Obama Portraits: A Masterpiece of Art, Politics, and Storytelling 🎨

Obama Portraits Blend Paint and Politics, and Fact and Fiction<br />WASHINGTON — With the unveiling here Monday at the National Portrait Gallery of the official presidential likenesses of Barack Obama<br />and the former first lady, Michelle Obama, this city of myriad monuments gets a couple of new ones, each radiating, in its different way, gravitas (his) and glam (hers).<br />In an imposingly scaled painting — just over seven feet tall — the artist presents Mr. Obama dressed in the regulation black suit<br />and an open-necked white shirt, and seated on a vaguely thronelike chair not so different from the one seen in Stuart’s Washington portrait.<br />On several levels, then, the Obama portraits stand out in this institutional context, though given the tone of bland propriety<br />that prevails in the museum’s long-term “America’s Presidents” display — where Mr. Obama’s (though not Mrs. Obama’s) portrait hangs — standing out is not all that hard to do.<br />The painters they’ve picked to portray them — Kehinde Wiley, for Mr. Obama’s portrait; Amy Sherald, for Mrs. Obama — are African-American as well.<br />Mr. Wiley has set Mr. Obama against — really embedded him in — a bower of what looks like ground cover.<br />Some of the earliest presidents represented — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson<br />— were slaveholders; Mrs. Obama’s great-great grandparents were slaves.<br />[Read our interview Kehinde Wiley | Read our interview with Amy Sherald]<br />It doesn’t take #BlackLivesMatter consciousness to see the significance of this<br />racial lineup within the national story as told by the Portrait Gallery.<br />Mrs. Obama’s choice of Ms. Sherald as an artist was an enterprising one.