From a young age, Kerry James Marshall was obsessed with art. He first had an inkling he wanted to be an artist when he was just four, after leafing through a scrapbook of old Christmas cards as a reward for being good at his Catholic Kindergarten in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was born. In 1965, aged ten, he went on a school field trip to the newly opened Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where he was particularly taken by two huge allegorical paintings by Veronese and a wooden Senufo figure from present-day Ivory Coast. After that, he would often return on his own to study and sketch the works on show in the museum. In seventh grade, a teacher recommended the precocious Marshall for a drawing class at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he would eventually enrol to study a BFA in 1977. Three years later, he would board his first plane to New York to see Picasso’s Guernica, a work that left a lasting impression on the artist. It is this exacting fascination with the canon of art that is the bedrock of Marshall’s biggest exhibition in Europe to date, an epic journey on a Homeric scale through the history of painting, which opens in the hallowed galleries of the Royal Academy of Art in London this week. There could not be a more fitting context for Marshall’s work, and the curators Mark Godfrey and Adrian Locke have had ample scope to play with the installation among the RA’s grand architecture. Each room is dedicated to a cycle of works that explore a different painting genre or convention (portraiture, vignettes, landscapes, love scenes)—every grouping a lesson in art history, and how to rewrite it. Read more
Kerry James Marshall, Haul, 2025 (detail)