Kehinde Wiley: Subversive Traditionalist (2020)

 

Kehinde Wiley’s joyously vulgar, ostentatious paintings feature black protagonists displayed in the heroic poses made familiar to us by centuries of traditional Western (read white) art history.

Wiley has spoken of his admiration for Western canon giants; Titian, Rubens, Ingres, and David, amongst others, and his work presents a racial re-staging of these and other artists’ images, in order to redress historical racism and inequality.

The often-gigantic scale of his work is that of church-directed imagery from the Renaissance, or historical propaganda narratives. In this, they fulfill his revisionist purpose well. For instance, he transposes hip-hop star, Ice T, onto Ingres’, Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806), thereby underscoring the macho-swagger of the hip-hop phenomenon, which demands access to the same power, wealth and respect. Another painting, Le Roi à la Chasse (2006), features a young man in the guise of Anthony van Dyck’s foppish Charles l at the Hunt (1635). The new sitter adopts an exaggeration of the original’s pose, thereby parodying those earlier visual tropes of white self-regard.

 

Kehinde Wiley, Le Roi à la Chasse, 2006.
Anthony van Dyck, Charles l at the Hunt (1635)

Wiley and his team meticulously construct the works in various global studios – in America and, more recently, Senegal, and Beijing. He adopts a traditional grisaille underpainting technique, whereby the entire image is first laid out in a painstaking monochrome – traditionally in greys, greens, or, in his case, browns – upon which an overlay of transparent coloured glazes is applied to the central figure. His assistants then paint the decorative foliage or ornate designs, which may derive from anything from Rococo decoration to suburban, Victorian, William Morris.

In his 2005 series, Rumors of War, the paintings all feature young black men on horseback. One features a restaged version of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801), the artist presents an anonymous young man, wearing contemporary urban clothing, astride the French ruler’s rearing stallion. Another reconfigures Theodore Géricault's Officer of the Hussars Charging on Horseback (1812) to accentuate the implicit sexuality of the original, in a synthetic depiction of masculinity, and its opposite: the rampant stallion presents its rear end to the viewer – tail aloft in a suggestion of submission; the rider grips a scimitar – significantly lengthened in Wiley’s version, and repositioned in order to draw attention to his sturdy right leg. The elaborate gold frame of this work, as with the others, features carved cornices depicting swarming spermatozoa.

Kehinde Wiley, Officer of the Hussars, 2007.
Theodore Gericault, The Charging Chasseur, 1812.

In his version of Titian’s two Penitent Magdalene’s (1531 and 1565), Wiley features a young man in the titular role, complete with lovelorn, heavenward gaze and elegant clutching fingers. Indeed, many of Wiley’s other paintings maintain the predecessor’s title, regardless of the changed gender of his sitter.

In 2008, Wiley staged his exhibition, Down, which featured paintings of young black men reclining in sleep, or in death. These images were based upon various historical paintings and sculptures of Christian martyrs and dying soldiers. The undeniable subtext to these monumental works is our knowledge of the ubiquity of media images of black men lying prostrate in positions of subjugation (arrest), or in symbolic castration (death on the streets). One work, based on Stefano Maderno’s sculpture, The Martyrdom of St. Cecilia (c.1599) features a young man lying awkwardly, face-down, in a posture that is unlikely to be sleep. There is a tacit homoeroticism within these works in which men are presented in the traditional poses reserved in Western art for the passive, ‘available’ female model. Wiley upends this paradigm with a gay male perspective, which is largely free of notions of ‘ownership’.

Kehinde Wiley, The Virgin Martyr St Cecilia, 2008.

In a kind of transmutation of traditional gay cruising, Wiley searches for his anonymous
models on the streets, constantly on the lookout for just the right type of young black man,
who is then approached and paid to come to the studio to sit for photographs, which are
later re-staged within the basis of the historical fine art imagery. In a 2015 New York Times
interview, Wiley called his casting process “serendipitous”: a discovery of “people who
resonate with me, whether for cultural or sexual reasons. My type is rooted in my own
sexual desire.”

One of the questions for an artist who accepts portrait commissions from the cultural/political elite is: to what extent are they expected to produce an ‘acceptable’ image of the sitter – one that maintains the carefully constructed image? There’s also no guarantee that these depicted stars will forever burn brightly beyond their allotted moment of fame; however, the artist is forever linked to them. Along with Wiley’s various portraits of black American hip-hop stars, two such portrait commissions – of Michael Jackson and Barack Obama - loom large.

In Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson) (2010), Wiley has produced a purposefully kitsch reworking of Peter Paul Rubens. He meticulously modifies details of the earlier painting. He changes the solidly dark brown horse into a preposterous, half-brown/half-white fantasy creature - almost My Little Pony - perhaps in a reference to Jackson’s own chimerical, racial phantasmagoria. Most tellingly, the original painting’s allegorical figure of the Angel of Victory, which floats behind the king and reaches to place a valedictory wreath upon his head, is now replaced with two little male putti – one brown and one white naked boy – which is disturbing, given the specific circumstances of the King of Pop’s spectacular fall from grace.

Kehinde Wiley, Equestrian Portrait of King Philip ll (Michael Jackson), 2010.

Wiley’s 2017 portrait of Barack Obama commissioned for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, presents him as a shimmering, artificial vision, against a wall of foliage, seemingly devoid of any real humanity - which is, perhaps, apposite; this fictional version of Obama is as ‘real’ or as ‘constructed’ as we care to read him.

Wiley’s largest work to date – a massive sculpture, also named Rumors of War – was installed in front of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, on December 10, 2019, after being first showcased in Times Square between September 21 and December 1. The work features an anonymous, young black man wearing urban streetwear, astride a horse. He appears at once heroic and humble. Just a short walk away from the site is Monument Avenue, which features the statues of Confederate figures Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, amongst others - all now considered provocative links to America’s repressive history of slavery and inhumanity. Wiley’s sculpture stands as a beacon of hope for a more progressive future, in which other, actual, black heroes will be similarly lionised. 

Kehinde Wiley, Rumors of War, 2019.

 In 2019 Wiley launched Black Rock, an arts residency program at his studio compound in Dakar, Senegal. The property includes a residence and studio space for Wiley along with three single-occupancy residency apartments with adjacent studio spaces for three artists at any one time between one- and three-month intervals.