Painters Kent Monkman and Jesse Mockrin confront colonialism and sexism in historical art

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Confronted with the unrepentant imperial monument, a statue of a slave trader or warmonger, the artist/activist has options: Remove it, vandalize it or perhaps turn it into a new work of art.

And yet art museums are stuffed with equally dubious historical works that nobody dares touch, paintings that depict North America as an empty land ready to be colonized or that disguise rape in mythical garb.

Two new exhibitions in Toronto and Montreal, by Jesse Mockrin and Kent Monkman, respond aggressively to the challenge of recreating history painting to critique colonialism and sexism.

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This is Mockrin’s first major museum show: She’s an emerging American artist recognized for a 2020 portrait of singer Billie Eilish as though painted by Caravaggio. Meanwhile, Monkman is well known to Canadians. Since the early 2000s, the Cree artist based in Toronto and New York has created a whole suite of canvases executed on the same massive scale and with the same busy detail as traditional history painting. But his subjects mock conventional Canadian and American narratives while celebrating both queer and Indigenous versions. Embraced by Canadian museums as a convenient solution to colonial collections, Monkman has been fabulously successful.

His subjects include murderous Frenchmen and Indigenous warriors slaughtering anthropomorphized beavers who pray for mercy in Les Castors du Roi (The King’s Beavers). In a soaring romantic landscape inspired by those of Albert Bierstadt, Colonel George Custer’s naked troops laze by a mountain lake. Unsuspecting of the defeat that lies ahead, they are painted by Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s gender-fluid alter-ego, usually depicted with nothing but a strategic loin cloth, or hot-pink drapery, and very high heels.

That ironic painting of 2013 is called History is Painted by the Victors, also the title of a Monkman mid-career survey now showing at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts where it fills the classical expanses of the old pavilion with giant paintings in gold frames.

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Mockrin also favours a historical look but her take is specifically feminist, as she applies Renaissance oil painting techniques to reconsidered versions of Biblical and mythical subjects.

At the AGO, in one of the European galleries, curator Adam Harris Levine has juxtaposed Nicolas Tournier’s 1625 Judgement of Solomon with Mockrin’s version in which she concentrates on the two mothers disputing custody of a young child. In the Biblical story, the wise Solomon decides that the mother who drops the child rather than see it sliced in two on his orders must be the true one. Tightly editing the French Baroque painting, Mockrin reduces Solomon to a gesturing hand and gives more prominence to a soldier’s sword, stressing the violent threat against the two women at the centre of the picture.

Her largest and latest work, the centrepiece of her main show at the AGO, is inspired by a late 17th-century ivory tankard in the Thomson collection depicting the rape of the Sabine women in miniature.

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That story from classical history tells how the Romans kidnapped neighbouring women and forced them into marriage to ensure the continuation of their race, and was often an artist’s pretext for a scene depicting a crush of naked women. Mockrin exposes that history in five large panels that render the rape life size. She keeps the all-white skin of the ivory figures, as though they were now marble statues, but only uses excerpts of the frieze around the tankard, cutting out the men for a dramatically discontinuous composition.

Mockrin’s work is best seen beside its historical antecedents, pointing to the way she cleverly exposes the unacknowledged sexual violence in much historical art. Similarly, when Monkman was commissioned to create two giant panels for the lobby of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2019, the scenes of colonial violence and Indigenous resurgence were particularly effective because they drew so strongly on history painting represented in the Met’s own collection, including the familiar image of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Those two mighty paintings by Monkman – known as mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People) – were purchased by the Met and are being shown in Canada for the first time in the Montreal exhibition.

There is a strong element in Monkman’s work of having your cake and eating it too. In a catalogue essay, curators John Lukavic and Leuli Eshraghi quote the feminist poet Audre Lorde and her 1984 talk The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Monkman begs to differ: You get the sweep of the Bierstadt landscape or the drama of the Washington posture alongside the critique.

Similarly, if Monkman originally sought to satirize the historical practice of an artist inserting a minor self-portrait somewhere in a group composition, the much repeated Miss Chief figure could be subject to the same criticism of narcissism or self-promotion. A few early canvases in Montreal show her as a rougher, more cartoonish version of the artist but as his practice has flourished and his technique has grown more realistic, the resemblance to Monkman has become inescapable.

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Monkman now has a large team that paints the actual canvases, working from compositions that are staged with live models and then photographed. Despite the heavily posed compositions, the results are closing in on photo realism – especially in the faces.

These aspects of his work become troubling as he increasingly abandons satire. His dramatic compositions featuring violent battles between Indigenous environmental protectors and riot police provocatively repurpose the master’s tools, but what is one to make of an artist who proposes a version of himself as the rescuer of Indigenous children seized from their parents or the angelic comforter of Indigenous women in a prison?

Mockrin has found a rather simple solution to the master’s tools problem: She layers in paint in the manner of Renaissance artists but she doesn’t varnish the canvases. This matte quality robs them of depth, leaving them with a flatness that makes them instantly distinguishable from historic art. They decline to let you bask unconsciously in the light of some borrowed beauty.

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In her flat figures and in the hyper-realistic faces of Monkman’s paintings, there is a disconcerting falseness – but that is the point. These are highly self-conscious works, their historical references complex but their concept very simple. In 100 years, when anxieties about colonialism and sexism will necessarily have shifted and changed, what will future viewers make of these head-on collisions with art history?

Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Jesse Mockrin: Echo at the Art Gallery of Ontario both continue to March 8.