NEW YORK — In 1816, Kentucky-born portraitist William Edward West created a print depicting the battlefield death of British Maj. Gen. Edward Michael Pakenham at the Battle of New Orleans. At the time, the wounds of the 1815 conflict, the last of the War of 1812, were still fresh, and West did his best to convey the drama. In the background, U.S. soldiers in blue fight off invading British redcoats. In the foreground, a British officer holds the dying Pakenham in his arms. Gen. John Lambert, who assumed command after Pakenham died, is shown burying his face in a white handkerchief as he weeps.
But "Battle of New Orleans and Death of Major General Packenham" — West misspelled the general's surname — is more bizarre than it is cinematic. Horses and men are out of scale, and Pakenham's body is awkwardly situated within the composition. Amid the war dead lies a horse on its back, presumably in a state of rigor mortis but better resembling a house pet in need of a belly rub. Ultimately, the most intriguing thing about the print is the way the artist revised it. Lambert, it appears, was not a fan of being shown in tears, because when West reissued the print in 1817, the handkerchief was gone. Instead, the general is shown drawing his index finger toward his brow, as if announcing a new pimple.
This absurd bit of revisionism was on my mind as I ambled through Umar Rashid's solo exhibition "Ancien Regime Change 4, 5, and 6" at MoMA PS1 in New York City last month. The Los Angeles-based artist has long been preoccupied with the mythmaking embedded in historical painting. Such artists were generally not at the events portrayed in their works; in fact, in some cases they weren't even on the same continent. Making things up was part of the deal. Rashid has taken that idea and run with it.
