Kerry James Marshall's "Untitled," 2009. (Kerry James Marshall/Yale University Art Gallery)
Kerry James Marshall is contemporary art's great engine tinkerer. He wants to know how things work. In the 1990s, when his contemporaries were making slight, cerebral works using found objects, photography and minimalism to poeticize the commonplace or reveal hidden ideologies, Marshall fell in love with the creakingly old idea of paintings as "machines."
"I've always wanted to be a history painter on a grand scale like Giotto and Géricault," he said in 1994.
As soon as you get interested in the "how" of things, you become conscious that they might have been done differently. That consciousness may open a crack of potential: They might yet be done differently.
The "how" question -- encompassing everything from "how do you make a painting?" to "how did we get here?" -- is the simplest route to explaining why Marshall -- the subject of a pulsating exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts (it will travel next year to Zürich and then Paris) -- is our most important living painter.
The Royal Academy galleries are the perfect venue for his paintings. Not only do they match the architecture's scale, they resonate with a level of ambition that was once expected from figurative paintings but was long ago disavowed. The show is divided into 11 cycles of work, each wrestling in distinctive ways with the tradition of history painting -- not by kitschily emulating it but by restlessly rethinking it.
Early in his career, Marshall began to construct paintings on the same scale as the "grandes machines," or history paintings, that for centuries dominated the Paris Salon and London's Royal Academy. But Marshall's history paintings were set not in ancient Rome or on Bonaparte's battlefields. They were set in fantasy versions of housing estates in Los Angeles or in living rooms filled with tributes to Black cultural heroes. Painted in acrylics and pinned to the wall, they combined realist spaces with glittering border decorations, lyrics from popular songs unfurling on banners, and abstract brushstrokes that sat with stubborn opacity on the surface.
Marshall moved to Los Angeles from Birmingham, Alabama, as a child and has lived in Bronzeville, on Chicago's South Side, since 1988.
He comes at history from odd and provocative angles. In the early 2000s, he made paintings that toy with tropes of Black style. These paintings combine pride, political consciousness and pure mischief in lasagna-like layers that can be gulped down at once but may require patience to parse. (One feeling I have in front of Marshall's paintings is of being continually outthought.)
Other works have recuperated historical figures for whom there is little or no visual record. These "counter-images" (Marshall's term) reimagine people like the preacher and rebel Nat Turner, the artist Scipio Moorhead and the abolitionist David Walker in scenes that (as Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Director Madeleine Grynsztejn has put it) combine "the true and the imaginary into a new visual legacy."
But some of Marshall's greatest paintings have addressed contemporary life, in the spirit of Charles Baudelaire's great 1863 essay, "The Painter of Modern Life."
Wanting to paint ordinary Black life on the same scale as old-school history paintings, Marshall produced paintings of beauty pageants, clubs, artists' studios, public parks, museum galleries and hair salons.
To my knowledge, no one in recent times has painted anything as ambitious, brilliantly executed or joyous as Marshall's 2012 masterpiece, "School of Beauty, School of Culture." The painting's scale (it is 10 times the size of "A Bar at the Folies-Bergères," Manet's beloved 19th-century "painting of modern life") and its sprawling cast recall the history paintings of Jacques-Louis David.
"School of Beauty" can be thought of as a pendant to Marshall's 1993 barbershop scene, "De Style." Both works make us think not only of the special importance of hair in Black culture but also of the unique energies whipped into being by congregations of men or women as they separately concern themselves with their beauty.
The picture's color alone is sensational. Against musk and orange floorboards, a gray-green wall, and mirror reflections that turn the green turquoise, a group of gorgeously dressed women prepare for a night out. Their skin is rendered in the rich blacks that have become Marshall’s signature. The mirrors reflect and reverse advertisements (“LOVELY,” “ULTRAGLOW,” “IT’S YOUR HAIR”) while the wall carries a poster for a Chris Ofili exhibition at Tate Modern and a signed album cover, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.”
A woman in striped pants, a chartreuse blouse and green pumps strikes a pose for a photographer, whose camera flash is reflected in the mirror behind.
