But what might be most important about Wiley’s selection was that it seemed to signal contemporary portraiture’s new relevance, the reconsideration of a mode that had been thought out of fashion, if not downright taboo, for decades.
#Portrait painter of the year series
More recently, his works were featured on the hip-hop television series “Empire,” a show that also has featured portraits by artists like Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas and Barkley Hendricks. His ascent was swift he had not one but two shows at the Brooklyn Museum, in 2004 and in 2015. When he first started showing his work in the early 2000s, Wiley’s reversals of classical figuration were an outlier at a time when most painters dealt in abstraction. The Obamas are connoisseurs - they were the first presidential family to display work by African-American painters like Glenn Ligon and Alma Thomas - and yet their choice stood out, because Wiley is an artist whose stature in the art world comes close to matching Obama’s in politics. Rarely do these commissions make any kind of larger statement about American art, but last fall, when Barack Obama selected Kehinde Wiley - a figurative painter who deploys the techniques, poses and patterns of the grand tradition of Baroque European paintings to portray contemporary black and brown men he finds on the street - to paint his official portrait for the Smithsonian, it at least reflected the Obamas’ well-developed connections to the world of culture. For hundreds of years, the presidential portrait was a ho-hum affair, failing to generate headlines or even a worthy anecdote, with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt, who was so displeased by Théobald Chartran’s 1902 portrait - he thought it made him look too coy - that he first hid it in a less-trafficked corner of the White House before finally burning it. This tradition, of a painter depicting a president, usually soon after the end of his final term, continued after the advent of photography mostly as a matter of ceremony. THE OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL portrait began with George Washington, who was painted in 1796 by Gilbert Stuart, among the pre-eminent American artists of his time.