NEW YORK, NY.- Right in the middle of the exhibition Giants: Art From the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, which opens Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, is Kehinde Wileys 25-foot-long 2008 painting Femme Piquée par un Serpent. Showing a Black man in snappy but casual dress reclined in a distinctively twisted position, with a background of Wileys signature flowers, it borrows both title and pose from an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger. What you think of it really depends on what youre asking for.
If you view the painting as a Venti-size iteration of Wileys ongoing project, his decadeslong attack on the paucity of Black faces in Western museums and art history, its one-note but hard to argue with. Brightly colored and thoughtfully composed, its visually appealing, and even today, when its no longer so uncommon to see Black figures on museum walls, catching sight of one this big still elicits a thrill.
On the other hand, considered strictly as a painting, Femme Piquée par un Serpent (Woman Bitten by a Serpent) doesnt offer that much. There are no details that youd miss in a jpeg reproduction, no visible evidence of human hands at play, no sensual pleasure to be found in the surface, nothing surprising, mysterious or engrossing. Its simply the adept illustration of an idea.
Of course, you could also ask for both for a clear conceptual work about painting (and the historical exclusion of Black subjects and artists) that is also a good painting. If you do, youre likely to respond to Femme Piquée par un Serpent with ambivalence and frustration.
I was thinking about this about artistic endeavors that succeed and fail at the same time as I walked through Giants, the latest celebrity tie-in exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. (Spike Lee: Creative Sources closes Sunday; a show of photographs by Paul McCartney opens in May.) Giants draws on the extensive art collection of married musical superstars Keys and Beatz (Kasseem Dean), bringing together 98 works many oversized and of recent vintage by 37 artists. Most of them are American, but they also come from several countries in Europe and half a dozen in Africa, and they range in generation from Ernie Barnes, who died at 70 in 2009, to Qualeasha Wood, born in 1996.
Stylistically, however, it would be hard to imagine a more narrowly focused show. That nearly all the faces are Black, or that wherever theres a political subtext, it involves an issue of special concern to Black Americans, is great. But that the work is also nearly all figurative, that so much of it is of a similar size, made with similar colors, composed in the same way and hung in the same way, is not so great. So many superficial resemblances have a flattening effect. It becomes hard to appreciate the nuance, or individuality, of a piece that at first blush looks like just a greener or redder version of the piece to its left.
If you can tune out this flattening effect, you will find quite a few excellent artworks from the collection. (The show is in the museums special exhibition space on the ground floor, which means you will also have to pay $25 per adult to get in.) They include vibrant paintings that South African artist, Esther Mahlangu, makes with traditional Ndebele house patterns; Arthur Jafas overwhelming, 7,000-pound truck-tire sculpture Big Wheel I; a rich, room-size polyptych by Meleko Mokgosi; and 14 charming, oval and round landscapes of Jamaica by Barkley L. Hendricks.
Theres a whole wall of black and white photographs by Gordon Parks, including both well-known images of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Langston Hughes and sensitive photographs of less famous faces, and a facing wall of Jamel Shabazzs more candid color photographs of well-dressed Brooklynites and early hip-hop pioneers. Deana Lawsons oversize staged photos of domestic interiors, hung together on yet another wall, are as unnerving and powerful as ever. These all would have been more effective hung around the exhibit instead of crammed together in a commercial-looking display, but the photographs themselves rarely miss.
A soundsuit by Nick Cave is reliably delightful, as is Jordan Casteels portrait of clothing designer Fallou Wadje selling T-shirts in Harlem, and Hank Willis Thomas contributes an incisive 2017 textile piece called You Shouldnt Be the Prisoner of Your Own Ideas (LeWitt). An 8-foot square of green and white stripes with an X in the middle, its made of decommissioned prison uniforms.
Before you get to any of this, however, you have to pass through a kind of shrine to the collectors.
Theres a larger-than-life photograph of Keys and Beatz in formal wear, posing with a BMX bike. And several actual bikes from Beatzs collection. And his turntables. And the piano Keys used in her 2014 video We Are Here. And portraits of the couple by Wiley, Derrick Adams and Shabazz, who shot them reenacting a somber 1970 Gordon Parks photo of Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver with his wife, Kathleen, in Algeria. Once you do get to the art, youll find it interspersed with little lounge areas surrounded by Bang & Olufsen speakers, the couples preferred brand, playing a special playlist compiled by Beatz, as if the couple had invited you to one of their houses to see what was on their walls.
The shows first text asserts that Beatz and Keys have stood as giants in our cultural landscape for decades; it doesnt mention that Beatz was on the museums board until late last year, when he resigned to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, nor had it been announced at press time which pieces, if any, the couple plan to donate to the museum.
What you say about all this depends, again, on your expectations. Is the point of the whole show to demonstrate how many talented Black artists there are in the world? Or to give a boost to some of the younger and lesser known of them? Those are important goals and it would be hard to claim that Giants didnt fulfill them. You could even imagine that the over-the-top hype of Keys and Beatz who are influential artists in their own right is meant to serve as a similar kind of demonstration. Or is the point simply to keep the museums lights on by getting visitors in the door? Given the current climate, I couldnt argue with that, either.
Still, you cant help but wonder if the same point couldnt have been made in a less aesthetically claustrophobic way, a way that dispensed with hagiography and left more room for the subtlety, the depth and the sheer complexity possible in visual art. After all, isnt that what museums should be sharing with new audiences in the first place?
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Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys
Saturday through July 7, the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000; brooklynmuseum.org.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.