Official Obama portraits show gravitas, glam
WASHINGTON — With the unveiling Monday at the National Portrait Gallery of the official presidential likenesses of Barack Obama and the former first lady, Michelle Obama, this city of myriad monuments gets a couple of new ones, each radiating, in its different way, gravitas (his) and glam (hers).
Ordinarily, the event would pass barely noticed in the worlds of politics and art. Yes, the Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, owns the only readily accessible complete collection of presidential likenesses. But recently commissioned additions to the collection have been so undistinguished that the tradition of installing a new portrait after a leader has left office is now little more than ceremonial routine.
The present debut is strikingly different. Not only are the Obamas the first African American presidential couple to be enshrined in the collection. The painters they’ve picked to portray them — Kehinde Wiley, for Barack Obama’s portrait; Amy Sherald, for Michelle Obama — are African American as well. Both artists have addressed the politics of race consistently in their past work, and both have done so in subtly savvy ways in these new commissions. Wiley depicts Barack Obama not as a self-assured, standard-issue bureaucrat, but as an alert and troubled thinker. Sherald’s image of Michelle Obama overemphasizes an element of couturial spectacle, but also projects a rock-solid cool.
It doesn’t take Black Lives Matter consciousness to see the significance of this racial lineup within the national story as told by the Portrait Gallery. Some of the earliest presidents represented — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson — were slaveholders; Michelle Obama’s great-great grandparents were slaves. And today we’re seeing more and more evidence that the social gains of the civil rights, and Black Power, and Obama eras are, with a vengeance, being rolled back.
Wiley, born in Los Angeles in 1977 and a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, gained a following with his crisp, glossy, life-size paintings of young African American men dressed in hiphop styles, but depicted in the old-master manner of European royal portraits.
In an imposingly scaled painting — just over 7 feet tall — the artist presents Barack Obama dressed in the regulation black suit and an open-necked white shirt. Whereas Obama’s predecessors are, to the man, shown expressionless and composed, Obama sits tensely forward, frowning, elbows on his knees, arms crossed, as if listening hard.
At some level, all portraits are propaganda, political or personal. And what makes this one distinctive is the personal part. Wiley has set Obama against — really embedded him in — a bower of what looks like ground cover. From the greenery sprout flowers that have symbolic meaning for the sitter. African blue lilies represent Kenya, his father’s birthplace; jasmine stands for Hawaii, where Obama himself was born; chrysanthemums, the official flower of Chicago, reference the city where his political career began, and where he met his wife.
Michelle Obama’s choice of Sherald as an artist was an enterprising one. Sherald, who was born in Columbus, Ga., in 1973 and lives in Baltimore, is just beginning to move into the national spotlight.
She shows Michelle Obama sitting against a field of light blue, wearing a spreading gown. The dress design, by Michelle Smith, is eye-teasingly complicated: mostly white interrupted by black op art-ish blips and patches of striped color suggestive of African textiles. The shape of the dress, rising pyramidally upward, mountain-like, feels as if it were the real subject of the portrait.