By James Brewer
A group of young Black children squat on the floor of an art gallery, gazing attentively at the paintings. They are pictured in an artwork that is an appropriate frame of reference for the new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. The artwork is in greys, because it is deliberately an underpainting – although the key colour in the exhibition in the London institution’s spacious main galleries is definitely, defiantly, black.
The kids-together scene is a way of introducing the largest survey yet in Europe of acclaimed American artist and Honorary Royal Academician Kerry James Marshall. The show appends The Histories because the Chicago-based Marshall considers his contributions as powerful transformations of the traditions and genres of Western history painting. “I’ve always wanted to be a history painter on a grand scale like Giotto and Géricault,” he says.
With mostly genial empathy he renders faithfully the lives of Black Americans past, present and future, entwined with truths both comforting and uncomfortable. His deeply felt concerns include a passion for promoting education among the new generations.
Often grand in scale and with a prominent role for the vast blue seas that carry some grim reminders of colonialism, the canvases take over the whole of the Royal Academy’s main galleries until January 18, 2026, and with their bravura references, celebrate episodes of history, everyday modern life, and dream up optimistic futures.
Marking the 70th birthday of this exceptional individual, the solo exhibition musters more than 70 works, primarily paintings, but with examples of his prints, drawings and sculpture, from museums and private collections in North America and Europe. It is the first institutional presentation of the artist’s work in the UK since 2006 and includes a series made especially for the show.
Already receiving rave reviews for this London appearance, Marshall addresses without sentimentality subjects including the Middle Passage, a seemingly innocuous term for the cruel voyages transporting millions of people from West Africa across the Atlantic. He visits too the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sadly, since being illustrated by the artist, recent advances are being rolled back.
With his resonant interpretations of everyday 21st century African American life, he centres Black figures in paintings built on principles of Western picture making, which he has encountered since his childhood in books and in museums. In short, a distinct aesthetic response to a great assortment of social phenomena.
Having grown up in Birmingham, Alabama, he moved to Los Angeles where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Otis Art Institute and was later awarded an honorary doctorate. A formative moment was travelling to a Picasso exhibition and being absorbed by Guernica (1937) which stood out as a history painting par excellence. Marshall set out to depict in a similar manner important junctures in Black history.
While his subject matter resonates with the present, he uses egg tempera, a medium favoured during the Renaissance to bind pigments; and he weaves African spiritualism into an accumulation of references to history, religion, politics, contemporary culture, Afrofuturism, and science fiction. He affirms Black citizenship from the perspective of barber shops, beauty parlours, parks and nightclubs. He is emancipating, as it were, historical Black figures: the enslaved, rebels, poets, artists, abolitionists and activists.
He uses differing black pigments for skin colours: ivory black, Mars black and carbon black, mixing in other colours. This brings out the depth and richness of the skin, and he declares: “if you say black, you should see black.” Rarely does he attempt to depict the browns of real skin tones. His figures are at once individual characters and examples of an emphatic Blackness, and he is deeply influenced by artists such as Edouard Manet, Gustave Caillebotte, Georges Seurat and other painters of modern living.
He delights in the disciplines of art taught in institutions – making the Royal Academy with its intrinsic dedication to pedagogy an ideal venue for the show. The centrepiece of the opening room is The Academy, 2012 (from a private collection) in which the male model in a life class raises his fist in the Black Power salute.
Soon we see the 2018 work Untitled (Underpainting) which includes the youngsters on a day out to a gallery. He chose the underpainting format – a traditional academic technique – to depict an underappreciated reality, that “Black kids go on school trips to museums too.” An underpainting is the initial layer of colour, usually brown, that allows a painter to work out the structure and relationship of tones across a composition. The scene recalls his childhood wonder and curiosity over museum collections, and he extols school trips as a critical social factor for observing and learning.
The second room contains some of Marshall’s earliest mature works, including from 1980 A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (great title!) and Invisible Man, 1986, named after the 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison, in which the anonymous Black narrator feels alienated by society because of his skin colour.
In the two largest galleries we go back to Marshall’s ambitiously composed, large-format paintings that record Black families picnicking in the park, lovers dancing, children playing in communal gardens and so on. Friends gather exuberantly in hair salons, in School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012. De Style (1993) takes us to a Chicago barbershop, with its fastidious and proud hairdressers and clients. The title evokes De Stijl, a movement founded in 1917 by Dutch pioneers of abstract art.
