Obama in Context — LACMA presents “Black American Portraits”
Political Scientist and 2021 Thomas Mann Fellow Claus Leggewie visited the “Black American Portraits” exhibition and the “The Obama Portraits Tour” at LACMA, Los Angeles. In this article, he tells us about his impressions and examines the history of portraits through the context of Black gaze in art. “The Obama Portraits Tour” will be on display until January 2, 2022 and “Black American Portraits” until April 17, 2022.
The fact that Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait “Diego and I” recently sold for the record price of 35 million dollars is a reminder that portraits continue to be the most popular subject for painters next to landscapes. Painters portrayed rulers, the rich, and celebrities of their time not only because it was a lucrative way to make a living; like Frida Kahlo, they often made likenesses of themselves, painter friends, cultural figures and patrons. The paintings by the younger Holbein currently on view at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles are an example of how this network of elites across Europe could be brought to mastery.
Like the Medici or the Sun King, democratic heads of government have also had themselves immortalized in oil or acrylics, as exhibited by the multiple portraits of George Washington. For several years the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has regularly commissioned portraits of outgoing presidents. The latest in the series was not Donald Trump, who ignorantly as ever wanted to break with this tradition, but rather Barack Obama and his wife Michelle, famously the first People of Color in the White House. So, it was only logical that they chose two well-known African-American artists, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald to create their legacy.
Meanwhile, the Obama portraits have gone on tour, reaching the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts (LACMA) as a second stop after Chicago. The context in which the museum placed the portraits is interesting due to LACMA’s history of collecting and presenting African-American art for years. They have placed the life-size portraits within a series of 150 paintings, photographs, sculptures and video installations by more than 100 predominantly black artists featuring only African-Americans. These “Black American Portraits” take a decidedly black perspective, underscoring not only that since 1776 only one president of color has governed and represented the United States, but also that after his term in office ended, racial discrimination did not pass. Since Kehinde Wiley’s Obama formally explicitly follows the tradition of European images of rulers, one wonders how this comports with the explicit “black gaze” that dominates in the adjoining rooms.
This is how Tina Campt, a cultural scientist who is also well-known in Germany, has described the special kind of looking that occurs when Black people find themselves exchanging glances with others (in the case of this exhibition, predominantly white people) — as intimate as it is immersive and not easy to decipher. Black people have long been invisible or the object of encroaching gaze; they have modeled for white painters, and white visitors have found shows by Black artists to be exotic. The compact exhibition now shows everyday and family scenes in the “safe space” of the black community like the large format photo of queer artist Clifford Prince King in the circle of his friends. Also idols such as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, or Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, the performer Grace Jones, Black Power athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics with fists raised, and Patrisse Cullors, initiator of Black Lives Matter, in a pensive pose, and last but not least, the painting star Jean-Michel Basquiat and Fulton Leroy Washington, who came to painting in prison are all subjects of these Black American Portraits. All variants of Holbein’s portraits can be found here, some with demonstrative pride, others with apocryphal messages, many sarcastic like the drastic blackfacing in Kerry James Marshall’s “Portrait of the Artist as Shadow of a Former Self.” There is no lack of testimonies of violent excesses against African-Americans, but by no means all of the paintings, photographs, pastiches, and videos on display in Los Angeles, mostly from LACMA’s holdings, depict African-Americans in subaltern positions. The face of the exhibit is the 1800 portrait by an unknown hand of the black sailor, probably Paul Cuffe, who had made it to great wealth and political influence.
From him, the arc spans to the portrait of the ruler Barack Obama, who, as recently in the podcast dialogues with Bruce Springsteen, presents himself more and more like an icon of pop culture. In the manner of Abraham Lincoln, casually leaning forward on a wooden chair, his hands on his knees and his shirt collar open, he looks out at the procession of visitors. When Wiley dips him in rank plants of different provenance (Kenya, Hawaii, Chicago), this is meant to emphasize his ultimately multicultural identity. Even more sophisticated than this Black Adam in the Garden of Paradise is Amy Sherald’s somewhat smaller-format portrait of Michelle La Vaughn Robinson Obama. Visitors often react with disappointment to her serious, ghostly-looking face: she doesn’t look like that in person after all, as she is such a radiant, energetic person. The fact that she herself had wanted exactly this portrayal may be an argument in itself, but above all Sherald has managed not to let the former First Lady stand out from this community (just as in her other works en grisaille), but also not to expose her as a member of a colored minority. Sherald wants to break the stereotypical combination of color and race, avoids any photorealism and demonstrative blackness, and thus allows for an immersive black gaze. This is the punch line of the combination in LACMA: the departed ruling couple joins the ranks and at the same time is touched by the resistance of the other sitters. An ex-president can hardly do more. But can perhaps an ex-first lady?
Claus Leggewie is a political scientist and Ludwig-Börne-Professor at the University of Gießen. He directed the Cultural Studies Institute in Essen for ten years and was a visiting professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre and the New York University (Max Weber Chair). His books include Breivik, Dugin, al-Suri & Co (2016), co-authored with Patricia Nanz, The Consultative: More Democracy through Citizen Participation (2018), and most recently, co-authored with Federic Hanusch and Erik Meyer, Thinking Planetary (2021). He is a 2021 Honorary Fellow at the Thomas Mann House.
