Brandon Taylor’s third novel, Minor Black Figures, departs from his familiar territory of the midwest to settle in contemporary New York, where Wyeth, a 31 year old painter, is suffering from a blockage of creativity, stemming from the complex artistic landscape around him. Wyeth is a black painter who features black characters in his work, attempting to resist the online discourse surrounding the politics of black art, and his work being force fit into a discussion that isn’t relevant to its subject matter. Wyeth spends part of his time painting, and other parts working as an art restorer and assisting in his friends’ galleries. As Wyeth contemplates how to locate his own work in the current moment, he begins a project restoring the paintings of a previously forgotten black painter, going on a fact finding mission about the artist to understand more of the context of the paintings that he is restoring.
At the same time, Wyeth meets Keating, and the two begin a tender and thoughtful romance. Keating was previously studying to be a Jesuit priest, and is now in a complicated moment in terms of his faith, and their romance forces Wyeth to step outside his artistic bubble and develop this romance with a man who has a complicated history. But Wyeth’s interest in Keating of course leads back to his artistic impulses, as he filters his attraction through a desire to photograph, paint, and render this other person whom he is connecting so deeply with.
But Wyeth has been struggling with his medium since graduating from art school, struggling to locate the truth of his artistic impulse within the cacophony of judgement and perception that surrounds him. He’s spent the last couple of years transposing scenes from elevated art house classic films and transposing black figures into these spaces where they did not appear in the film. His work challenges viewers to contextualize these figures in spaces where they have not been previously located. Wyeth’s friend describes his work in less generous terms, telling him “his black people were always hypothetical and that this gave his work a sterile air. They’re cut off…from real black life as it happens in the real fucking world. You make thought experiments, not paintings.”
Not only struggling with the context for these characters within the paintings, Wyeth is also struggling with the larger context of himself and his work. He watches other artists of color cash in on identity politics in ways that he finds degrading and unimaginative—while trying to understand how he can create authentic work featuring black people that isn’t subject to capital D “Discourse” that washes away any conversation of artistic merit. Of the tension in his work, Wyeth bemoans the criticisms he’s received from the artistic community: “Sometimes, Wyeth’s work was described as bourgeois, betraying a desire for black ease and affluence, trading in a corrosive and politically dubious desire to see black people rich or at the very least in luxurious settings. Sometimes, it was described as fantastical, depicting unrealistic and strange juxtapositions, as though the black people in his paintings had wandered into a genre or set of conditions totally discordant with what the viewer considered their actual reality.”
The novel is a fascinating study of what it means to be an artist and a creative in the digital age, as Wyeth’s own journey as a painter is juxtaposed with his work restoring the paintings of a forgotten artist—each thread complementing the other in its consideration of whether art can be separated from the public’s perception of it and the figure of the artist as salesperson or celebrity. Wyeth’s consumption of art—including other paintings, films, or pieces of visual art—form the fabric of his life, bleeding into his relationship with Keating and all of his friends. Wyeth has created a universe of cultural references and criticism that speak to the depth of Taylor’s ability to develop a layered character and commitment to art and curiosity in his own work. A masterfully written and sharp portrait of an artist in the process of growing in his instincts and seeking truth and creativity in a complex landscape that cannot separate art from its social implications.