The Obama Portraits

Taína Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard Powell, Kim Sajet, Thelma Golden, Richard J. Powell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691203287
• eBook ISBN: 9780691203294
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

A richly illustrated celebration of the paintings of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama

From the moment of their unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery in early 2018, the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama have become two of the most beloved artworks of our time. Kehinde Wiley's portrait of President Obama and Amy Sherald's portrait of the former first lady have inspired unprecedented responses from the public, and attendance at the museum has more than doubled as visitors travel from near and far to view these larger-than-life paintings. After witnessing a woman drop to her knees in prayer before the portrait of Barack Obama, one guard said, "No other painting gets the same kind of reactions. Ever." The Obama Portraits is the first book about the making, meaning, and significance of these remarkable artworks.

Richly illustrated with images of the portraits, exclusive pictures of the Obamas with the artists during their sittings, and photos of the historic unveiling ceremony by former White House photographer Pete Souza, this book offers insight into what these paintings can tell us about the history of portraiture and American culture. The volume also features a transcript of the unveiling ceremony, which includes moving remarks by the Obamas and the artists. A reversible dust jacket allows readers to choose which portrait to display on the front cover.

An inspiring history of the creation and impact of the Obama portraits, this fascinating book speaks to the power of art—especially portraiture—to bring people together and promote cultural change.

Published in association with the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC

Richard J. Powell

The Obama Portraits, in Art History and Beyond

Fig. 1 Installation view showing Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of President Barack Obama in the National Portrait Gallery’s signature exhibition, America’s Presidents, September 2019

The artistic judgments that viewers impose on portraiture frequently hinge on the relative success or failure of portraitists to transmit their subject’s essence. Whether or not the portraitist prevails in this endeavor is usually linked to a variety of factors, including competence in one’s chosen media, the ability to successfully render physical reality (i.e., the ability to capture an accurate likeness of the sitter), or placing a subject in an appropriate environment or socio-psychological frame of reference. While skill and accuracy are quickly detectable and often placed at the forefront of many evaluations, it is the portrait’s context—the artist’s decision to situate the sitter within a particular cultural milieu or social setting—that, while not always recognizable to the average viewer, nonetheless emerges in the critique, and envelops the portrait within an interpretive schema and critical space that loom large in its commendation or deprecation.¹

In thinking about the significance of Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of the 44th US President Barack Obama and Amy Sherald’s portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama, especially in relationship to art history broadly and the traditions of portraiture in particular, one cannot overstate the importance of each portrait’s cultural context (figs. 1–2). Or, if one were to pose this aesthetic determinant as a question: in what social or cultural structure did Wiley and Sherald place their subjects, and, once received by the public, were these settings generally understood as the most apropos for the presidential and first lady portrait milieu in which these two paintings reside?

There is no shortage of news reports, art reviews, and published critiques concerning Wiley’s and Sherald’s creations, but noticeably absent or rarely seen in these opinions are comments that consider the two paintings in the context of: 1) other authoritative portraits, especially portraits of US presidents and first ladies; 2) the implementation of the human figure as a vehicle for an autonomous artistic statement; or 3) art history and what the eighteenth-century British painter and academician Sir Joshua Reynolds termed portraiture in the grand style.² What this analysis—by way of reading these paintings through an art historical lens—reveals is that Wiley, Sherald, and the two sitters in question have found multiple ways to both place these paintings solidly within the greater category of official portraiture and, perhaps at cross purposes, to markedly depart from that genre’s expected conventions.

How Kehinde Wiley’s and Amy Sherald’s portraits of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama join their predecessors in presidential and “grand manner” portraiture is fairly self-evident. They provide basic likenesses of their subjects. They defer to at least a modicum of the identificatory protocols for refined characterizations. And there are sartorial exemplars in this particular genre and other pro forma portrait practices, including the tieless presentation and halter-neck look in the Obama portraits, for what many critics view as an authorized casualness (for example, John Singer Sargent’s 1907 portrait of Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes in informal walking attire, Elaine de Kooning’s 1963 portrait of President John F. Kennedy in his shirt sleeves [see p. 5], and Aaron Shikler’s 1980 portrait of President Ronald Reagan in blue jeans and a work shirt).³

Fig. 2 Installation view showing Amy Sherald’s portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama in Recent Acquisitions at the National Portrait Gallery, February 2018

How these portraits differ from the prototypes is also quite apparent. In addition to being convincing portrayals of their subjects, both paintings claim the category and, by extension, the elevated stature of contemporary art. As realistic representations of African Americans, both works stand apart from an overwhelmingly white and Eurocentric consortium of traditional portraits and other ex officio depictions. Unlike their forerunners (with the exception of the very popular, historic paintings of the first US president, George Washington), these two portraits have received unprecedented interest from the public at large, acquiring an almost devotional following since their unveiling. What these distinctions coalesce around—and, by way of emphasis, what shapes these paintings as contemporary works of art—are Wiley’s and Sherald’s reputations in the art world, not so much as portraitists but, rather, as cutting-edge artists who ingeniously employ the trappings of portraiture while essentially dismantling the genre’s more conventional outcomes in order to convey something novel, critical, and timely.⁴

Fig. 3 Aaron Shikler, Nancy Reagan, 1987. Oil on canvas, 44⅛ × 24 in. (112.1 × 61 cm). White House Collection / White House Historical Association; gift of the White House Historical Association and the Petrie Foundation