Just as “De Style” made playful reference to paintings by Rembrandt, Manet and Mondrian, “School of Beauty” toys with some of the most famous works in Western art. The title is an allusion to Raphael’s “School of Athens.” The posing woman, whose sultry outward gaze places us in the position of the photographer, recalls the Spanish infanta posing for her royal parents in Velázquez’s “Las Meninas.” The mirror reflection behind recalls Van Eyck’s Arnolfini double portrait.
Despite their self-confident aura, there is nothing naive about Marshall’s Black subjects. Even his most idyllic scenes are often inflected by an ambient threat. “De Style” was set (as indicated by a barbershop calendar) a month after the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. “School of Beauty,” too， contains a silent menace.
What is that strange pink and yellow shape hovering over the floorboards?
That’s the question the toddler in blue appears to be asking as he stoops to see whether this spectral presence has any dimension.
Surprise! It’s the blond cartoon head of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, in the form of an anamorphic distortion. Marshall’s allusion here is to the famous anamorphic skull in the foreground of Hans Holbein’s masterpiece, “The Ambassadors.”
Marshall’s entire painting is actually two-dimensional. But if the salon is an imagined interior, it’s also a safe space, as the toddlers and the exuberant mood make clear. Sleeping Beauty, in the form of a floating distortion, threatens to break the picture’s illusionism, and might also interrupt the stylish, confident atmosphere these women have together created. (Disney’s idea of beauty is not the same as theirs!) Only the comedy of the infant’s guileless curiosity returns us to the salon and its gorgeous hubbub.
What an astonishing, life-affirming construction! A 21st-century masterpiece.
But Marshall is a dismantler as well as a builder. He’s one of those patient, deliberative artists who pull things apart to see what they’re made of. Only then does he use those same parts to make something new.
He has spent his career lifting the hood on both the mechanics of painting -- literally, how to make them -- and on the rhetoric behind every historical phase of painting, up to the present. The result is a new kind of painting, as unlikely as it is persuasive.
Marshall pays close attention to the poetics of visibility, and to the specifically Black choreography of seeing and being seen. He has made paintings of Black models posing, Black painters painting and Black students looking at paintings in art museums. All his work serves as a ramifying response to the dearth of self-possessed Black people in the annals of art history and in our museums.
In 2010 -- two years after a Black senator from Illinois had been elected president -- Marshall went to the Art Institute in Chicago -- a city where Black people make up more than a quarter of the population -- and tallied up the number of Black visitors.
He counted seven. He counted, too, the number of Black faces he saw depicted in the artworks on display.
Four.
"It would not be a stretch to suggest," he wrote at the time, with withering understatement, "that low 'African-American' attendance [in U.S. art museums] correlates with their low visibility in the art. That any people with an ounce of self-respect should support this level of disregard, as a leisure-time activity no less, is pure lunacy."
Quite a lot has changed in the 15 years since, and Marshall, by dint of his own work's excellence, has been a driving force behind those changes.
Marshall's figures are not naturalistic. An aficionado of comics and graphic art, he routinely uses dolls as models. He keeps tonal transitions visible, endowing his figures with a slightly stiff, schematic quality, and he prefers subtly modulated blacks to real skin tones because he wants us to register race as both an abstraction and a complex, consequential reality.
His acute awareness that every style of painting, including realism, is a kind of rhetoric enriches his deeper concern: As a Black man in a world that's awash in rhetoric about Black people, he is using painting to carve out pockets of freedom from all that.
Avoiding transparently expressive emotion, Marshall prefers to hold something back, as if he doesn't want his subjects to be categorized or glibly explained away. His most recent paintings, which deal with African complicity in the slave trade and the White brides of postcolonial African leaders, have proved puzzling to many. But they are, as the show's curator Mark Godfrey has written, "arguments about history." And history is nothing if not puzzling.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories Through Jan. 18 at the Royal Academy of Art, London. It will travel to the Kunsthaus Zürich in February and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris in September.