Financial Times, review by Jackie Wullschläger
2025
Kerry James Marshall and the Royal Academy’s sumptuous main galleries were made for each other. As the bold, important and unforgettable exhibition Kerry James Marshall: The Histories recounts, towards the end of the 20th century, the African American artist set out to paint monumental masterpieces in the grand western tradition, variously reminiscent of French impressionism’s happy secularism — the picnickers and boaters in “Past Times” — or Winslow Homer’s vigorous realism — the yacht trip “Gulf Stream” — or, in the barber shop “De Style”, Piet Mondrian’s primary colours and grids. A pink and green pastoral series with tinsel lettering, “Vignettes”, nods at rococo fantasy. Women bearing flowers in domestic interiors decked with memorials, “Souvenir”, boast golden wings, recalling Renaissance Annunciations. “Plunge”, with a swimmer in a leopard-skin bikini on the diving board, has the vibrancy of David Hockney’s pools. Then you notice the toy steamer in pan-African red, yellow and green named Immamou — in Haitian Vodou, the ship transporting dead souls. The water is inscribed “Atlantic Ocean”. Like a magpie, Marshall steals from everyone, the better to glitter and shine in his own paintings, whose manner is straightforwardly appealing: crystalline compositions in bright smooth acrylic paint, each starring Black characters who are striking, confident, forceful. Most are having fun, as we do looking at them. That sounds simple but when Marshall, now almost 70, began working, it was unheard of. Introducing a new Black figuration in the 1980s, he both radicalised and rescued the canon. Art schools then were telling students that painting was finished. Not before Black subjects take their place in its history, replied Marshall. So he put them in the picture: positive, potent figures in engrossing narratives. Read more