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Kehinde Wiley: General John Burgoyne

Asked why he mainly paints African Americans in his work, artist Kehinde Wiley said:

“... because I want to see people who look like me…”

And he wants to see them in art works in museums, and not just on the street where he finds his models. In this work, Kehinde Wiley’s model was a New York screenwriter. His confident posture with one hand holding a sword echoes the pose of General John Burgoyne in a portrait by the English artist Joshua Reynolds. So here, Wiley has taken an eighteenth-century portrait as his inspiration, but completely reinterpreted it.

Curator Holger Birkholz is very pleased to be able to show this work in the Mosaic Hall.

“This room actually visually displays the history of white men’s power in a particular way – through grand political figures, kings and other rulers, as well as intellectual greats like Lessing, Goethe and Schiller. This eminently illustrates the dominance of the white narrative permeating our history. In that context, it was especially interesting to find an artistic position critiquing this tradition.”

Kehinde Wiley is ranked among the best-known American painters. In 2018, he painted the official portrait of the former President Barack Obama.

Yet from the outset, as we all know, the history of African Americans in the United States was a story of abduction, slavery and violence – and even today, Black people still face discrimination. Wiley gives them a place in history, linking tradition and modernity across a variety of levels. With his strongly athletic body, the young man could be an icon of sexual desire – yet the ‘ideal body’ was a key trope in the art of antiquity, just as it was later in neo-classicism.

Dressed in everyday clothes and in a self-confident pose, the figure is set amid wondrous flowers gently twining around his body. His hand on the sword handle seems almost affected. But the position of the hand recalls the customs and magnificence of courtly France – and is also Kehinde Wiley’s homage to his mother, a woman from a simple background who gave their home an opulent interior design.