When the public sees these portraits and takes into account the aesthetic sensibilities and embodied sentience of the president and first lady, one soon realizes that Wiley and Sherald have, in effect, chronicled a cultural shift, a perceptual about-face not considerably different than, say, the geographically and culturally diverse scenes of America that appear on the antebellum-era French wallpaper in the White House’s frequently photographed Diplomatic Reception Room. Images of the president and first lady posing alongside the Zuber & Cie wallpaper’s assorted images of elegantly dressed black Americans, circa 1834, indicate the Obamas’ cognizance of their own emblematic roles almost a century beyond those of the figures depicted in these White House decorations.⁵

A comparison of Sherald’s portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama with the portraits of First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy (1970) and Nancy Reagan (1987), both by the renowned portraitist Aaron Shikler, illustrates the difference in Sherald’s concept of a formal, officially commissioned depiction of the first lady (fig. 3). Unlike Shikler’s head-to-toe representations of Kennedy and Reagan—enveloped in dramatic lighting and wearing resplendent, classically inspired evening gowns—Sherald places Michelle Obama in the artist’s characteristic mid-range format and in an all-over luminescence that showcases her subject with grisaille skin coloring and distinctive, multi-patterned clothing.⁶ Sherald’s fidelity to this approach—allied with analogous visual strategies by artistic forebears and contemporaries Barkley L. Hendricks, Kerry James Marshall, and Wiley, each having reimagined the black figure in the wake of studio portrait photography—found an unexpected enthusiast in First Lady Michelle Obama, whose personal input into this portrait augments Sherald’s creative oversight.⁷

Fig. 4 Barkley L. Hendricks, Tequila, 1978. Oil and acrylic on linen, 60¾ × 50¼ in. (154.3 × 127.6 cm). Collection of the Butler Institute for American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama and its location within a youth-oriented, non-elitist, African American representational purview link this image to a significant body of black portraiture that, beginning with Hendricks’s circa 1970s paintings of flamboyant and politically self-conscious “everyday people,” has come to define the post–civil rights era black persona (fig. 4).⁸ Whether self-confident fashion trendsetters or class- and caste-adverse social outliers, Hendricks’s subjects offered an alternative to a more conservative and often corporate African American image: a brash and breezy strain of black identity that Sherald, too, artistically privileges.⁹ Although certainly not as bohemian and insouciant as the women and men in Sherald’s other figure paintings, the Michelle Obama portrait possesses a similar informality and ease that, colored by an appreciable self-possession, puts the first lady’s portrait on par with a group of cool, fin de siècle African American portrayals in art and other visual representations.

Portrait studies more or less acknowledge not only the looming presence and power that many sitters have in the practice of portraiture but the risk these sitters often assume as they relinquish some of their control to the artist commissioned to portray them. Conversely, portraitists often find themselves at a diplomatic impasse as they execute their commissions, feeling the need to balance the expectations to portray their sitters in a flattering light along with the desire and artistic impulse to make a work of art that goes beyond a routine representation.¹⁰ Sherald and First Lady Michelle Obama seem to have successfully overcome the anxieties and dilemmas that portraitists and sitters face as they enter into the portrait contract, their encounter possibly echoing the visible rapport and understanding that the painter Hendricks and his black subjects had with one another. Hendricks’s Tequila, a portrait of a confident young woman wearing a sporty ensemble and a good-natured expression, may be four decades removed from Sherald’s portrait (not to mention separated in terms of the social standing and level of celebrity of the subject), but the two portraits nevertheless exist in a comparable, emotionally affable ambience, and in the esprit de corps of an artistically beguiling yet permeable realism.¹¹

Figs. 5 and 6 Michelle Obama and Amy Sherald during a sitting for the former first lady’s portrait, October 2, 2017

The first lady wearing a floor-length stretch cotton poplin halter dress—or “Milly Gown” that, according to its designer Michelle Smith, “could [be worn] in everyday life, as well as in this iconic portrait”—is evidence of her portrait’s departure from the archetypes in the “First Ladies” portrait genre (figs. 5–6).¹² Evocative of the black-and-white photographs of women wearing ground-draped, vibrant dresses by the mid-twentieth-century Malian studio photographer Seydou Keïta (fig. 7), Obama’s resolutely modern, geometric print dress and Sherald’s clothing-focused composition aesthetically shared Keïta’s starting point for stylishness and singularity in the African diaspora.¹³ Allowing their dresses to create an optical dynamism that, in concert with the sitters, initiates a visual repartee resulting in artistic considerations well beyond portraiture, Keïta’s Untitled and Sherald’s portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama discreetly exit the doctrinal portrait category and, almost imperceptibly, enter the unrestricted orbit of modern and contemporary art.

A similar portrait-to-idealized-statement transpired more than one hundred and sixty years earlier when the French history painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted Madame Moitessier, whose opulent Second Empire surroundings and meticulously embroidered silk ball gown formed a kind of internal scaffolding and complementary, two-dimensional framework around this elegant woman (fig. 8). Openly contemptuous of portraiture, Ingres nevertheless painted many individual simulacra (most notably Madame Moitessier), rationalizing his work in this vein as an extension of his more serious work as a chronicler via painting, and whose responsibility for depicting a likeness was superseded by a higher calling; that of plotting a creative pathway between “nature” and “the ideal.”¹⁴ Sherald negotiated a comparable, albeit postmodern course in her Obama portrait, placing her signature heather-gray adaptations of the first lady’s complexion at the center of a chromatically pure, minimalist, and hard-edge application of oil pigments on canvas. Sherald’s incised and stylized approach to painting brings to mind the keen observations about an embodied abstraction made by novelist Ralph Ellison’s un...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Unveiling the Unconventional: Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Barack Obama
• “Radical Empathy”: Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Michelle Obama
• The Obama Portraits, in Art History and Beyond
• The Obama Portraits and the National Portrait Gallery as a Site of Secular Pilgrimage
• The Presentation of the Obama Portraits: A Transcript of the Unveiling Ceremony
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Credits