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Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley

DATES January 24, 2020 through August 30, 2020
ORGANIZING DEPARTMENT Special Exhibition
  • Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley
    Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley places two iconic paintings in dialogue: Kehinde Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps (2005) and its early nineteenth-century source image, Jacques-Louis David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (1800–1). Seen together for the first time, these two heroicized images provide an opportunity to explore how constructions of power, representation, race, masculinity, and agency are enacted within the realm of portraiture.

    David’s equestrian portrait of the First Consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, has become a famous symbol of military glorification and the cult of personality. First commissioned by King Charles IV of Spain in ingrate himself with the influential French general, the composition proved such an effective mode of propaganda that Napoleon asked David to produce a replica of it. The original, on view here, was donated to the Château de Malmaison, the former home of Napoleon and Joséphine Bonaparte located just outside of Paris.

    Bonaparte Crossing the Alps has inspired numerous copies, but none that resonate in contemporary culture as much as Wiley’s large-scale interpretation. Since 2001, Wiley has deliberately transformed and challenged the grand tradition of European historical portraiture, as exemplified by David's painting, which conveyed or constructed the social status and power of the sitter. His paintings foreground Black subjects who, like the artist, confront their exclusion form the canonical narratives of art history and from the writing of history as a whole. Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps retains many features of David's composition, but, most significantly, the figure of Napoleon is replaced by a contemporary Black citizen wearing camouflage fatigues and Timberland boots, literally and figuratively redressing history.

    Although they were made two centuries apart, both paintings highlight the long-standing connection of image-making to power, serving as a reminder, in this twenty-first-century age of social media and celebrity, of the significant relationship between visual culture, dominance, and history. Considered together, the paintings show that the desire and the need to construct images of power cut across centuries and cultures. At the same time, they challenge a monolithic view of history by shedding light on the inequities from which power is built and the intersection of global, local, and contemporary politics.

    Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the Musée national des chateaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau. The presentation at the Château de Malmaison was organized under the leadership of Amaury Lefébure, Director, and curated by Emmanuel Delbouis and Élodie Vaysse. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is curated by Lisa Small, Senior Curator, European Art, and Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum. Special thanks to Joseph Shaikewitz, Curatorial Assistant, Arts of the Americas and Europe.
  • I am the revolution.
    Napoleon Bonaparte's (1769–1821) military prowess, political acumen, relentless ambition, and gift for self promotion reshaped Europe in the early nineteenth century and helped define the modern era. He was born on the Mediterranean island of Corsica the same year France conquered the Italian-speaking republic. Because he belonged to minor Corsican nobility, the new government granted them status as French nobles. This rank, along with the Bonaparte family's modest means, qualified Napoleon for a free education from the French state. At the age of 10, he left Corsica to attend military school in norther France.

    Napoleon's military and political fortunes coincided with and were made possible by the most turbulent period in French history. In the 1770s and 1780s, France was in crisis: strangled by government and economic dysfunction, food shortages, unequal taxation, and disastrously expensive wars. At the same time, new ideas about natural rights and legislative participation based on civic equality rather than aristocratic privilege were taking hold. By 1789, these circumstances ignited the French Revolution, a profound political and cultural rupture, which challenged and then abolished the monarchy that had ruled France for centuries.

    With the revolution came a series of wars between France and other European countries intent on overrunning the young, radical French Republic. Napoleon rose through the ranks of the Revolutionary Army and became a full general at age 24. Each victory, treaty, and annexation brought him acclaim that he exploited to burnish his heroic image, even spinning his failed mission to colonize Egypt as a brilliant success. When different government factions and leaders emerged and fell in the 1790s, Napoleon consolidated his power: in 1799, he staged a coup and made himself First Consul, and two years later he declared himself Consul for Life. Then, in 1804, almost twenty years after beginning a career as a 16-year-old artillery officer, he crowned himself Emperor of the French.

    Out of a regicidal revolutionary republic, Napoleon forged a centralized autocratic state that promised stability after a decade of turmoil and terror. His regime's legacy is complex and contested. He supported republican ideals of meritocracy and freedom of religion, and he promoted secular education and equality under a streamlined code of law, although there were glaring exceptions for women and workers. At the same time, his empire operated as a police state that repressed dissent through censorship and surveillance. Most egregiously, he reinstated slavery and the slave trade, which had been abolished in 1794 in France's Caribbean colonies.
  •  "Boney"
    For every celebratory official representation of Napoleon, such as David's Bonaparte Crossing the Alps, there were hundreds of popular satirical images that subverted the heroic persona and portrayed him as a villainous despot. Scathing prints by British caricaturists in particular, including those on view by James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, were meant to undermin the authority and belittle the character of the man given the unflattering nickname "Boney."

    Long after his ultimate defeat, Napoleon continued to be a potent political symbol of expansionism and imperialism, as the humorous late nineteenth-century figural jug nearby suggests.