The Obama Portraits by Taína Caragol

Author:Taína Caragol
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Fig. 15 Sonia Boyce, Lay back, keep quiet and think of what made Britain so great, 1986. Charcoal, pastel, and watercolor on paper, each panel 60 × 25⅝ in. (152.5 × 65 cm). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London

Fig. 16 Horace Pippin, Man on a Bench (The Park Bench), 1946. Oil on canvas, 13 × 18 in. (33 × 45.7 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art; bequest of Daniel W. Dietrich II, 2016

Unveiled about a year after President Barack Obama ended his second term, Wiley’s portrait carried a contemplative and somewhat introspective air, as if the stark aloneness of the president—except, presumably, for the wind rustling the leafy background and the scent of the assorted flowers in bloom—was just as crucial a part of the painting’s story as the history contained in the embedded greenery. From Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) to Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World (1948), solitary figures in painted landscapes almost invariably carry the narrative of loneliness. No matter how obvious a portrait’s fabricated world of solitude might be when compared to reality, viewers grab hold of the manufactured story line of reclusiveness and incorporate it into their interpretations of the subject.

An overarching sense of isolation in a constructed landscape is certainly present in the portrait of President Obama and, presciently, in another occupied pictorial idyll, Man on a Bench, by the early twentieth-century self-taught artist Horace Pippin (fig. 16). Painted toward the end of Pippin’s life, Man on a Bench (also known as The Park Bench) used a near identical palette and many of the same visual strategies that Wiley would employ in the presidential portrait, signaling a common vision by two chronologically distinct painters that sought to artistically and psychologically capture on canvas a sojourner or, rather, a contender at the end of a professional and personal odyssey. Many historians have theorized that the figure in Man on a Bench is Pippin, and, with the idea that this picture’s primary purpose was self-portraiture, the painting covertly takes up the sum of the artist’s rollercoaster life and idiosyncratic career, encapsulated in an anonymous black man seated alone on a fire-engine red park bench, under an ochre canopy of leaves. Comparing Pippin’s autumnal mise-en-scène with Wiley’s flourishing hedge of green introduces yet another reading: the pairing of a cyclical metaphor with autobiography that, in the case of the Obama portrait, promises, or at least hopes for, a recurring season of new growth.33

Kehinde Wiley’s painting of President Barack Obama and Amy Sherald’s painting of First Lady Michelle Obama enter art history and, specifically, portraiture at a critical juncture. Between centuries of artistic production during which the portrait occupied an elevated status and a much shorter timespan, when such formerly inviolable notions like verisimilitude and identity were questioned and probed by artists, these two portraits—by virtue of their governmental investitures and contemporary locus—bridged these conceptual models, existing in a diagnostic realm where not just each sitter’s story and standing, but their symbolic value across many communities, shape the portraits’ reception.

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