The Telegraph, review by Alastair Sooke
2025
We’re only halfway through September, but here, already, is the show of the season: a retrospective of ravishing paintings by the American Kerry James Marshall, coinciding with his 70th birthday. You can’t fault pictures this ingenious and accomplished, which, although serious in subject matter, impart so much visual pleasure. Eight colossal examples on display in the Royal Academy’s grandest gallery alone provide sufficient reason to buy a ticket: billed as contemporary paintings of modern life (in the manner of, say, Georges Seurat), they’re finessed with a classicist’s obsessive attention to detail and technique – even if seven are unframed and attached to the walls with grommets. Yet, this is only one of 11 themed rooms conceived by Mark Godfrey, the curator. Marshall, who is black, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, a few years before the “race riots”; from 1963, he grew up in Los Angeles. As a young artist, he didn’t respond to the conceptual currents swirling around the city. In 1980, he painted an important and enigmatic self-portrait, probing racial stereotypes, in egg tempera – a medium last in vogue in Italy circa AD1400. In it, Marshall appears so dark-skinned against a black background that – aside from his white eyes, and a gleaming, cartoonish grin, missing a tooth – he’s practically invisible. From this, he developed his principal motif: the depiction within naturalistic spaces of figures so unnaturally (and glossily) black that their effect is, as Marshall puts it, “rhetorical”, rather than realistic. The range of his blacks is astonishing. Read more.