Commanding the community scenes is the 294 x 698 cm (9ft 8 inches by 23ft across) Knowledge and Wonder, the artist’s largest painting to date, exhibited for the first time outside Chicago. That city commissioned it for its Legler branch library in 1993, and it celebrates the institution of the library as a source of mystery and fascination. Children and adults cradle larger-than-life books which are viewed as agents of the imagination while planets and stars symbolise the natural inquisitiveness of children. The ladder to the right of the canvas suggests the library is a means to achieving higher goals.
Knowledge and Wonder became a conspicuous marker of the value a society places on art when in 2018, to the dismay of Marshall and many supporters, the city planned to sell the painting at Christie’s to fund renovations for the branch library and establish a new public art fund. On the public outcry, the Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel reversed the sale decision.
In an allegory of the one-time vogue for an image-within-an image, Untitled, 2009, a flamboyant artist with an oversize palette and ambitious coiffure turns firmly towards us from an unfinished self-portrait which is a painting-by-numbers composition. One of her thumbnails can be discerned as painted with the green, black and red of the Pan-African flag.
The exhibition continues with Marshall’s endeavours to face up to the troubling history of the Middle Passage, as in Great America, 1994 (from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) in which he is certainly not portraying America as “great again,” whatever that means. In it, a small boat loaded with African American passengers sails from a changeful sea towards a ghost-train tunnel representing white America. Perhaps this is a reference to incidents such as the casting overboard in 1871 by a ship’s master of as many as 132 enslaved men and women who were dying from disease and malnutrition.
There are imagined portraits of significant Black individuals such as the African American 18th century writer Phillis Wheatley who dedicated a poem to her contemporary, the otherwise scarcely recorded artist Scipio Moorhead; the former slave turned abolitionist Harriet Tubman; and Olaudah Equiano who was kidnapped from West Africa and sailed the oceans with his Royal Navy officer ‘master’ and eventually bought his freedom.
On display in the final galleries are Wake, begun in 2003, a sculpture which is decorated with new medallions of Black heroes each time it is exhibited. Wake and the painting Gulf Stream were first shown together at the Venice Biennale of 2003. Thesculpturecentres on a blackened ship commemorating the first 20 slaves of African origin born in America, with a pedestal standing for a black sea. While recalling the journey made by enslaved Africans, the work also suggests the growing power of Black cultural expression. Gulf Stream echoes a painting also called The Gulf Stream, by the American artist Winslow Homer, (1899/1906), which featured a shipwrecked Black seafarer threatened by sharks.
The exhibition culminates with the first showing of Africa Revisited comprising eight paintings of episodes in African history and the transatlantic slave trade, the artist being unafraid to point to the complicity of African slave traders greedy for European consumer baubles. The traders are shown kidnapping children, rowing captives in a canoe to buyers out of the picture, returning with all kinds of booty, and celebrating their rotten deals. The paintings include Haul, 2024, and Outbound, 2023, acrylic on PVC panel.
On a surprise note, looking ahead we see an Afrofuturist family enjoying a jaunt on a spaceship.
The exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, and in close collaboration with the artist. It is curated by Mark Godfrey, independent art historian, critic and curator, with Adrian Locke, chief curator of the Royal Academy of Arts, and Rose Thompson, assistant curator of RA and Nikita Sena Quarshie, curatorial researcher.
Captions in detail of works by the artist:
Haul, 2024, and Outbound, 2023, acrylic on PVC panel. The artist and David Zwirner, London.
Untitled (Underpainting), 2018. Detail. Acrylic on PVC in artist’s frame. Glenstone Museum, Maryland. Simon Wallace.
School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012. Acrylic and glitter on unstretched canvas. Collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; museum purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth (Bibby) Smith, the Collectors Circle for Contemporary Art, Jane Comer, the Sankofa Society, and general acquisition funds, 2012.57. © Kerry James Marshall. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Sean Pathasema.
De Style, 1993. Acrylic and collage on canvas. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by Ruth and Jacob Bloom. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: © Museum Associates/LACMA.
Untitled, 2009. Acrylic on PVC panel. Yale University Art Gallery. Purchased with the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund and a gift from Jacqueline L Bradley, BA, 1979. © Kerry James Marshall.
Knowledge and Wonder, 1995. Oil on canvas. City of Chicago Public Art Program and the Chicago Public Library, Legler Regional Library. © Kerry James Marshall. Photo: Patrick L Pyszka, City of Chicago.
Woke. Model sailboat. 2003-ongoing. Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Gulf Stream, 2003. acrylic and glitter on canvas. Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis. TB Walker Acquisition Fund, 2004.
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Piccadilly, until January 18, 2026.
