What I see in this picture is the kid brother acting the fool, the teenager who would rather hang out with his friends than get a lesson in American democracy by touring the Capitol, and the mother looking back at the photographer (and at us!) sharing a moment of complicity, joy and love.
I can’t get this painting out of my mind. I have my own reasons for being so touched by it—I remember that look from someone I used to know. It’s not a painting of a photograph—it’s a picture of the moment the photograph was taken—of a look that lasted a second or two—and was returned.
And in the context of this show and race relations in America, I did not need to look at the title to know what it is about, but there is nothing so vulnerable as forgetting for a moment to be wary— and nothing so beautiful.
THE TIMES… is a horrifying painting and a great one too.
Because I am a painter, I couldn’t help trying to figure out why it is so powerful. I thought, “it must be the angle, the way we are dragged into the car and stopped by the gun and hand.” And at that moment of looking at this painting, I realized that Taylor is always moving us into the space of his paintings by the positions of the human figures.
I don’t agree with the New Yorker critic, Jackson Arn* that Taylor’s paintings have “slack compositions” or that “Much of the time….[he] doesn’t really paint paintings at all; he paints faces and occupies the rest of each canvas with bright, dead space.”
Taylor is actually a master of our attention, really a magician. What makes those faces so important is the contrast between the way he has painted them and the way he has painted the often bright, sometimes geometric, sometimes delicate, sometimes crude surrounding space. In Watch Your Back he has made the woman’s face almost finished, the boy with his tongue out cartoonish, the teenager is nothing more than a bored slump with surprised eyes; the Capitol and the Mall are only suggested. My experience of the painting is one of continuously entering into the space of the painting and then suddenly seeing the faces again as if for the first time.
In THE TIMES.. that flat ochre and the repellant crudeness of the gun and hand pushes us back to the face and hands of Philando Castile, where it is almost impossible to rest either. This circling movement becomes something like a despairing meditation on how and why such a thing could happen.
Not every painting works, not every painting seems finished; that is why this show is called B Side after all, but it captures the full range of his effort to paint everything about Black life in America.
(I get so depressed going to gallery after gallery full of paintings that never fail because they are so limited in what they try to do. Too often the ambition seems to be to create finished products in a distinctive style.)
In The Love… the composition is so witty, we follow one point perspective to the cartoon horse, tree and grass and then look again more and more carefully at the individual members of the family.
I suppose it’s now indisputable that there is a contemporary renaissance in the genre of painted portraiture. It is driven by Black artists’ sympathetic identification with (and I don’t mean sorry for!) their fellow Black Americans. That seems to be a better description than empathy, especially in Taylor’s work, because he sees his subjects as separate whole human beings.
One might think that this would happen often, that there might be great painted portraits of 9/11 victims and survivors, for example—certainly there was a lot of fellow feeling. There are other oppressed groups of people, what about the Holocaust? But as far as I can see—and if I’m wrong, I hope you will write to tell me so—in its scope, this is anomalous.
Since photography was invented—to make painted portraits obsolete, no doubt—there have been great individual portrait painters. Chuck Close and Alice Neel come immediately to mind. But I’m talking now about a group of artists who have almost simultaneously found a reason to make paintings of individual people and make it mean something more than a likeness of a single person. This is not a comprehensive list but I’m thinking of Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Jennifer Packer, Lynette Yiadom-Boakeye, Barkley Hendricks and Mickalene Thomas.
The most powerful reason is that they have done it so that Black people can see themselves depicted, and in the museums, a brilliant idea from Kerry James Marshall.
(I don’t see Marshall as a portrait painter exactly though. I think I would call him a history painter—a history that is happening now.)
Maybe the Obamas played a part by picking Wiley and Sherald instead of official portraitists of the old school. Another influence is the memorial portraits on building walls —this one is on the corner of Marcus Garvey and Van Buren Street in Bed-Stuy.
To my eyes Henry Taylor has added a warmth and spontaneity that is unique in our time. I can only think of Van Gogh and Alice Neel when I try to find a precedent for it. Like them, Taylor is usually portraying his friends and acquaintances, not the rich and powerful.
Some critics and even some portrait painters seem to think that making a portrait of someone is using them, stealing their soul or whatever—to me it looks like an honor to be painted by Henry Taylor. I like the reference to Da Vinci’s John the Baptist in Too Sweet and the ambiguity of whether the man is begging or has a message. Taylor has found this man to be worthy of notice.
It really isn’t right to ignore people.
—CNQ
*Jackson Arn, Henry Taylor’s Fraught Art of Seeing. New Yorker, October 23, 2023
