Kehinde Wiley: Art that Expands the Imagination
Julia Zgurzynski
During Contemporary Drama, we visited the exciting new exhibit of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings at the National Gallery. In the classroom beforehand, we looked at some of his earlier paintings which are not on display here in London. Those paintings inserted Black subjects into dramatic portraits done by the European painters known as the “old masters”, originally done of noble Europeans in fancy historical clothing. Wiley places his Black models in the same confident poses, in their own modern clothes, using the ornate background to give a sense of grandeur. I admired the vibrant colors and skilled photorealistic painting, but I could not help but wonder about one thing. Must Wiley place these people of color into typically white environments to achieve his goal. Is a white European setting the best or only place where a person can feel powerful and beautiful? Surely not. As I continued looking at the paintings, I remembered a moment from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ autobiography, Between the World and Me. Coates relates the time when had read a quote from writer Saul Bellow, who asked, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”, in which Bellow is challenging people of color to come up with a Zulu writer as good as Leo Tolstoy. Later Coates reads Ralph Wiley’s answer to Saul Bellow, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”. Thus the Zulus do not exist in some separate world which competes with the art and culture of the Western world. Rather, all the world can share art and culture in common. That moment from Between the World and Me helped me to understand that, in such terms, old European portraiture is the old European portraiture of people of color. They have equal claim to that art, and so it is equally fitting for them to be painted as inhabiting the world of the Old Masters. Further, people of color had been living in Europe for hundreds of years with very little positive representation in European artwork, and so these painting give them a chance to be represented in a space which they associate with wealth and power, but that they were never previously allowed into.
The painting on the left above is Kehinde Wiley’s “Prelude (Babacar Mané)”. It called to me because I recognized that it was modelled after Caspar David Fredrich’s painting,“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” pictured on the right. I first saw Fredrich’s painting on the cover of Paul Johnson’s “The Birth of the Modern”. It is a book of history from 1850-1830, and I never read the book, but the painting always struck me as well fitting the title. The man is wearing a plain but somewhat old fashioned tailcoat, and therefore he is from the past, but the situation of being alone, facing forward towards a hostile sea, indicated to me a major transition of soul into the modern era. Further, the combination of the solitary situation and the title of the book indicated a philosophical, contemplative mindset to me. Much of modern philosophy is about redefining our relationship with nature, especially in light of industrialization by which we attempt to “render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature” (Descartes Discourse on Method). Therefore, the action of stopping to ponder the raging sea, a manifestation of powerful nature which rebels from man’s control is a characteristically modern philosophical scene in my eyes. With my existing conception of the man in the Friedrich painting as a modern philosopher, it was as if Wiley had placed a person of color into that role. The painting called me to imagine the depth and complexity of the transition to modernity as taking place within a Black mind, thereby widening my philosophical imagination.
Wiley’s palette is noticeably more vibrant. Fredrich works only with cool tones, black, white and blues, but Wiley incorporates more colors. The rocks have a green sheen, and there are streaks of yellow in the sky. The warm colors enrich the painting, making it feel more realistic and alive. Even the skin tones of the subjects reflect that difference. The white man’s skin is pale and blends in with the pale blues of the sea and sky. The Black man’s skin is a rich brown, with varied hues to indicate shape and depth. One puzzling element of the Wiley painting is the teal glow on the man’s back. Teal does not appear anywhere else in the painting and it looks as if there is some kind of artificial light behind the man, spoiling the otherwise natural scene. Perhaps there are the bright neon lights of the industrial world behind the man, vying for his attention, and yet he turns away from them, and focuses on the vast and wild sea.
