Kent Monkman’s ‘The allegory of painting’
Kent Monkman The allegory of painting 2015, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Kent Monkman
Kent Monkman The allegory of painting 2015, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Kent Monkman
Born in Canada in 1965, Kent Monkman is a Canadian First Nations artist of Cree and Irish descent. He is a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation, whose reserves are located in the Canadian province of Manitoba.
Monkman began exhibiting in Canada in the early 1990s and since that time has emerged as one of his country’s most prominent contemporary artists. He is particularly recognised for artworks which bring a queer, First Nations’ perspective to bear on the art histories of Western Europe and North America. The themes of colonisation and sexuality in relation to Indigenous experiences (both contemporary and historic) lie at the heart of his art practice.
While performance, moving-image and installation all form part of Monkman’s oeuvre, it is as a painter that he is especially well-known and accomplished. His paintings appropriate a variety of historical European painting genres and often incorporate the figure of Monkman’s gender-fluid alter-ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, whose presence challenges received narratives about colonialism and Indigenous peoples.
The allegory of painting 2015 hangs in the Grand Courts, where it shares space with 17th- and 18th-century European paintings and ceramics, in addition to etchings by Jacques Callot and colonial Indian Company School prints. Hung in a reproduction period frame, and integrated into a salon presentation that also includes landscapes by Claude Lorrain, John Constable and Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael, Monkman’s contemporary painting could, on a casual scan of the wall, be mistaken for a work from a much earlier period. The painting animates a conversation not only between different cultures but also across time, revealing the historic environment of the Grand Courts to be a space in which different eras are overlayed and in which distant places are brought into proximity. As Monkman has said, ‘I want to make the contemporary feel historic and the historic feel contemporary.’
The gallery in the Grand Courts in which Kent Monkmann's painting hangs
Executed in 2015, the acrylic on canvas depicts Miss Chief Eagle Testickle playing the role of the ‘allegory of painting’, an art historical figure, popular in the 17th century that nearly always depicted a woman (despite the fact that female artists were so often obscured in Western art history). Johannes Vermeer and François Boucher famously depicted the subject as did Artemisia Gentileschi who, like Monkman, executed a self-portrait in the guise of ‘La Pittura’.
Monkman’s composition is based on a Hudson River School painting, Shandaken Ridge, Kingston, New York 1854 by Asher Durand, which is held in the collection of the New York Historical Society. The artist’s reworking of this painting inserts a queer, Indigenous perspective into the European tradition of romantic landscape painting – a tradition that played a prominent role in the imaging of lands occupied by colonial powers. As such, there are correspondences with works by Eugene von Guérard in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection (especially A fig tree on American Creek near Wollongong, NSW 1861, in addition to works by Claude Lorrain Pastoral landscape 1636–37 and John Constable Landscape with a goatherd and goats (after Claude) 1823.
Artemisia Gentileschi Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) c1638-39, Royal Collection
Eugene von Guérard A fig tree on American Creek near Wollongong, NSW 1861, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Claude Lorrain Pastoral landscape 1636–37, Art Gallery of New South Wales
John Constable Landscape with a goatherd and goats (after Claude) 1823, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Purchased in 2020 with funds provided by Atelier and the Mollie and Jim Gowing Bequest Fund, the work also meditates on the relationship between Indigenous art and European modernism. ‘Casting the Indigenous figure of Miss Chief in the role of artist offers a further challenge to Western creative values,’ the artist says. ‘In a stylistic nod to the millennia-old pictographs at Áísínai’pi (Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada), Miss Chief paints a distant herd of buffalo on rock. Her subject matter speaks to the appropriation of ‘primitive’ artistic forms by Western artists such as Pablo Picasso. I take Picasso’s bull – a deliberately constructed symbol of his male virility – and reclaim it through Miss Chief’s depiction of the buffalo, matriarchal beings recognised as kin to Plains Indigenous people. Taken together, these elements of The allegory of painting complicate Western ideals of art, gender, and landscape by asserting Indigenous relationships with those concepts.’
On the invention of Miss Chief, the artist told New York magazine: ‘I wanted an artistic alter ego who could live inside the paintings to reverse the gaze and to riff on 19th-century American artists like George Catlin, [who] would paint Native Americans but would also place himself inside his own paintings to self-aggrandise. I wanted to create a character who presented an empowered example of decolonised Indigenous sexuality and our understanding of multiple genders. She was inspired by people like We’wha (1849–96), who was an accomplished Zuni potter as well as a lhamana, or two-spirit individual. She also represented her nation in Washington. I stole Miss Chief’s first outfit from Cher’s “Half-Breed” Bob Mackie-designed outfit for her cultural and gender cross-dressing.’
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‘Isn’t a time-travelling, gender-fluid, Indigenous sex goddess exactly what art needs right about now?’ the writer Jarrett Earnest asked in 2019 when Monkman was commissioned by the Met to produce a work for its soaring Great Hall. Exploring themes of Indigenous displacement and migration, the artist delivered two monumental paintings, each measuring roughly 7 m by 3.5 m. In one, Miss Chief welcomes ashore settlers arriving in North America, extending a hand to an enslaved African in shackles. In the other, Miss Chief is in a boat – a la George Washington in Washington crossing the Delaware – filled with First Nations people from across America. ‘With humour and fantasy, Monkman disrupts clichés of Native victimhood,’ wrote The New York Times.
A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine