It glows with a bright, mournful edge from every one of these works, probing the question of what might have been if his enormous success had not in some way required, or at least contributed to, his eventual annihilation. Titled with a pun after, arguably, his best album (though some say Thriller, others Bad), “Michael Jackson: On The Wall” gathers together the work of forty-eight disparate artists exploring the legacy of perhaps the most frequently depicted cultural figure in history, and his fame is their common palette.

It was Michael Jackson’s astronomical celebrity that made Wiley think the call was a prank-a fame that is central to the National Portrait Gallery’s current exhibition of contemporary art inspired by Jackson’s image and work. The resulting painting, completed after Jackson’s death in 2009, shows a magnificent Michael in full armor on an ivory horse, flanked by multicultural cherubim and vivid roses in a distant barren land, rainclouds overhead the look on his face is hard, determined, haughty, with a hint of vulnerability underneath.

And sure enough, not long afterward, a meeting was set up and Wiley and Jackson were chewing the fat on such things as the function of clothes as body armor and the distinctions between Peter Paul Rubens’s earlier and later brushwork. “Will you please answer the fucking phone?” a mutual friend said. Kehinde Wiley: Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II, 2009Īt first, the artist Kehinde Wiley didn’t believe it was Michael Jackson calling so he didn’t pick up.

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