In this painting, Kehinde Wiley boldly recasts Napoleon as a contemporary black warrior. In his reference to Jacques-Louis David’s painting Napoleon Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Great St. Bernard Pass, Wiley creates a tension with traditional art history and its neglect of black subjects. His portrait symbolically reassigns value to the sitter, asking us to recall remarkable black leaders such as Toussaint L’Ouverture from Haiti, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela, whose images appear far less frequently, if at all, in histories of art.

—Tumelo Mosaka, independent curator

Kehinde Wiley’s series of reclining figures offers some of his most eroticized images. In many ways, this is a result of the tradition on which he has drawn. In those older works, the recumbent and vulnerable body was often used as a vehicle for the sensual. Take Femme piquée par un serpent, which refers to the scandal-inciting 1847 sculpture by Auguste Clésinger of a woman supposedly dying from a poisonous snakebite. The sculpture was highly praised for its sensual naturalism, but many viewers and critics wondered whether her voluptuous writhing was, in fact, evidence of her death.

Wiley adapted the famously contorted torso of Clésinger’s female nude to show both the rear and front of his model: the viewer is confronted with both the alluring expanse of the white underwear and, at the same time, the searching face with open eyes and mouth. But the titanic recumbent figures in this series both incite and scoff at attempts to reduce them to mere erotic objects, and the vulnerability of their sources has been transmuted into confidence by a scale that is nothing less than heroic. —David J. Getsy, Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Though Kehinde Wiley is best known for his painted portraits, here he shifts from painting to sculpture. In both the lift and turn of the young man’s head and the open V of his zippered collar, this bronze refers to an eighteenth-century marble bust by Jean-Antoine Houdon.

Yet in many other ways, Wiley’s work could hardly be more different: in substituting male for female, black for white, and present for past, he upends the earlier sculpture even as he quotes it. His radical reinterpretation encourages us to examine the stereotypes that can be found in portraiture. —Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum

Consider Kehinde Wiley and the model in the studio, poring over art history books together to choose an image that will serve as the source for a new painting, in which the model will replace some long-departed exemplar of European privilege and power. The model was previously unknown to the artist, but struck him—perhaps by the strong cut of his jaw, perhaps by his leonine confidence—as a fitting candidate for the elaborate and sophisticated impersonation in which he was hired to participate.The model, who remains unnamed, is from Harlem (New York City), as was the original subject, Willem van Heythuysen, a Dutch wool merchant from Haarlem (the Netherlands), whose portrait was painted by Frans Hals in 1625. As Hals’s bravura portraits defined the Golden Age of Holland, Wiley’s painting—at once parody and tribute—gives image to our own age’s conflicted relationship to privilege, power, and the past.

—John B. Ravenal, Executive Director, DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts