Last of three parts. Earlier installments are on a Detroit essay by Angela Flournoy and an excerpt from her new novel.
What novelist Angela Flournoy (right) and her cousin Angie overheard at the Detroit Institute of Arts seems like something she didn't have to write down to recall.
It's a say-what? gobsmack that can't be shaken and is easy to awaken.
Flournoy drops it at the top of a book review as an example of how African Americans' "days are often peppered with minor insults and microaggressions."
We came across it while compiling reports on "The Turner House," Flournoy's lavishly praised first book. Here's most of what she retold last fall in a Los Angeles Review of Books evaluation of "Ruby" by Cynthia Bond:
We enter the museum five minutes late for our guided tour and hustle past Rivera’s murals to catch up with the group.
The group consists of the sort of people Angie and I imagine run the DIA: elderly, white, comfortably middle class. We fall in behind a man in a wheelchair as the guide discusses Picasso’s Melancholy Woman as an example of how the artist was influenced by Cézanne. I see another Picasso painting closer to me, Bottle of Anis del Mono, and I point it out to Angie as evidence of Picasso’s West African influences. We whisper about how Picasso was famously dodgy when it came to acknowledging African sources in his work, despite the undeniable aesthetic hallmarks. The guide asks for questions or comments about Melancholy Woman, and I consider making my Bottle of Anis comment but decide against it.
We round a corner and confront the dazzling, nine-foot-tall equestrian portrait by Kehinde Wiley, Officer of the Hussars. Angie and I gasp in unison. A sword-wielding black man in a muscle tank, silky purple jacket, jeans, and Timberlands rides a white stallion, its curly, shampoo-commercial mane billowing. The background is a bold gradient of reds and pinks, with a brown battleground landscape at the bottom. Gold filigree swirls around the man and the horse, deliberately flashy-classy, like pretty much any item of clothing put out by streetwear labels in the early 2000s. The guide faces the painting.“Can anyone describe the expression on the man in the painting’s face?”
“He looks strong,” Angie offers. Then she leans toward me and whispers, “And he is fine.” I nod in agreement.The guide explains how Wiley recruited subjects for his Rumors of War series on the streets of Harlem. She calls our attention to the info placard next to the portrait.
Under the standard card listing Wiley’s birth date and how the museum acquired his work is a print of Officer of the Hussars, created by Théodore Géricault in 1812. It too is a dramatic equestrian portrait, but its subject is a French officer of the Imperial Guard. The original hangs in the Louvre. Members of our group crowd closer to see it, then they step back and scrutinize Wiley’s portrait anew. The guide talks about Wiley’s desire to explore the concepts of masculinity and nobility by reimagining these portraits of once powerful men. She again asks for questions or comments.
“I just wanted to thank you for pointing out the original painting and explaining the connection,” the woman pushing the man in the wheelchair says. “I would have walked right by this new one, otherwise.”Angie wears the look I imagine I have on my own face: affronted disbelief. If a nine-foot-tall Technicolor portrait of a good-looking brother in Timbs on a horse doesn’t warrant a minute of a museum-goer’s time, how does a tiny print of a white soldier on a horse change things? I want to yank the info placard off the wall.
-- Alan Stamm
