Biting, funny, astonishing, difficult, surprising, erudite and hugely ambitious, Kerry James Marshall’s The Histories is the largest show of the black American’s work ever held in Europe. Its effects are cumulative. The Histories charts the 69-year-old painter’s intellectual as well as practical development, his themes, his switches of media and of focus and attention. Everything is here for a reason.
How engaging Marshall’s art is, from the first. He takes us from the bar to the bedroom, to the Middle Passage, from the studio to the academy, from the beauty parlour to the dancehall. He paints scenes of kidnappings and of enslavement in Africa and of a black cop sitting on the hood of his squad car – I love the jagged stylised flare of the streetlights in the background. Marshall knows that everything is contended and complex and that there are no innocent images. Pustules of paint, like litter between the blocks, decorate the spaces between the housing projects, like flowers blooming in a riot. On an idyllic day in the park, black folks picnic, practise a golf swing, play croquet, water-ski on the lake and listen to the Temptations, the lyrics floating up like ticker tape from radios on a sunny afternoon. It is an absurd, impossible image. The humour in Marshall’s art is not to be underestimated. In a series devoted to the Middle Passage a Baptist flounders. There are water slides and swimming pools, ocean liners and toy boats and a woman about to dive from a board. The water is filled with drowned maps of Africa and carefully rendered fish, and there’s an exhortation to plunge.
The key early work here, and one that led to several variations, is Marshall’s 1980 egg tempera on paper A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self. The title alludes to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the slanting hat, tipped back on the subject’s head, may also echo Wyndham Lewis’s Tyro, from 1921. Gap-toothed and wide-eyed, a black face grins wildly. Dressed in black and wearing a black fedora, he looms from a black background. Only the white triangle of shirt at his collar, those eyes and that smile, punctuate the dark. This small work on paper is cartoonish, but also reserved and confrontational, bounded by a white mat in a black frame. He repainted it as an image-within-an-image, hung on a red wall above an old-fashioned upright vacuum cleaner, and called it Portrait of the Artist and a Vacuum. Where does the artist belong? Where’s their milieu, their audience, their culture? Studying at CalArts in California, where painting seemed to be definitively over, there was little if any acknowledgment of the artist’s blackness, or of the importance of art to a wider, let alone a wider black, audience. But Marshall was showing that even an old-fashioned egg tempera portrait was as conceptual as anything else. It is an essay in blackness, and also alludes to Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel Invisible Man. These paintings were both an end point and the beginning of a career in which he has become the pre-eminent painter of black American life.
Black Painting (2003) depicts a bedroom at night, the details only becoming apparent as your eyes adjust to the close-toned gloom. The painting is not black, but filled with tiny shifts in the darkness. Adjustments. There are bulks in there, shifts, bodies troubled in sleep. The viewer’s eye roams the gloom, an interloper, hovering by the pillow, noting the copy of Angela Davis’s If They Come in the Morning. What and who do the sleepers dread? It is a painting that waits and waits, a singularity amid an overwhelming multiplicity of signs, of innumerable crisp and telling details. Marshall’s art rewards attention, to its larger social and political themes, its momentous occasions and to its smaller stories.
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Portraits and still life, looping descriptions of electrical flex, painted inventories of studio paraphernalia, gags about abstraction, old masterish riffs and quoted lyrics of Snoop Dogg, knuckle rings that spell “STUD”, magazine racks of Ebony and Jet all vie in this exhilarating and at times moving exhibition, filling the main galleries at the Royal Academy. And don’t forget the shoes: so many closely observed sneakers, mules, sandals, slip-ons, pumps and high heels. Even at his loosest, Marshall insists on the particular. There’s no end to the invention or the details that constantly arrest you.
There are near monochromes and sly plays on abstract expressionism, couplings in the park, an Afrofuturist family evening on an interstellar spaceship and a woman with amazing hair happily nursing a drink in a bar. A guy sweeps the stage in a cavernous hall, where a woman stands in effortless emulation of the sad-eyed girl at the counter in Manet’s 1882 Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Marshall’s figure clutches her bag and waits, but for what or who we do not know. Like Manet’s barmaid, she’s a witness to her time.
A naked guy, dressed only in a jock strap, poses as though for a life class, one arm raised in a Black power salute. On a worktable nearby rests a woman’s handbag and a small doll, apparently a nkisi nkondi figure from the Kongo people of central Africa. Already there’s too much to resolve. And what of the knotted rope, rendered in glitter, dropping from above, or the big abstract canvases shunted to the edge of the painting, beyond the white and red and patterned drapes? And we haven’t yet mentioned the model’s blackness, his near impenetrable silhouette, the barely discernible lineaments of his body and face, his big hair, his unknowable expression. You could almost pick up the yellow glass on the table, the bag or the bunch of keys, but the model is somehow out of reach.
And so it goes, from painting to painting, from the studied portraits to the figures in motion, the naked guy lying on the bed, holding the red, black and green Pan-African flag over his genitals (my eyes snag on his patterned socks); the elderly ladies in their parlours, golden-winged like angels at an annunciation, with appliqué “we mourn our loss” tasselled hangings commemorating Martin Luther King, JFK and Bobby Kennedy. Little black kids and teenagers look at art in the museum, and two female black artists, their brushes hovering over palettes heavy with moiled and drooling piles of pigments, look as though they’re threatening to paint us.
Many of the larger paintings are unstretched, fixed to the wall with grommets – like the paintings of Leon Golub, one of many ghosts at the feast of Marshall’s art, which is full of licks and nods to other artists. But it is the specifics that finally grab you. Seagulls catch the light on their wings, floating over the small boats drawn up on the shore, awaiting their human cargo destined for the Americas. Marshall’s paintings are filled with the imagined, the feared, the remembered, the repressed and the invented. They’re woven through with black history and culture, with aspiration and loss, a distant past that won’t go away and an entangled present. Everything is always impending. By turns ragged and precise, offhand and offbeat and concise, Marshall’s art is as necessary as it is unmissable.