JON McGEE • ART HISTORY

Jon McGee
Paper Abstract ART 563: Art Theory and Criticism Seminar

TITLE: Kehinde Wiley’s Subversion of Class in the Western Art Historical Canon:
The Recontextualization in Willem van Heythuysen of Status Communicated Through Commissioned 17th Century Portraiture

"Perhaps the 21st century’s most esteemed portrait artist, Kehinde Wiley, has built his artistic practice upon engaging with the status communicated through traditional portraiture, appropriating the depictions of figures with power from Western art history and replacing their White subjects with 21st century Black figures. Wiley’s 2006 oil and enamel painting on canvas, Willem van Heythuysen, does just this. However, rather than reworking a depiction of what is usually found in a Wiley portrait of this genre: a political figure, Willem van Heythuysen places a street-casted Black man from Harlem, sporting contemporary hip-hop clothing, in the exact pose a seventeenth-century cloth merchant once held. Wiley’s choice to rework a portrait depicting a seventeenth-century upper bourgeois subject was no accident: not only does it produce a commentary upon canonical representation and power, but it can be understood as a class critique. If one is to examine Willem van Heythuysen with what art historian Michael Baxandall called an artist-client relationship, one can view the “client” as the contemporary art market itself. Wiley’s figure certainly exists to be exalted as a wealthy White man once was, but the artwork also operates to provide enrichment (for example as a social tool, a status symbol, or an investment) for the buyer. As such, Willem van Heythuysen represents the commodification of hip-hop culture, though executed in an edifying capacity with an individualized representation. However, Wiley’s class commentary, resting upon the irony of his figure’s imposed context, refrains from being overt. The overall impact of the work emphasizes identity politics: because of the interests and demands of a predominately white, wealthy art market, the popularity of powerful representational propaganda becomes contingent upon the absence of overt confrontations of material conditions which led to a subject’s initial exclusion, as these are the same conditions granting collectors the wealth to purchase such works. A painting’s neutrality becomes important to support such structures. Thus, it is necessary in Willem van Heythuysen for the composition’s class critique to emerge subtly, in order to uphold Wiley’s popularity with collectors required for continued success."

Nominator: Dr. Amanda Strasik
Jon is studying Studio Arts, class of 2022