Source: Dallas News
The U.S. was rather late in establishing a National Portrait Gallery — and in creating the conditions for commissioning official portraits of presidents and first ladies. Sadly, the National Portrait Gallery’s able staff has little to do with the selection of artists or even with the framing of the portraits.
Presidential power trumps that of mere curators and directors of art museums.So, it is not often that the unveiling of an official painting of a president and first lady would attract the attention of a regional art critic. Most of them are by competent and utterly unimportant portrait painters for whom the contemporary art scene holds no interest. But that changed Monday with the unveiling of the official portraits of former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.
There is little doubt that the Obamas were the most stylish and sophisticated first couple since the Kennedys and, as powerful individuals in their respective roles, the Obamas elected to each choose a different painter, thus breaking the tradition of commissioning official portraits from one — always white and always male — artist.
But nothing is typical about the Obamas. They were the first African-American couple in the White House, and nothing is typical about their portraits. The Obamas selected artists of African descent, and each selected an artist of their same gender.
Amy Sherald portrayed Michelle Obama, making Sherald the first female artist of any race in the history of official portraits.
If any official presidential portraits are “politically correct,” it is there.The portraits are by artists widely recognized in the art world — a far cry from the conventional painters favored by earlier presidents and their wives. Even the savvy Jacqueline Kennedy chose the competent, but unremarkable, society portrait painter Aaron Shikler, who also painted Nancy Reagan, and no art critic or art historian worth his or her salt would ever consider writing about those thoroughly unexceptional, if conventionally beautiful, portraits.
Kehinde Wiley and Sherald are another matter altogether. We in North Texas know Wiley well; a large retrospective organized by the Brooklyn Museum made a local stop at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where he demonstrated the art of empowerment by portraying ordinary African-Americans dressed as wealthy rappers and pop stars against jazzy, colorful backgrounds.
By giving his subjects the royal treatment, Wiley glories in the beauty of contemporary black life juxtaposed with the trappings of traditionally white art history.
Sherald’s aesthetic is as “cool” as Wiley’s is “hot,” and her visual solution to the representation of “black” skin is to render it in varying shades of gray. Younger and less well-known than Wiley, she has shaped a career in Baltimore, Md., that has been given a real boost by Michelle Obama, in a manner familiar to fashionistas who often learned about young American dress designers when the first lady wore their creations.
Let’s consider the portraits one at a time, since they are different in size and visual character. Wiley is…
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