photoshopped over a rococo wallpaper in red and gold. It has a dynamic and amusing quality; Wiley is an extremely intense and conscious colorist. His Obama is, in comparison, frozen in his dignity, given a muted, hieratic treatment that suggests a medieval Madonna—though the
