68 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
Sherald ’s “A single man in possession of a good fortune,” from 2019.
THEA RT WORLD
BEHELD
Amy Sherald ’s portraits.BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
© AMY SHERALD. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH
T
he subjects of Amy Sherald’s eight
strong oil portraits at Hauser &
Wirth impress with their looks, in both
senses: striking elegance, riveting gazes.
In six of the pictures, the subjects stand
singly against bright monochrome
grounds. (The other two works are more
complicated.) They are young or young-
ish, attractive, stylishly dressed, and
likely well-to-do—presentable people,
presented. All are African-American.
Should this matter? It does in light of
the artist’s drive to, in her words, seek
“versions of myself in art history and in
the world.” Sherald, who is forty-six and
lives in New Jersey, revitalizes a long-lan-
guishing genre in painting by giving
portraits worldly work to do and dis-
tinctive pleasures to impart. Her style
is a simplified realism, worked from
photographs that she stages and takes
of individuals who interest her, an ap-
proach much like that of the late, be-
latedly celebrated painter Barkley Hen-
dricks. Peculiar to Sherald is a consistent
nuance, in her subjects’ expressions,
which can take time to fully register—
it’s so subtle. There is no palpable chal-
lenge. But there’s drama, starting with
that of the show’s existence.
Three years ago, Sherald was plucked
from low-profile but substantial status
as an artist when Michelle Obama chose
her to paint her official portrait. Theresult was unveiled, last year, along with
the official portrait of Barack Obama,
by Kehinde Wiley: the ex-President
seated and leaning forward, as if in in-
timate conversation. Barack’s charac-
teristic pose (I beg indulgence to use
the couple’s first names, for convenience)
rather undercut Wiley’s signature man-
ner of investing contemporary subjects
with neo-early-nineteenth-century, Na-
poleonic grandeur. (Wiley compensated
by surrounding Barack with glorious
flowers.) In Sherald’s painting, Michelle
sits sideways and turns outward, with
her arms bare and her chin resting lightly
on the back of one hand. She wears an
immense cotton gown—by the designer
Michelle Smith—patterned with frag-
ments of eccentric abstract shapes adrift
on white, which fills most of the can-
vas that isn’t taken up by a light-blue
ground. Like some other commenters,
I was bemused, when I saw the work
in reproduction, by what seemed an
overwhelming of the wearer by the
worn. Then I visited the painting at the
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery,
in Washington, D.C.
You must—and I mean absolutely
have to—see Sherald’s work in person,
if at all possible. Taking in the paint-
ing’s scale (it is six feet high by five feet
wide) and the sensitive suavity of its
brushwork (a tissue of touches, each a
particular decision), I decided that art-
ist and sitter had achieved a mind meld,
to buoyant effect. The dress amounts
to a symbol of Michelle’s public role—a
tall order for anyone—and the éclat
with which she performs it. But the
gown becomes subsidiary when you
meet Michelle’s gaze, which we’ve
glimpsed often since 2008, one of dis-
arming but seriously knowing irony,
true to her roots even as she rises to
her station. Sherald riffs on the extrav-
agance of the spectacle while defer-
ring—as just another beholder, another
citizen—to the integrity of the mien.
The work is a tour de force within the
constraint imposed by a political com-
mission. Even so, it didn’t prepare me
for the more intense eloquence of Sher-
ald’s present show: portraits commis-
sioned by herself, all but one painted
this year. She activates the double func-
tion of portraiture as the recognition
of a worldly identity and, in the best
instances, the surprise of an evident