The portrait of the media magnet of the work of artist Sean Michael Warren is presented in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithson Museum, and the olive branch hints a lot.
There is no single standard by which someone's image is considered worthy of getting to the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithson Museum. Politicians, including presidents, are represented simply because they had power, no matter how they used it or abused it. Recently, the dominant currency has been celebrity, and the museum is quite agnostic about what kinds of glory are honored. The great wealth is also glorified, although usually in more acceptable terms, such as influence, public service or philanthropy.
Oprah Winfrei could enter any of these doors: wealth, power, influence, even political influence, given that she supported Barack Obama in the 2006 presidential election and suggested Mitt Romny to run against Donald Trump in 2020. And now the official, ordered painting with its image is included in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, joining photos and engravings that have been documenting the decades of careers of the leading talk show and the media magnet.
One thing is to have your own portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. It is quite different - when your portrait is officially opened there, in a large central atrium in front of the crowd of captured viewers. On Wednesday morning, when the portrait of Winfrey finally came into the world, this space was crowded and full of admiration, as was the opening of Barack's portraits and Michelle Obama in February 2018.
Winfrey was present, like the Chicago artist Sean Michael Warren, who drew a full height image. Lonny G. Banch III, Secretary of the Smithson Institute and former founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, was also there, and he acknowledged that the support of Winfrei of this young museum helped him hold his current position.
"We, the country, are in debt to you," he said before opening.
10 minutes before Winfrey and representatives of the Smithson Institute, they took the stage, a reverent silence reigned in the hall.
"Like in the church," one woman said in the crowd.
So it was. At 10:12 am, all the mobile phones in the cave room were directed to the podium, where the picture Warren was hidden behind the black cloth. The artist and Winfrey made an honor, cautiously pulling the veil, which fell, opening it in the volumetric folds of a purple tapt dress, which stood in her own prayer garden, surrounded by oaks, holding an olive branch in his left hand.
It is a traditional image, figurative representation, designed to read details and symbolism, not formal experiments. Winfrey is smiling and attractive, only a few strands of gray hair are reminiscent of the flow of time. Warren effectively reproduced the satin texture of the dress, and the shadows behind her back give a convincing feeling of a warm sunny day and the coolness of a well -shaded garden. The garden is neatly groomed, but not perfect, like the public image of Winfrey: always almost perfect, but not quite, because its attractiveness depends on the fact that it is a person, like us.
Warren chose a careful but intelligent path without rethinking the image. Winfrey is one of the most photographed and removed figures in the world that is saturated with images. She is also known to have declared independence from her own body: "I know for sure that I am not my body," she said after many years of torment because of problems with figure and weight.
One day she appeared on the cover of Forbes in the royal pose, looming over Warren Buffette and Bill Gates, who sat politely under her. But Warren, who also drew it as part of a common mural in Chicago in 2020, did not go that way. He also did not portray, perhaps, the most iconic of her poses - the outstretched hands, as if hugging her audience, who enthusiastically correspond to the gesture of love and affirmation.
Instead, the artist chose simplicity, fixing the star alone, happy, in peace with her, as if she appeared on the cover of her own magazine.
After the show, Winfrey told how she often does, about her path from rags to wealth, about her ambitions and gratitude, about how she rose from poverty in the countryside Mississippi to the rank of the richest African American. She remembered the famous washing bath in which her grandmother boiled her family clothing and her confidence in a very young age that she is intended for something better.
"I live and breathe God's dream of me today," Winfrey said. She talked a lot about a purple dress, her favorite color, and about the importance of her role in Stephen Spielberg's movie "Purple Color" in 1985 not only for her Zalete to glory, but also for her independence as an artist and entrepreneur.
But she did not talk about the olive branch, which is the only, most noticeable symbol in the picture. Obviously, this is a generalized symbol of peace. But it is also a deep Christian image, the first little green sign of hope that the dove brought in his ark after God destroyed the rest of humanity during the destructive flood.
The symbol of peace and a reminder of the cruel, capricious nature of our world with ghosts. I would like to hear more about it from Winfrey or Warren, but the closest thing that she did, was referred to by Maya Angelou's poem, written to the 50th anniversary of Winfrey. "My desire is for you - to continue to… amaze the cruel world / with your good deeds," Winfrey said, reading in the memory of the ode composed in her honor.
"Today I live and breathe God's dream of me," Winfrey said during the ceremony. The Wednesday ceremony was more solemn than the one that happened five years ago, after the election of Donald Trump, who crossed out many of the Obama left. But the olive branch is reminiscent of the farewell character of most official portraits. In Winfri-Magnate, no doubt ahead of a lot of speeches, and she was able to insert into her speech a mention of the future Roman "purple". "Buy tickets now," she said.
But the era is over. For decades, she has offered the Americans a seductive imagination: that our greatest problems can be solved by discussing them by confessing to sins, by hugging those we consider terrible or strangers. It was the last flowering of the liberal ideal, the end of civil rights era, the transient apogee of the American hope between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of Obama's reign.
Winfrey borrowed from politicians, and they borrowed in response, and for a while it seemed that post-Razova America could really exist, which would not mean. She advocated the truth and reconciliation, and Nelson Mandela was a guest of her program. Both Bill Clinton and Obama borrowed its approach, using a public confession as a political tool for reconciliation. The audience of white women did not accept Winfrey as a black woman, while the audience of black women considered her an inspiring example of African American success. Like a sunny day and saturated shadows in the portrait, it is difficult to achieve such a careful balance of identity, and it is unclear whether it will be possible to do so in our polarized and cruel world.
It is strange to think that America gave rise to both the OPRA and Trump, which came as a kind of anti-label, exploiting many things that were standard themes of its show: racism, mizoginia, xenophobia. His style was also anti-screw: monologue, not conversation, abuse and ridicule, not compassion, division, not harmony. They both offered hope and affirmation, but claimed very different things. Of course, both styles have always existed, and now it is just a question of which of them will eventually win.
Trump again seeks to become president, promising revenge. And the portrait of Winfrey now hangs in the galleries of the first floor of the national portrait gallery, her hand is extended with an olive branch. Of course, this is a painted image, and no matter how you try to reach out and grasp it, it's just an illusion, as you have seen on TV.
