I have a problem with the fact that the world feels like it’s on fire and we’re all going to hell in a hand basket — and an artist can just paint white on white? It’s so divorced from reality. It’s too privileged.

A half-timbered Tudor building in the background could belong to either a medieval town square or the Tudor Revival shopping areas favored in affluent suburbs such as Scarsdale, N.Y., where the artist grew up.

Tellingly, the Uncle Sam who pops up in her painting “Tea Party” (2012) is a shrunken figure with a hole in his red-striped pants, sipping on his tea as two right-wingers seated beside him assemble a bomb.

Ms. Eisenman’s awareness of the European past is matched by her attention to the politics of the American present.

Your blackness and your otherness are in your face every day in the lunchroom and at recess. It was a three-tiered view of life: You’re already a foreigner in America. And now, among African Americans, you’re African, which is another strike against you. And even in your own family, you’re not the same—you’re starting to become more Americanized.”

Every aristocratic family has a formal portrait, right?

allows us to witness an artist testing new ideas and stretching her craft, testing and stretching the boundaries of blackness in the process.

It became an extended pictorial narrative “about wealth and nobility, and the sort of self-possession and ownership of capital that surrounds you, instead of you being the capital.” In other words, it’s a meditation on what might have been possible in Africa if colonial conquest had never happened.