It’s doubtful that any two painters could be more superficially different than Jacques-Louis David and Faith Ringgold. David — a French man — was a painter of Paris’s power elite in the 18th and 19th centuries. Mrs. Ringgold — a black American woman — is an artist of protest who is still working at 91.

Differences can be deceiving. The two artists, who have shows opening this Friday in New York, both work at the intersection of politics and art. David painted Marat and Napoleon. Mrs. Ringgold’s work is about race and violence, the 1960s and black power. The Sun reviewed “Radical Draftsman” on Tuesday. Mrs. Ringgold’s show, “American People,” her first full retrospective in New York, is a bracing companion to David’s Académie honed hand.

David’s drawings are ensconced in the high culture imperium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Mrs. Ringgold’s art is in residence at the avant garde redoubt of the New Museum. On the way to the David show, I passed the baronial residences of Fifth Avenue. Walking on foot to see Mrs. Ringgold, I dodged a knife fight on the Bowery.  

Mrs. Ringgold has worked in many media across her long life and career. Her oeuvre includes painting, quilting, sculpture, and performance art. She began making art in the early 1950s, under the influence of writers like James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka and close enough to Cubism and Impressionism to paint through their afterfumes. 

The New Museum’s spaces are spare and even cavernous, but the first room of the exhibit, aptly named “American People,” seemed bustling even though I was the only person there. It felt crowded because there are so many faces in the frames hanging on the wall — black and white, men and women, defined and fuzzy.

Mrs. Ringgold is not after verisimilitude so much as capturing internal landscapes on the canvas. Echoes of Alice Neel’s elongated figures and faces abound.  The series is often uncanny, as in a work called “Speak No Evil” that features an array of suited and sinister figures. Others, like “A Man Kissing His Wife,” an image of an interracial couple three years before Loving v. Virginia, are lovely.     

Other rooms house Mrs. Ringgold’s quilts, large objects that combine imagery and writing to create miniature worlds. These are difficult to take in, as the writing is small and the figures indistinct, though the New Museum does provide QR codes for further study. It does convey the magnificence of quilts as a genre.

The sculptures on display, clearly in dialogue with African art, feel less accomplished than Mrs. Ringgold’s canvases. While she is an undoubtedly eclectic creator, the Ringgold heart seems to beat for traditional painting. 

In the 1960s Mrs. Ringgold immersed herself in politics. On display are works that speak directly to the violence at Attica prison, which left 42 persons dead, and frequent displays of hostility to American intervention in hostilities around the globe. A mural by Mrs. Ringgold, “For the Women’s House,” has hung at Rikers since 1972, though it will soon travel to the Brooklyn Museum.  

The most striking section of this show is a series of three murals. In one, “The Flag is Bleeding,” painted blood drips down an American flag. In another, “Die,” on loan from the Met, a hectic collection of individuals hold knives and do each other violence in a kind of interracial war of all against all. Two traumatized children huddle in the middle of the bloodletting.  

There is a serrated edge to this cohort of Mrs. Ringgold’s work, an interest in depicting wounds and slaughter. The matter of the flag held special resonance for her. In 1970 she, along with two other artists, who collectively became known as the “Judson 3,” were arrested and fined for flag desecration as part of an art show and Vietnam War protest. “American People” has a photograph of a flag burning on display.     

Mrs. Ringgold has internalized Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” and expresses it through paint that speaks with an American accent. One could be forgiven for thinking of Mrs. Ringgold’s painting undertone as, at least figuratively, caput mortuum.

These images convey a rage. Their juxtapositions portray American history as a tale of hypocrisy and injustice. To achieve this they sacrifice nuance and complexity. A constructive contrast is Mrs. Ringgold’s nearly exact contemporary Jasper Johns, whose American flag paintings have resisted interpretation. Their tone is unreadable. 

Mrs. Ringgold is after something different. Her oeuvre poses the question: How does a work of art respond to its own time and remain fresh for all time? Many will say that the themes of racial injustice and government brutality are timeless. Even if that is true, to remain locked in a posture of perennial critique is to preclude access to other seasons of the soul. 

A student of the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s will find beyond the artwork much of interest here. There is a letter signed by Mrs. Ringgold and others addressed to the Museum of Modern Art demanding a separate wing for black and Puerto Rican art, named after Martin Luther King Jr. Another missive, addressed to Governor Rockefeller, asks for a “Women’s Wailing Wall” at Rockefeller Center.    

There is no doubt that when Mrs. Ringgold first began making bleeding flags and maps of American atrocities, these objects offended and provoked. In today’s art world, in Lower Manhattan, in the year after Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police, they emerge as a canon of radical orthodoxy.

On my way out I returned to Mrs. Ringgold’s faces. There will always be a magnetic pull between one set of eyes and another. It is here in that reciprocal gaze that we can grasp the way art can exist just for art’s sake. David himself would have been deeply moved.