LOS ANGELES — A centaur is an uncanny thing, part man, part horse, that lives in a cave but trots through the city. In classical Athens — at the Parthenon, say — you often saw centaurs at war, their human arms entangled with their equine legs. They bellowed, they galloped, they carried off their victims. The centaurs were a half-civilized breed.

Artist Kara Walker has sculpted a disordered new centaur: an American centaur, American in its bones and in its burdens. Hers is a 13-foot-tall tumbledown bronze, with a man’s limbs and a horse’s haunches. One limb, clad in a Southern officer’s sleeve, droops alongside its four hooves and lets a sword clatter to the battlefield. Inch by soldered inch, from shoulder to hind shank, Walker’s horse and rider fuse from two beasts into one. Her centaur

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