Henry Taylor's singular masterpiece, Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi sees the artist Cassi Namoda turn away from her viewer to instead face the canon of Western art history. The centerpiece of Taylor's acclaimed 2022-24 midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Taylor's critical revisionist portrait sees his peer and then-partner in the guise of Gerhard Richter's daughter, the subject of his 1988 painting Betty, posing an arresting rebuttal to the fault lines that riddle the history of art and the deafening absence of Black figures within it. Assuming a kind of contemporary contrapposto, Namoda immortalizes Taylor's profound reinterpretation and repetition of history; her presence is made all the more present by the heft of Taylor's facture. Taylor's oeuvre more broadly presents an archive of Black excellence: Michelle and Barack Obama, David Hammons, Jay-Z, Martin Luther King Jr., Deana Lawson, his children, and himself. And here, capturing a sitter of incredible personal significance, Taylor seizes the omissions of the past as an opportunity: the canvas is not only a surface but an arena, one that empowers Taylor to counter the work of a master portraitist. Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi remedies history with hope. There is still room, Taylor assures us, to paint one's place into it.

Here, Taylor recasts Richter's portrait of Betty's braid, once tucked into her floral hoodie, as the contours of Cassi's afro. Spanning an extraordinary seven feet in height, Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi is executed at double the scale of Richter's portrait, dwarfing its source of inspiration. The work's magnitude alone declaratively insists upon the existence of this intrepid intervention. Jim Lewis, in his essay on Richter's Betty, writes: "the work negotiates so many ambiguities and doubts, to achieve such a carefully maintained aporia, that it immediately impressed me with what I can best describe as the force of its tentativeness. Here, for example, is the uncertainty of experience. Betty is caught in the full strangeness of her own act of observation; she's the consummate subject, portrayed in the act of an observation purely and entirely her own." (Jim Lewis, "Gerhard Richter's Betty," Artforum, September 1993, p. 133) While the act of contemplation Richter captures—and the privacy and reticence it requires—are largely preserved here, Taylor's painterly stat.mes nt is decisively unambiguous. If it is doubt that charges Richter's image, then it is certainty that empowers Taylor's: Cassi is irrefutably monumental, positioned at the center of a discipline and institutional framework that, for centuries, not only failed but categorically refused to recognize Black artists, subjects and achievements.

Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi's surface is heavily, repeatedly worked. Taylor captures Cassi with the sculptural mass of a sybil, the pastose, lush quality of a Nicolas de Staël. Taylor paints with a perceptible sense of immediacy, though not the kind sought out by the Abstract Expressionists. Stroke by stroke, Taylor's brushwork seeks not to create an art about form and form alone but one with a substance and plasticity that rushes to keep up with a far wider project: one of representation and revision.

"All these images gain power from Taylor's paint handling," Roberta Smith wrote in her review of Henry Taylor: B Side, "which tends to be startlingly tough and direct. It proceeds in slabs of untempered color and skirmishes of brushwork, sidestepping traditional notions of finish and beauty. It conveys something of the harshness his sitters often face in this country and the resiliency that springs from it." (Roberta Smith, "Henry Taylor's 'B Side' Is Full of Grade-A Paintings," The New York t.mes s, 17 October 2023 (online)) Where Richter's photorealism blurs the weft of his canvas into an atmospheric haze, Taylor's hand thickly layers atop it, rendering Cassi all the more rich and profound. His dialogue with Richter is further heightened by the coincidence that Namoda was born the year Betty was painted, as though this very painting were passing a generational torch—and shifting the paradigm of painting's aims between them.

Taylor's paintings, which somet.mes s riff on earlier canonical masterpieces, have been labeled as "covers" or "samples," repurposing totems of artistic significance for a critical aesthetic strategy that ties Taylor to contemporaries like Kerry James Marshall and Robert Colescott. A visionary social realist, Henry Taylor is among the most important artists working today. His powerful, unyielding expressions of the nuances of the contemporary American cultural landscape negotiate the complexities of identity politics and postmodern discourses on race relations and the elemental simplicity of admiration, adoration and companionship. "It's about respect," the artist shared of his artistic ethos, "because I respect these people. It's a two-dimensional surface, but they are really three-dimensional beings." (Henry Taylor quoted in: Antwaun Sargent, "Examining Henry Taylor's Groundbreaking Paintings of the Black Experience," Artsy, 16 July 2018 (online)) In each canvas, Taylor simultaneously materializes empathy and empowerment, preserving the authenticity of their embodied cultural experiences in paint. "Taylor depicts black history the way many black people actually experience it: as simultaneous change and stasis, revolution and stagnation, one step forward, two steps back," Zadie Smith writes. "There is a Picasso-like restlessness to Taylor, a determined promiscuity of intention and execution." (Zadie Smith, "Henry Taylor's Promiscuous Painting," The New Yorker, 23 July 2018 (online))

As Betty averts Richter's lens, looking toward one of her father's paintings, Cassi shuns an imposing Western gaze, privileging instead the latent possibilities in the future of painting. Taylor's works are widely represented in institutional collects ions worldwide, from the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault collects ion, Paris; The Studio Museum in Harlem; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Of his vast and prolific body of work, Before Gerhard Richter there was Cassi undoubtedly ranks among the most impressive canvases Taylor has ever created, a best-in-class example of the artist at the height of his powers.

Artist

Henry Taylor