Day 295 - Walker on Leutze
April 28, 2022
Gallery 767 is home to works by three contemporary African-American artists, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, and Hugh Hayden, that reflect on two icons of American painting in the Met's collection: Emmanuel Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware," which hangs in the adjacent gallery, and Winslow Homer's "The Gulf Stream," part of a major show on Homer that's currently at the museum.
For me, Kara Walker's "The Crossing," an outsize diptych that measures approximately 12 feet long and 7 feet high, is by far the most impressive item on display, and unquestionably the most hard-hitting. According to the placard, she began this take-off on the Leutze painting on January 20, 2017, the day of Trump's inauguration, and the work expresses her anger and anguish about that event. The drawing is largely in black and white, with a few notable exceptions: the red, white, and blue of the American flag, the blue of the water, and The Donald's orange hair and breeches. Whereas in the Leutze painting, the oarsmen make their way through ice floes, Trump's is at the fore of a boat - a metaphorical ship of state - immobilized by icebergs. He wears a triangular hat like the kind of paper hat a young kid would make. A figure to his right in a baseball cap clutches the American flag, while another holds a pistol over his head, pointing, inevitably, rightward. Some of the crew members have grotesque, twisted faces, and one spews vomit overboard onto the naked corpse of a woman floating in the water. A seated woman appears to be in mourning as she holds up a portrait of a bearded man wearing a Muslim head covering (Bin Laden?), while a naked child holds his breath as the man behind him throws him into the churning water. A brown-skinned woman waves her arm to a helicopter -is she begging for rescue, or simply not to be fired on? At the lower righthand corner is a jagged-toothed shark that conjures up the Homer painting.
For me, Kara Walker's "The Crossing," an outsize diptych that measures approximately 12 feet long and 7 feet high, is by far the most impressive item on display, and unquestionably the most hard-hitting. According to the placard, she began this take-off on the Leutze painting on January 20, 2017, the day of Trump's inauguration, and the work expresses her anger and anguish about that event. The drawing is largely in black and white, with a few notable exceptions: the red, white, and blue of the American flag, the blue of the water, and The Donald's orange hair and breeches. Whereas in the Leutze painting, the oarsmen make their way through ice floes, Trump's is at the fore of a boat - a metaphorical ship of state - immobilized by icebergs. He wears a triangular hat like the kind of paper hat a young kid would make. A figure to his right in a baseball cap clutches the American flag, while another holds a pistol over his head, pointing, inevitably, rightward. Some of the crew members have grotesque, twisted faces, and one spews vomit overboard onto the naked corpse of a woman floating in the water. A seated woman appears to be in mourning as she holds up a portrait of a bearded man wearing a Muslim head covering (Bin Laden?), while a naked child holds his breath as the man behind him throws him into the churning water. A brown-skinned woman waves her arm to a helicopter -is she begging for rescue, or simply not to be fired on? At the lower righthand corner is a jagged-toothed shark that conjures up the Homer painting.
It's a bleak image of American violence, military and otherwise. In Walker's vision, Trump's country is a place hostile to women, children, and nonwhites. I wish I thought it had changed.
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