The 2017 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art was, I recall, a contentious affair. It included a controversial virtual-reality snuff film, which I never saw because of squeamishness as well as the long waits to put on a headset. There was a lot of very noisy handheld video, which I also missed because handheld camera makes me queasy. The most ferociously discussed inclusion was Dana Schutz’s improvisation on a photograph of the young lynching victim Emmett Till, a painting more memorable for the vitriol it provoked than for its aesthetic merits. According to the protesters denouncing Schutz and the painting, artists may only make work derived from their own ethnicity and history, a contention that essentially wipes out all of Western art. (Schutz’s defense, that as a mother she identified with Till’s mother’s pain, didn’t help; why didn’t she say she was horrified by his death and wanted to honor his memory? But that’s another matter.) I’ve forgotten just about everything else in this raucous exhibition, but one group of works remains vivid: Henry Taylor’s paintings, especially The Times Thay Aint A Changing, Fast Enough! (2017, Whitney Museum of American Art), an eight-foot-wide canvas that places us inside the car in which Minnesota police shot and killed Philandro Castile during a routine traffic stop. The head and shoulders of the young black victim, an open eye staring, fill the lower part of the canvas, pressed down by a row of blunt window shapes signaling “car interior.” A schematically rendered white hand clutching a gun intrudes from the upper left. The black-green-ochre palette recalls, without imitating, the colors of the African National Congress flag.

This fierce, economically constructed painting is once again a high point of an exhibition at the Whitney, this time in “Henry Taylor: B Side,” a retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it was seen last year.¹ Curated by moca’s senior curator Bennett Simpson, “B Side” was installed at the Whitney by the museum’s curator Barbara Haskell. Arranged thematically, the show includes early portrait drawings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, made when Taylor, a late bloomer born in Oxnard, California, in 1958, was a psychiatric technician at a California mental hospital. It culminates with an uninhibited, vaguely autobiographical wall drawing made specially for the Whitney iteration of the show. The main body of the exhibition consists of paintings from between 1992 and 2022, plus enigmatic “painted objects,” sculptures constructed from unlikely elements, and an installation honoring the Black Panthers. Despite the ironic connotation of the title’s “B Side”—the less desirable songs on the record—there’s nothing second-best about the tough, exhilarating works on view. On canvas, Taylor has a consistently vigorous, expressive touch. The “painted objects”—a miscellany of small, recycled cardboard boxes with unpredictable images—are quirky and engaging. (The sculptures, mainly large assemblages, are more familiar and less rewarding.) The mood and affect of the included works range from ineffable tenderness to bitter anger. The paintings present us with portraits of the artist’s family, friends, and neighbors as well as celebrations of his heroes in the worlds of the arts, sports, and politics, an eclectic group including Jackie Robinson, Barack and Michelle Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Cannon (the blind cultural impresario of downtown New York), and the artist David Hammons. Taylor’s people, even when relaxed, can seem watchful, a little suspicious. Occasionally words drift across; like the frequently oblique titles, they reinforce or challenge the implied narrative, making us question our responses to what we are seeing.

Throughout, even in works that appear benign at first encounter, Taylor manifests his rage against the persistent inequities of American society. He has spoken about finding provocation for works in both personal experience and in larger events, including those reported in the news, such as the Philandro Castile incident—the latter category termed in the Whitney installation “History Paintings.” We’re sometimes made uncomfortable, not so much by the nominal subject as by how Taylor has embodied that subject. In the painting about Philandro Castile, the vantage point crams the viewer into the car as the killing takes place. Or is that the corpse of the slain man? Yet whatever other thoughts are stimulated, we are also invariably engaged by energetic brushwork, forthright structure, intense color, and a range of sumptuous brown skin tones.

There’s almost always something—light, space, a fleeting or not-so-fleeting reference—that reminds us that Taylor is a California painter, more specifically a Los Angeles painter. It’s never as obvious as David Hockney’s palm trees, but it’s there nonetheless. Take, for example, an untitled painting made in 2022, in which a terrifyingly low plane hovers over a wide street punctuated by street signs and expedient infrastructure, or Too Sweet (2016, Museum of Modern Art), based on a roadside panhandler Taylor encountered. In the latter painting, a bearded man with untended hair holds a wordless sign, elegantly poised against a pale blue sky, a streetlight, and a complicated utility pole; his delicately rendered hand gesture seems echoed by the slender elements of the street furniture. The original sign, we learn, said “Anything helps.” Taylor’s deletion of the words allows the image to be more abstract and open to speculation. The “California-ness” of Too Sweet is anticipated by Fatty (2006, collection of R. Blumenthal), like Too Sweet a half-length “portrait” in an outdoor urban setting. A hefty man, one eye inexplicably obliterated by a strip of blue masking tape, stands in front of a row of low buildings; a large pink rose floats overhead.

