Amy Sherald
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018
Oil on linen
Courtesy: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
THESE WALLS CAN TALK
WESLEY MORRIS
The best way to experience Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama—Kehinde Wiley’s presidential portrait of Barack Obama—is to trek to it. It lives in Washington at the National Portrait Gallery, as do most official paintings of American presidents, and to find his, you have to make your way past everybody else’s. And if you’ve gone to Washington (perhaps all that way to Washington) to see this portrait, your instinct (or sense of politics or American history [or limited time!]) might tell you to skip past everybody else (Andrew Jackson can kiss my Black ass). But suppress it. There’s a case to be made for taking the long way. For one thing, the long way generates situational anticipation for your main attraction. Before you’d left the house, you’d have known what Wiley’s Obama looks like—vivid and leafy and weird. So why not soak in the ordinary drabness and repetition of the 43 dudes before him? Why not let the Portrait Gallery tell you a story? Because that’s the other thing: The story is pretty good.
The exhibit takes up about four large halls, and several of the pieces are large, too. And the Whiteness of the leadership becomes the story, but since you’ve come all this way, you can also probably savor the irony of where you’ll wind up, that these memorials in oil and gouache pay tribute to 43 stewards of a country that legally spared itself the hassle of having to imagine the 44th, a country that stole two-fifths of Black humanity and did all the shitty things to Black people that you know it did. The closer you get to Wiley’s portrait, knowing that you’re getting closer, feeling the approach, the more intense your acrimony—or, perhaps, your acrimonious amusement. Then you get there, to the slab of a wall upon which it hangs, near Reagan and Clinton and the two Bushes, and you round the wall to face it, and 43 lemons make quite a cup of lemonade.
Wiley’s portrait is so unlike what precedes it that it feels as much like a moral rebuke as an aesthetic antidote. No more autumnal solemnity, no more dead leaves but the living ones of spring, of salads, or salad days. Instead of brown backgrounds and brown furniture, just brown skin. There’s no way to be prepared for this thing in person. You will behold it and want to cry. For the distance you might have traveled to see it. For the distance Black people have traveled. We came all this way. There’s no preparation for its physical bigness or its science-fictional brightness. Bring shades. Bring a parasol.
Barack Obama is of a piece with Wiley’s other gloriously Edenic aggrandizements of Blackness. This one, of course, is also of a piece with the space that contains it, positioned so as to be symbolically ambivalent about the long, grim national history that led up it. Obama faces us. But his back, for now, is to his ancestors.
Kehinde Wiley’s portrait was announced as a twofer. Barack chose him. And Michelle Obama went with Amy Sherald. They were unveiled in a kind of media tandem, as well. And not everybody liked the trademark and imagination of Wiley’s. But Sherald’s vision of Michelle really seemed to bug people. It had no life, no fun, no Blackness. It’s true that the skin of Sherald’s Obama isn’t brown. In a reproduction, her skin seemed gray. Also—and this really seemed to disturb people—it doesn’t look like Michelle!
What there was to be mad at with respect to Sherald’s painting is where the Portrait Gallery originally put it. If part of the thrill of the Barack Obama portrait experience is the story it tells, all of the exasperation with the Michelle Obama portrait experience is the story it tells. Her husband’s in a great, vast room. She was in a hallway. Across from some elevators, near a pair of restrooms, just off the main entrance.
When it’s five feet away, the painting turns out to be stunning. Its placement was not. You’re forced to think, once again, about what the country’s always thought of Black women. A Black woman’s picture of Michelle Obama was hanging in a hallway. But either because of the pandemonium to see the painting or the optics of having it be where it was, the Portrait Gallery moved it somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t clog the building’s rotunda and seemed more dignified.
Sherald’s painting felt more popular than Wiley’s. There were viral pictures of people—one little girl in particular, Parker Curry—simply beholding it. The portrait itself is a more daring statement of a different kind of power. With the back of one hand under her chin, Obama is seated against a sky-blue background. Well, we presume she’s seated. There’s no apparent chair to speak of, since whatever she’s sitting on is obscured by a white dress. And not any white dress. For one thing, in it there are these licks of color—big stripes of red, pink, and yellow. There are also blocks of geometry that maybe suggest the boogie-woogie phase of an artist like Piet Mondrian. The dress is a dress, but also a character, a quilt, a canvas upon which to splash your awe or befuddlement.
Amy Sherald
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, 2018
Oil on linen
Courtesy: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Kehinde Wiley
Barack Obama, 2018
Oil on canvas, framed: 92¼ x 65¾ inches © 2018 Kehinde Wiley
Courtesy: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
The reason to spend any time thinking about the dress is because the dress isn’t an accident or accent—nothing that takes up a third of a canvas is accidental. It’s a crown by another name. On anybody else, that dress is wearing them. But on Obama, it’s a complement. Its complexity, capaciousness, mystery, impossibility (how do you put it on, wear or walk in it; and since it’s too long for the canvas to contain it, where does it end?); its brightness, warmth, generosity all could be Obama’s. It seems to issue out from her.
Here’s a garment that lets her be. And what, in this portrait, is she being? Regal? Demure? Polite? Actually, Obama looks contemplative, captured in a moment of reflection. She would have sat for Sherald at the end of her White House tenure. There would have been time to think about all that she saw and that she came to mean, perhaps the lack of precedent for most of it. I can feel history in this portrait. I can also feel something glum. The blues happen to be part of the Amy Sherald project. That’s the actual color of the skin of the people she paints. A deep unsaturated blue. But also a whiff of melancholy. Kehinde Wiley’s portraits want to glorify the neglected and majestify the maligned. I think Sherald’s simply want to observe. Their ambition is to ask who else these people are besides the Black folks they would be tagged as. You look at Sherald peering into Michelle Obama and you’re rocked. She’s a figure of majesty, too. But she’s also another of Sherald’s everyday people. And for all the looking we’ve done at this woman, you really do wonder whether she’s ever truly felt seen.
MORRIS