In a wood-panelled library of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the artist Kerry James Marshall is reminiscing about his first encounter with art. “Two things impressed me,” he says of a school trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: a pair of 10ft-tall paintings by Veronese, “with monumental figures that looked like superheroes”, and an African sculpture a fraction of the size that exerted its own spell. “It was the first time I’d been in a museum and I was struck by the power of both: the gigantic and heroic; and the small and mysterious.” Ever since, he says with wonder still in his voice, “I’ve been trying to match that power”.
Marshall, who turns 68 this month, is among the greatest living painters, known mainly for epic figurative works, though his practice extends to drawing, photography, sculpture and video. In the early 1990s, the LA museum he frequented as a child was the first of many — including MoMA in New York — to acquire his paintings, and he was elected an honorary Royal Academician in London last year.