Kehinde Wiley @ Santa Barbara Museum of Art - Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan

Kehinde Wiley: Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Through October 13, 2019

KEHINDE WILEY

Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, 2015

Oil on canvas

Collection of Dennis and Jeanne Masel

Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

© 2019 Kehinde Wiley

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) presents of a major work by Kehinde Wiley that appears as part of the Museum’s innovative series of public exhibitions, Park Projects. The painting, a large equestrian portrait fashioned after an early 17th-century painting by Dutch master Anthony van Dyck, is on view in the Museum’s Park Entrance space.

Kehinde Wiley has become internationally recognized for his examinations of the aestheticizing of power and masculinity through the time-worn genre of portraiture. This major painting, titled Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, is an extension of the artist’s Rumors of War series, which takes the form of historic equestrian portraiture. In Wiley’s hands, this established genre expands in scale to over nine feet in each dimension, and explodes in color with a revelry of bold and bright hues.

For this series, and in much of his work, Kehinde Wiley cast his subjects from young black men he met on the street, mostly from New York. During this process, he invites the individuals to his studio, asks them to choose a painting from art history textbooks, photographs them in that pose—in their own clothing—and then paints them. In this way, Kehinde Wiley subverts the tradition of portraying European nobleman in positions of power by depicting contemporary black men in the same poses. Addressing the politics of race and authority in art, Kehinde Wiley’s work points to the lack of representation of people of color in the history of Western painting, while also challenging present-day portrayals of masculinity.

ANTHONY VAN DYCK

Equestrian portrait of Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignan, ca. 1634-35

Oil on canvas

Collection of Sabauda Gallery, Turin, Italy

The painting on view was inspired by a 1634–1635 equestrian portrait by Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck and depicts Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, an Italian military commander. Painted in a style of relaxed elegance and ease, the portrait attributes a noble status to the subject through artistic tropes used to convey glory, wealth, and prestige. Naming the work after the original source, Kehinde Wiley’s Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation. Painting his subject larger-than-life and isolated against a colorful floral background, Kehinde Wiley emphasizes the dignity and nobility of his model.

KEHINDE WILEY

President Barack Obama, 2017

Oil on canvas

Collection of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

© 2019 Kehinde Wiley

In 2018, Kehinde Wiley became the first African American artist to paint an official US Presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Former US President Barack Obama selected Wiley for this honor. In 2015, Wiley was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, titled A New Republic, which traveled to six venues including the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; the Phoenix Museum of Art, Arizona; and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.

KEHINDE WILEY was born in Los Angeles, California and is based in New York. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Shortly after, he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Denver Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART
1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA
www.sbma.net

Van Dyck 1599 - 1641, Royal Academy of Arts, London

VAN DYCK 1599 - 1641

Royal Academy of Arts, London

11 September - 10 December 1999

Anthony van Dyck was born in Antwerp in 1599. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, The Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, are organising a major retrospective of the artist’s work. This collaboration brings together two of the cities in which Van Dyck built his international career as a painter. Her Majesty The Queen and Their Majesties King Albert II and Queen Paola of Belgium have graciously agreed to act as patrons of the exhibition. With over one hundred works this exhibition will offer a rare chance to see Van Dyck’s mythological and religious paintings as well as a great assembly of his portraits - of Antwerp burghers, Genoese nobles, the Stuart royal family, poets, statesmen, courtiers, friends and children.

Anthony Van Dyck was a child prodigy, whose exceptional talent was recognised by Rubens. By 1618, aged only 19, he had established his own workshop. His paintings from this early period were religious works for the churches of Antwerp as well as mythological paintings and portraits. His fame was such that he was invited to visit the Court of England where he worked for King James I, the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Buckingham. From 1621 to 1627 he lived and worked in Genoa, visiting Venice, Rome, Palermo and Naples. Genoa was the most important international centre of banking and mercantile shipping, and Van Dyck painted the Genoese aristocracy and their children to brilliant effect. He returned to Antwerp in 1628 painting portraits at the court and altarpieces for the great churches of the city.

In 1632 Anthony Van Dyck was finally persuaded to accept the position of Court Painter to Charles I. The painter was knighted, presented with a gold chain and medallion, and given a studio on the river at Blackfriars where he painted the royal family and members of their court. In the space of seven and a half years he produced perhaps as many as four hundred portraits, ranging from grandiose portrayals of the King on horseback to more informal paintings of the less exalted courtiers, the diplomats, poets and musicians who were his friends. He completely eclipsed the rather wooden portraiture of his contemporaries in England, and set a style and standard that influenced artists from Sir Peter Lely to Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence. Although many of his subject paintings made in England have been lost, a haunting Cupid and Psyche from the Royal Collection illustrates his genius for romantic and poetic works.

During this time he still visited Flanders and painted many fine pictures there. By 1640, he was anxious to leave England, but dogged by ill health, and unable to obtain a secure position in France, he returned to die in London in December 1641. He was buried in old St Paul’s Cathedral, his grave bearing a Latin inscription which in translation reads: `....while he lived he gave immortality to many. Charles I, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, provided this monument for Sir Anthony van Dyck’. By July 1642 the country was on the brink of Civil War.

The exhibition has been organised by the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition has been curated by Dr Christopher Brown, Director of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and an expert on Van Dyck.

Significant loans have been promised by Her Majesty The Queen; the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp; the National Gallery, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; The Museo del Prado, Madrid; Palazzo Rosso, Genova; Museo Capitolino, Rome and the Musée du Louvre, Paris, as well as the galleries at Brussels, Dresden, Amsterdam, Vicenza, Melbourne, Budapest, and elsewhere. In addition some works in private collections, rarely seen by the public, will be shown.

ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS

Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J 0BD

www.royalacademy.org.uk