BBC, review by Precious Adesina
2025
The painting School of Beauty, School of Culture is among the exhibits in a major new London retrospective of the US artist Kerry James Marshall. But there is more to the salon scene than first meets the eye.
At nine feet tall and 13 feet wide, School of Beauty, School of Culture doesn't just tower over its viewers; it invites them in. "If you want to make a painting that many people can look at together and that can compete with paintings in big museums, then it's got to have scale," explains art historian Mark Godfrey, curator of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy, London. "The painting has its own wall" in the exhibition, he tells the BBC, "and can be seen from a distance of about 60 metres away." The US figurative painter is among the most acclaimed living artists in the world, and in 2018 set a new record when his Past Times sold at auction for $21.1 million – a groundbreaking amount for a work by a living African-American artist at the time. The Royal Academy show, which opens today, is the largest survey of his art ever shown in Europe. "Staggering, triumphant", "ingenious" and "astonishing" are just some of the glowing epithets recently used in reviews of the exhibition. "Prepare to be bewitched," says another. And nothing in it is more bewitching than School of Beauty, School of Culture. Completed in 2012, the painting presents an everyday scene, yet like the other artworks displayed in The Histories, there is more to it than initially meets the eye. The scenario is layered with multiple coded references from history, culture and art history, from Disney to Holbein. Read more