Kehinde Wiley and the Last of the Lost Cause?

 

 

Rumors of War, 30' tall

 

The Last of the Lost Cause?*

*This essay/review is part of a larger in-progress project on Civil War mythology.

 

If you don’t follow the art world carefully, you might not know the statue above. It is a work that subverts one of the biggest lies of the past 160 years. The sculptor is Kehinde Wiley. If you can’t quite place the name, I’ll bet you know his presidential portrait of Barack Obama, but first things first. 

 

Wiley portrait of Barack Obama

 

 

Wiley’s equestrian statue is titled “Rumors of War” and is meant to shock. Instead of a wig-topped noble or a dashing solider, Wiley’s defiant figure is a black man with his dreadlocks tied back suggestive of a crown or an Indian sachem’s topknot. The figure is also wearing high-top sneakers, blue jeans, and a warm-up jacket. You can find this statue outside the main entrance to Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VMFA).

 

Wiley based “Rumors of War” on a statue of J.E.B. Stuart that once sat atop a similar pedestal on the city’s Monument Avenue where it shared company with other “heroes” of the Confederacy. You might recall that those came down during Black Lives Matter protests in 2017. There is but one statue remaining, that of tennis great Arthur Ashe. CSA president Jeferson Davis was among those that pulled down and defiled. Wiley’s statue suggests that the real “war” was/is that of black freedom. That’s not the way the story is usually told.

 

Jefferson Davis vandalized; Stuart statue in storage

   
 

 

The Confederacy was defeated, but you’d hardly know that from the way the Civil War was retold before all the bodies were put to rest. The so-called “Lost Cause” was the ideological precursor to legal and customary segregation that sought to strip newly emancipated enslaved peoples of their political, economic, and human rights. The so-called “Jim Crow” era was the order of things until most of its vestiges were outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Even then, the “war” Wiley wants you to ponder still rages: the one for black equality and dignity.

 

The Lost Cause did as much, perhaps more, to ingrain racism deeply into American culture. It claimed that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery and invented a host of specious and nonsensical alt.realities. You name it and it was tried: tariffs, the interference of Northern radicals, states rights, attempts to subvert the Southern agricultural system, a Northern political power grab, Southern honor…. Some of these have validity, but it’s simply impossible to fashion an explanation for the Civil War that doesn’t have black slavery at its core. (Tariffs are rising today, but I don’t detect a serious call to arms!) The Lost Cause created myths: the genteel South vs. the money-grubbing and unkempt North, a war of Northern aggression foisted upon the South, Scarlett O’Hara-like plantations marked by easy-going relations between white and blacks, kindly Southern “massas,” illiterate” slaves better off in bondage, evil abolitionists, etc. Some of that has a kernel of truth as well, but it all rests upon a worldview in which all whites were viewed as better than any black person. 

 

Currently in garden by Valentine Museum. Soon to be reinstalled at the Ironworks. 

 

When this statue was placed in front of the Tredegar Ironworks in Richmond, howls of protest erupted and white people committed acts of vandalism against it. Ditto the Arthur Ashe monument. Do we presume they did so genteelly?

 

Looking down Scarlet's stair case

 

For the record, Southern charm is not my thing, but parts of the South retain an air of grace. I might have been just as happy to have some barbecue and listen to the blues, but we had lunch one day at the Jefferson Hotel in down Richmond and it’s quite a place. Scarlett O’Hara even sashayed down its staircase in Gone with the Wind. There are tons of plantation homes below the Mason-Dixon Line that ooze with elegance as long as you don’t think about who and what sustained them.

 

As Bob Dylan put it, though, “the times they are a changing...” (Okay, he dropped the final “g.”) A Richmond friend and I visited the “Southern White House,” where Jefferson Davis quartered during the war. In many ways it’s more democratic that the one in Washington DC. It belonged to a bourgeois doctor who made it a home. Davis did all of his serious presidential duties at the state capital building a block away. The dining room picture is about the biggest thing in the house. Make no mistake, though; Davis was a Confederate and a racist. The good news is that guides no longer try to whitewash that. Nor do they fail to tell you that the house “staff” was comprised of wage-earning whites and white indentured servants, but the vast majority of workers were enslaved black folks. 

 

Not exactly the State Dining Room

 

To circle back to art, Kehinde Wiley is far from the first artist of color seeking to put African Americans back in the historical narrative. He is, though, one of the most successful and clever. He’s a lot of things the hardshell right hates: black, gay, has an Ivy Legree degree (Yale), and possess an impressive grasp of art history. If you wonder what’s up with the flowered backdrops of his portraits, know that his role models are precisely those Old Masters (and Mistresses) venerated by white cultural elites. The VMFA has a Wiley painting titled “Willem van Heythusen Posing with a Sword.” Why the Dutch name? It’s based on Frans Hals painting done in 1625. He has done the same with religious paintings and most of his portraits. Things look a bit different when we replace white bodies with black ones and update the drapery, doesn’t it? 

 

Frans Hals

Wiley