The American artist sought to put black faces in technically accomplished, European-inspired art, and did just that
By J.D. | CHICAGO
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL set out to change what we see in the giant canvases in art museums, not because he hated traditional art, but because he admired it. An early primary-school field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) made a lasting impression. There, he discovered “some really big paintings with figures in them that looked like superheroes” by Paolo Veronese and, on a lower level, a “terrifying” Senufo figure from Mali. As he tells me by phone from his home in Chicago, “I was trying to figure out why both of those things were in the museum and both were equally powerful, but they didn’t look anything like each other. For most of my life, both those things stuck in my mind. I have never forgotten either of them.”
Mr Marshall’s 35-year career as a painter is the subject of Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, an important retrospective at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In Mastry, we see Mr Marshall skilfully rework the styles of Courbet, Rembrandt and Seurat, but with a difference. Mr Marshall’s works boldly insert African American subject matter and figures in the historic styles. By celebrating the history, beauty and modern lives of black Americans, his expertly composed pieces turn Western European art history on its head, but are punctuated with sly jokes and meaningful details at the same time. The kid who loved superhero paintings is very much alive--and now it’s his pictures hanging on the wall.
Born in Alabama, raised in South Central Los Angeles, Mr Marshall grew up smitten with the visuals of Christmas cards to comic books. He’s a lifelong collector and cataloguer of images. As a boy he discovered a world of possibility in the art books at his public library. “I started to figure out how the artists who made the things in the art books made them. I read that they would copy the work of the masters, so I started trying to do that.” He took out how-to guides on everything from Japanese brush painting to cartoon drawing, landscape to etching, accumulating a toolbox of technique.
Black Panther, a comic-book character who had his debut in 1966, was another spark. The painter, who later investigated comics with his own Rythm Mastr series, never looked at superheroes the same way. “The moment it [Black Panther] appeared it highlighted the absence of black superhero characters across the pantheon. You become hyper aware of that absence and start feeling the need to address it.”
Charles White, the country’s most renowned African-American, social-realist painter, struck a chord with the teenager. He chose to make his first oil painting on a pulled-down windowshade because his forerunner had done it, too. Mr Marshall discovered that White taught at the nearby Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design), so he sat in on White’s classes, but learned too late that he couldn’t attend straight out of high school. He worked for a tile business until the recession of 1974, when he was laid off. From then on, he studied for the necessary credits and found his way to Otis to earn his arts degree.
It wasn’t the rigorous education he imagined. “By the time I got to art school in 1977, the whole idea of making pretty pictures was out. The whole idea of making paintings was, at that point, fairly obsolete…It turned into a place where people were just hanging out and having a good time but not working on anything,” Mr Marshall recalls. But he had a goal in mind, learning how to construct and paint a picture so well that it would have to hang in a museum. He stuck with painting, believing his pictures still had work to do.
After he graduated, Mr Marshall made innocuous mixed-media collages before realising that he had to stake out new territory. He introduced the idea of a black figure presented with rigorous technical detail and composition. In 1980, with the Ralph Ellison-inspired painting “A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self”, that idea became his mission. “Portrait of the Artist” sold immediately, and further milestones, for this artist for whom market appeal has always been a consideration, quickly followed.
In his next group of paintings, including the large-scale “The Lost Boys” and “De Style”, Mr Marshall found himself truly satisfied with his work for the first time. “They were big, they were full of stuff and they were kinda complicated. And I thought they were pretty to look at. Those paintings clarified a lot of things for me.” “De Style” a large acrylic of a scene from a typical African-American barbershop, achieved Mr Marshall’s dream. The painting was snatched up by LACMA. Mr Marshall’s work would go on to investigate the hope and longing of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s and growing middle-class comfort. His Garden Project series in the 1990s was based on housing projects with "gardens" in their names. Today, Mr Marshall is one of America’s preeminent painters--Chicago’s MCA calls him one of America’s greatest living artists. In 2013 the National Gallery of Art acquired his “Great America”(1994) and put on a show of his work to mark it. Mastry is another milestone. The work here takes on the Western canon from the Renaissance to modern American abstraction. Mr Marshall has thrown a spotlight on representation in technically complex paintings, just as he intended. Few artists can say they have done precisely what they set out to do, but Kerry James Marshall has.
Mastry runs to Sep 25, 2016 at Chicago’s MCA. It travels to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 25, 2016–January 29, 2017, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 12–July 2, 2017
