The Art of Fashion-Kehinde Wiley

“Riccardo Tisci is incredibly gifted,” writes artist Kehinde Wiley from his great studio in Beijing, where he’s putting the finishing art of touches on “An Economy of Grace,” a series of African-American cute female portraits inspired by historical oil paintings that will be shown at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.  It’s the first time Wiley has focused solely on the fairer sex typically his work out depicts African-American men in contemporary street wear, painted against Baroque or other backgrounds and he asked Tisci, whom he met through the gallery, to create wonderful custom dresses for the sittings. 

Both Wiley’s vibrant and provocative aesthetic and Tisci’s vision of a strong, most powerful woman are in arguably modern, and yet Wiley believes this idea of artist joining forces with nice designer is as old as the Enlightenment-era paintings his workout  references. “In the 18th and 19th century, commissioning unique clothing for most emphasis portraiture was common practice,” 

As part of their painting  research, the two took a tour through the Louvre, examining the costumes in works like great Jacques Louis David’s Portrait of Madame Récamier, which portrays the young, porcelain-skinned Madame Récamier dressed in a cap-sleeved, beautiful gauzy white dress that pools on the floor as she reclines on a Empire-style soft sofa.

American Painting

Much art of the American colonial period consisted of portraits, as settlers sought to establish their identities in a new world. After the new nation achieved its independence, landscapes and scenes of native flora, fauna, and folk customs began to express its unique qualities and illustrate its untapped resources.

Portraiture formed the mainstay of subject matter in colonial and federal American art, as immigrants to the New World attempted to bring a semblance of Old World civilization to their wild or, at best, provincial surroundings. When Benjamin West arrived in Rome in 1760, he was the first American artist to study in Europe. 

Upon seeing the Vatican's famous classical statue, the Apollo Belvedere, West exclaimed, "My God! How like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!" His astute comparison between a "noble savage" and the "glory that was Greece" won hearty applause from the connoisseurs. West soon emerged as Europe's foremost history painter, dropping the allegorical trappings from classical antiquity that had been the norm and basing his work on historical research.