THE NEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 23, 2019 69
inner life. Race applies as a condition
and a cause for resetting the main-
stream of Western art.
T
he subjects make eye contact with
us. They can seem mildly interested
in how they are beheld—they wouldn’t
have bothered dressing well if they
weren’t—but with dispassionate self-pos-
session, attitude-free. Their affects vary
from the radiant assurance of “Some-
times the king is a woman,” a young
woman in a dress of slashing black-and-
white patterns against a pink ground, to
the slightly gawky presence of “A single
man in possession of a good fortune.”
(The whiff of Jane Austen bodes some
consequential comedy.) This young man
sports a spectacular sweater that displays
gridded architectural motifs in blazing
colors; the ground is a modulated gold.
He impresses as somebody’s son, some-
body’s brother, who is embarking on
adulthood with resilient confidence but
a good deal yet to learn. He made me
smile, with wonder. The tacit narratives
of both pictures are compelling in a way
that recalls the long-lapsed convention
of painted portraiture as courtly cere-
mony, exalting kings and courtiers—this
was the forte of Velázquez, whose du-
ties to Philip IV happened to occasion
some of the greatest paintings ever made.
(The Spaniard’s royal tots, for instance,
had everything to learn, but their exis-
tence was important to everyone.)
Race anchors Sherald’s project in his-
tory. She represents it strategically, by
modifying a policy of today’s leading
painter of subjects from black society
and culture, Kerry James Marshall. Mar-
shall renders the skin of all of his peo-
ple coal black. Sherald opts for grisaille.
Both thereby apostrophize America’s
original sin and permanent crisis: the
otherizing of the not white, regardless
of gradations. The standardized hues put
race both to the fore and to the side of
what’s really going on—an address to
Western pictorial precedence, freezing
a debate in the present to thaw a con-
versation with the past and future. To
explain the startling authority of Sher-
ald’s art, you must think back to peri-
ods when portraiture was a vital func-
tion of painting and then, returning
forward, incorporate as mainstream the
apposite contributions of honored but
too often patronized black American
artists such as Romare Bearden, Jacob
Lawrence, and Charles White. When
art changes in the present, it changes
in the past, too. I had a dizzy sensation
at the Sherald show—which was so
much better than I had expected—of
ground shifting under my feet.
As is natural in a time of transition,
Sherald, too, is still learning. Marking a
hugely ambitious departure for her, “Pre-
cious jewels by the sea”—a beach scene,
ten feet high by nine feet wide, in which
two young men carry two young women
on their shoulders, all in chic swimwear,
next to a tipped reddish-orange-and-
white beach umbrella—should be a mas-
terpiece, and it almost is. The frankly
observing, untroubled intelligence of the
four subjects stuns with what I want to
call the Sherald Effect: an experience of
looking that entails being looked at, to
ambiguous but inescapably gripping ends.
However, there’s a lurch in her switch
from flat to spatial backgrounds. Aqua
waters flipping to dark blue at the hori-
zon fail to convince, and I could very
well do without a tiny sailboat in the
supposed distance. The perfunctory depth
doesn’t detract from the terrific aplomb
of the figures, but it sabotages the uni-
tary power to which the picture aspires.
I love “The girl next door,” a less in-
sistent departure for Sherald. The young
woman portrayed is personable and any-
thing but svelte. She fills out a baggy
dress that is patterned with red, yellow,
blue, green, and purple polka dots, cinched
by a thin belt. Her look is rather guile-
less—far from the cool savoir of the beach
people—but equal, you somehow know,
to whatever daily life she is leading. She
is praised by Sherald’s brush for the in-
souciance of her garb: the bouncy dots
a tonic exception to the refinement of
the abstract designs that the other sub-
jects’ clothes provide for this painter’s
aesthetic use. What’s the neighbor’s
name? I’d like to know. I almost feel that
I do—on the tip of my tongue, about to
come to me. Now let’s define great por-
traiture. It makes companionable for you
a person who is identified or unknown,
perhaps remote from you in geography
or time (even dead, no matter), different
from you in ways big or small, a lot or
only the littlest bit like you in other ways,
and, all in all, another exceedingly specific
inhabitant of a certain planet, amid ev-
erything that cannot help but be. OR CALL 888.646.6466
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