Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor: Art for art’s sake  

I snapped up Brandon Taylor’s new novel as soon as it appeared on NetGalley having very much enjoyed The Late Americans. Minor Black Figures spans a Manhattan summer following Wyeth, a black artist, and his relationship with Keating who he meets one night in a bar after visiting the opening of the latest glitzy identity art show to capture the city’s attention.

Wyeth was aware that part of his aversion to MangoWave was because he himself had once participated in an identity-based art grift.  

The son of a white woman, Wyeth was already fatherless before he was born. He hasn’t spoken to his mother for years, keeping tabs on her through her homesteading blog posts featuring her new family. He moved to New York a few years ago at the suggestion of a friend met on his Wisonsin master’s course, after spending the pandemic looking after his landlord. Wyeth earns enough from a part time gallery gig and grunt work for an art restorer to pay for his walk-up apartment and studio space but is stalled in his own work. After visiting the MangoWave opening, Wyeth drops into a bar where he meets Keating who does ‘a little of this, a little of that’. A back and forth of texts leads to much agonising from Wyeth unsure about the interest of this striking white man who seems drawn to churches on their walks around the city. Meanwhile, Wyeth is given his first restoration project: a set of lithographs by an obscure late twentieth-century black artist. As the summer draws to a close, Wyeth learns that MangoWave are to stage an exhibition of ‘outtakes’ at the gallery and have asked that one of his pieces be shown alongside it.

He was trying to be a person who lived in the real world and not the constrained, hyperbaric chamber of arts institutions, which had more in common with dogfighting than making art.

The above is the framework on which Taylor hangs this discursive, witty novel of ideas. Wyeth is a chronic overthinker, which may irritate some readers but struck a chord with me, allowing Taylor to explore a multitude of themes and questions through Wyeth’s constant debates with himself and others, often as he walks around a sweltering, vividly evoked Manhattan, pondering art, identity, the state of the nation and social alienation to name but a few of his preoccupations. His descriptions of art are meticulous and often erudite. He’s not a writer who casually mentions a restoration technique without describing it in detail which I found fascinating. The preciousness, greed and hustling of the art world is mercilessly lampooned reminding me of Hari Kunzru’s blistering takedown of Brit art in Blue Ruin. Cerebral, fluent and elegantly expressed, Taylor’s novel poses many more questions than it tries to answer leaving its readers with much to think about although I imagine that’s the point.

Jonathan Cape: London 9781787336421 400 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)