The gray skin in Michelle Obama’s portrait feels at first like a loss, and then like a real gain.© Amy Sherald
The former First Lady Michelle Obama’s decision to commission theBaltimore painter Amy Sherald for her official portrait was intriguing.Like the former President Barack Obama’s choice of the painter Kehinde Wiley for his own portrait, it was a demonstration of discriminating taste; these paintings, in the eclectic Smithsonian halls, will relate more easily to Douglas Chandor’s study ofFranklin D. Roosevelt’s upper half and fiddling hands, the atomizing ofBill Clinton by Chuck Close, than to Robert A. Anderson’s conservativetranscription of George W. Bush. Sherald and Wiley, the first blackrecipients of commissions from the National Portrait Gallery, areartists with points of view. Wiley is a glittering propagandist whocatapults the common black man and the occasional black woman intohistorical environments of rearing equines and colonial fleur-de-listapestries. He placed Obama against his ancestral flora, “hyper-visible and yet always partly hidden,” as my colleague Vinson Cunningham writes.
Evidence of power is more elusive in Sherald’s paintings. Her modelsare black, and they are creatures of fashion who stand upright againstbackdrops of pastel monochrome. In the past, Sherald has chosen hersubjects for their ineffable “quality of existing in the past, present,and future simultaneously,” her gallerist Monique Meloche has said; itis true that, before one of Sherald’s figures, you think not about thepassage of time or the oppressive reach of the state. Instead, these paintingsmake the viewer speculate about the quieter wants and wishes of theblack common men and women who have emerged on the linen en grisaille—Sherald’s taupe variant of grayscale—like ghosts.
At the Smithsonian unveiling, Michelle Obama and the forty-four-year-oldSherald together pulled down brown wraps to expose a painting ofshocking mystery. It is a portrait of the first black FirstLady in an abundant gown, designed by one of her favorites, MichelleSmith for Milly. Smith, in an interview with Vogue, has said that the dress’s “clean, minimal geometric print” is “without a reference to anything past or nostalgic” and is“forward-thinking,” like Obama herself. But at the lectern, introducingthe six-by-five-foot “‘Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama,’ oil on linen,2018,” Sherald said that the shapes reminded her of Mondrian, and thediligent quilt-making of the black women artisans of Gee’s Bend,Alabama. “My approach to portraiture is conceptual,” she said. Obamaherself emphasized that she did not come from the sort of family thathad had members sit for portraits. As a variation of the classicalAmerican pioneer, she sought out Sherald to translate what being thefirst meant to her.
The painting is shocking because Sherald has somehow conjured a visionof Michelle Obama, one of the most photographed women in history, thatwe have not yet seen—one free of the candid Washingtonian glamour foundin photographs such as those in Amanda Lucidon’s “Chasing Light: Michelle Obama Through the Lens of a White House Photographer.” Obamasits against sky-blue oblivion, the triangular shape of the dressturning her into a mountain. Sherald may be the portrait artist of“American people,” and Obama, looking askance, leaning slightly, maywant to be a part of that record, but she is also a symbol, anaggrandizement. The racializing schema of Sherald’s work is to “excludethe idea of color as race,” she has said, in her artist’s statement. ToSherald, the photorealistic depiction of race—a quality determined byothers’ eyes, externally—is a dead end. Applied to Michelle Obama, the lack ofbrown in the skin feels first like a loss, and then like a real gain.This is a different Michelle, a woman evacuated of celebrity, whoappears provisionally dreamlike, nearly a shadow. The mouth and theeyes and the strong arms that we know are present, but fainter. Fromsome distance, I can imagine, the figure might not be immediatelyrecognizable.
FURTHER READING
Vinson Cunningham on Barack Obama’s official portrait.
To some, the lack of racial verisimilitude may be intolerable. Andyet this is how the subject would like posterity—young black girlsespecially, she said in a speech—to see her, through Sherald’s vision: as a herald of success. In this way, Sherald wondrously troublesassumptions about blackness and representation in portraiture.Lookingat it, I thought for a moment of Kerry James Marshall’s portraits,especially his 1980 self-portrait, in which the artist depicts himselfas an actual black void, only eyes and teeth gleaming. The phantasmic grayscale of Sherald’s painting makes one work to bring its subject tolife—to remember what Michelle Obama has endured. From her husband’sfirst campaign she was scrutinized, even more than her husband, who wasthe one running—an appearance on “Larry King Live” had viewers nervousabout her stridency. She was exhorted, by worriers of all races, to besoft. She had to give America fewer reasons to say ugly things, to makeugly cartoons. It is undeniable that there was a shift in how she wasmarketed. Commercials de-emphasized Michelle Obama’s legal career—infact, it was she who had mentored Barack, not the other way around—andpushed her domestic identity as a mother. The tenure of the first blackFirst Lady was defined by her no-nonsense charm, her easy beauty, herrhetorical gifts, her championing of healthy meals for the young and thepoor. She had a long-lasting emotional effect on millions of people. Andthen she had to hand the baton to Melania Trump. One wonders what the sitter divulged to the portraitist, who has experienced her own trials—deaths in thefamily, a heart transplant. One wonders how the years in the WhiteHouse—which, Michelle Obama reminded the country, had been built by slaves—affected her.
I think the portrait is one answer. It is an intensely private work ofart that will seem otherworldly in whichever state gallery hall it ishung. “What have we done?” Michelle Obama has said sheasked her husband the first time she watched her two daughters leave theWhite House for school, shadowed by a Secret Service army. In publicexit interviews, Michelle Obama is open about her relief that the eightyears are over. The portrait, beautiful and discomfiting, is like amemory of what we never knew.