Taylor’s paintings about his family are particularly resonant, full of affectionately observed details. A group about his mother includes the dress ain’t me (2011, private collection), an arresting imagined portrait of her as a young girl. Hair elaborately arranged, she faces us in a room full of furniture. A woman in bedroom slippers is beside her, almost subsumed by the surroundings. Taylor’s mother’s white dress floats against the ochres and browns of the painting, echoed by her gleaming eyes. The title adds an unexpected layer of discontent to an image that, at first acquaintance, seems to commemorate a cheerful rite of passage of some kind. A very different mood is encapsulated by an untitled work from 2022, in which an attentive father leans in beside a toddler in a highchair, absorbed by her meal. The scattered bright green peas on her pink plate generate a rhyme with the leaves of a distant tree and some essential but mysterious small green circles at the bottom of the canvas, which, in turn, flirt with the pale toenails of the seated man’s bare foot.

Among the most potent and vaguely discomfiting of the family pictures is The Love of Cousin Tip (2017, collection of the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles). A man, a woman, three children, and a Siamese cat stand on a porch, embedded in the geometry of the architecture. A horse, a tribute to the protagonist’s profession as a horse breeder, is barely visible in a narrow slice of landscape. The woman embraces two little girls protectively. The man’s expression makes us keep our distance: we are not welcome. The fortuitous coexistence of “Henry Taylor: B Side” at the Whitney and “Manet/Degas” at the Met allowed for seeing, within a short period, both Cousin Tip and Edgar Degas’ Family Portrait (The Bellelli Family) (1858–69, Musée d’Orsay), a similar psychologically loaded group of adults and children in an emphatically geometric setting. I doubt that Taylor was thinking about Degas’sportrait, but the opportunity to compare the two works, both with elusive suggested narratives, was fascinating.

An even more complex meditation on the black family, Resting (2011, collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg), confronts us with a young couple relaxing on a sofa. Strangely positioned behind them, a massive third figure seems to sleep, broad back towards us. We begin to examine the delicately painted details: a spray of white lilies, a page of photographs, the young woman’s pink sweatshirt emblazoned califirnia. When we turn our attention to the view out the window behind figures, we are startled to discover the wall of a prison stretching the full width of the painting, with the terrifying message warning shots not required painted on it. The relaxed calm of Resting is transformed by this allusion to law, punishment, and incarceration. We encounter the message again in the immense Warning Shots Not Required (2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), described as a “social allegory” centered on Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the founder of the Los Angeles street gang the Crips who was convicted of four counts of murder, incarcerated for twenty-four years and, despite having become an advocate for anti-gang education, finally executed. An image of Williams, based on a photo, looms in the center of the twenty-foot canvas, outside the prison wall. He is surrounded by heads, other figures, and arcane symbols. A horse enters from the right, read variously as an emblem of freedom and as an allusion to Taylor’s horse-trainer grandfather, who was ambushed and killed in Texas. warning shots not required, uppercase and large, is inscribed on top of Williams’s image.

Unlike many black painters attracting attention at the moment, Taylor plainly loves his medium, reveling in the responsiveness of paint to the movement of his hand. His images are brushy and fairly loose, with crisp edges played against ragged ones for maximum expressive effect. He activates the entire surface of his compositions, often through enriching details that suggest space, add specificity, or reinforce a subtext. This approach is very different from that of colleagues such as Kehinde Wylie and Amy Sherald who, seemingly following the example of Barkley L. Hendricks (more than a generation their senior), isolate sleekly painted, often frontal figures against neutral or patterned grounds. Taylor’s untitled 2021 self-portrait in profile, based on a late-sixteenth-century portrait of Henry V that he saw on a visit to the National Portrait Gallery, London, is an exception to his usual method. He sets a head against an elaborately patterned golden brocade derived from the source. A nod to Wylie? Taylor’s enthusiasm for subtly varied, lush brown skin tones is also noteworthy, since it separates him from both his contemporary Kerry James Marshall and the younger Sherald. The uninflected, bottomless black Marshall uses for skin in many of his most powerful works is an aesthetic choice and a potent metaphor for the idea that black people are unseen. I’m not sure what Sherald’s relentless gray, which makes most of her figures look embalmed, is intended to mean; it doesn’t convince me, visually. Like Marshall’s blacks, Taylor’s sumptuous browns, usually dark and rich, but different from painting to painting and figure to figure, function as both narrative and aesthetic decision, along the rest of his usually full-throttle, saturated palette.

The handsome catalogue that accompanies “Henry Taylor: B Side,” produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, doesn’t entirely correspond to the Whitney’s version of the exhibition but reproduces many of the most significant works included in New York, as well as others not seen there. It includes an informative interview with Taylor, plus essays and entries by the exhibition curator, artists, poets, and the director of a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Cumulatively, the texts point up many of Taylor’s allusions and the context that provoked them. Yet while we may miss some of the specific connections in these complex works, the paintings speak eloquently on their own. You didn’t have to know the Philandro Castile story to be stopped in your tracks by Taylor’s painting in the 2017 Biennial. You still don’t.