“Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas,” from 2017

Not quite two months after the Presidential Inauguration, a Henry Taylor painting appeared on the cover of Art in America: “Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas” (2017). In this portrait, the Obamas are invisible, represented only by the house they’d just left, while the actress Cicely Tyson and her lover Miles Davis have been transported from a long-ago black-and-white society photograph onto the green impasto glory of the White House front lawn. Transported? Transmogrified. The original paparazzi snap is from the 1968 première of “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” a film in which Tyson had a supporting role—in 1968, a black actress could rarely expect more—and she is playing a supporting role here, too. The nature of this support is interesting. Her hand is on Davis’s sleeve, a gesture somewhere between solidarity and protection. Her gaze is steely: as proud and firm as it is guarded. (Meanwhile, his shades are on and his arms are crossed, as if the camera were some sort of weapon.) The support she offers is not meek or retiring (“Behind every great man . . .”), nor is it hidden or oblique (“The power behind the throne”). Instead, it speaks of a double consciousness. On the one hand, her lover is that unimpeachable thing: an American genius. Why should Miles Davis need anyone’s help or protection? On the other hand, he is a black man in America. The same black man who, nine years earlier, found himself beaten up by a New York cop for the twin crimes of escorting a white girl to a cab and not “moving on.” (He had been standing outside Birdland, where he was playing a concert for the U.S. armed forces.) Davis’s name was up in lights, but Davis himself was laid out on the pavement: blood “running down the khaki suit I had on,” as he later recalled. If you can be assaulted outside your own show, you might come to experience many apparently benign situations as rife with the potential for humiliation or violence. It’s 1968: best be on your guard. But to be on your guard—unsmiling, self-possessed, not in need of anyone’s approval, and dressed like you know your own worth—is also to be cool. Cool as a motherfucker. And surely one obvious way to read this translation of Miles and Cicely to the Obamas’ front lawn is as a form of transhistorical wish fulfillment. What if these cool cats met those cool cats?