Kerry James Marshall: The Histories – ‘the exhibition of the autumn’

School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012): ‘complex as well as gorgeous’

(Image credit: Getty Images)

Kerry James Marshall “sits at the pinnacle of American contemporary painting”, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. Now 70, he has since the 1980s been producing a “visually and intellectually rich” body of work that “largely builds upon, continues and subverts” the once prestigious genre of history painting. Marshall, who is African American, uses this genre – which tells a story from the Classics or the Bible – to confront the near-total absence of black subjects in the Western artistic canon. He combines a “staggeringly deep understanding” of Western art with a wide-ranging knowledge of African artistic traditions. This retrospective at the Royal Academy explores his career to date, bringing together a dazzling selection of paintings “that consider what it means to be black, particularly in America, with a rigorously inquiring breadth and curiosity, never hectoring nor shying away from complexity”. I hope many people will see this very pleasurable show.

“To introduce black subjects into the tradition of Western painting, Marshall evolved a precise, luminous style” reminiscent of the Old Masters, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. His first significant effort in this style, a 1980 self-portrait, was painted in egg tempera – “a medium last in vogue in Italy circa AD1400”. It’s an “enigmatic” work that satirises “racial stereotypes”, in which the artist “appears so dark-skinned against a black background” that – apart from his eyes and teeth – “he’s practically invisible”. Marshall’s more mature paintings are “complex as well as gorgeous”, “finessed with a classicist’s obsessive attention to detail and technique”. The ephemera of modern life feature like the “symbolic objects” in Renaissance art: a rap lyric, say, might sprout from a radio “like a Latin inscription”, while the distorted skull from Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors is repurposed as Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in his painting of a hair salon, School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). All in all, this is “the exhibition of the autumn”.

Marshall is by turns “biting, funny, astonishing, difficult, surprising, erudite and hugely ambitious”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. “He takes us from the bar to the bedroom, to the Middle Passage” – with scenes of enslavement and abduction – “from the studio to the academy, from the beauty parlour to the dancehall”. There are episodes of horror and portent, but also delightful, pastoral scenes of a black family enjoying a picnic in a park, or “elderly ladies in their parlours, golden-winged like angels at an annunciation” as they mourn the death of Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Kennedy and JFK. He is wonderful in a technical sense, too, rendering the spaces between housing projects with “pustules of paint ... like flowers blooming in a riot”. Marshall’s art is “as necessary as it is unmissable”; and this show is both “exhilarating” and “moving”.