Kerry James Marshall at Modern Art, Oxford 2006

Date: 03-09-2006
Owning Institution: The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, courtesy Kerry James Marshall
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012  
Subject:   Now    

Kerry James Marshall, a retrospective of whose work is on display at Modern Art, Oxford, is one of the leading American artists of his generation. His pictures, formed from a clever melange of styles and subjects, draw on a wide range of sources from both high and low art. They are quietly militant without ever descending to stridency – amounting to a series of glancingly ironic commentaries, both on the nature of black urban experience in modern America, and on the difficulty of representing it.

The artist’s painting is inseparable from his sense of politics, which was shaped during his childhood and early adolescence. He was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up at the height of the American civil rights movement. In 1963, Marshall’s family moved to Watts in southern Los Angeles. Two years later, when he was ten, he witnessed the notorious Watts riots. A few blocks away from where he lived, the Black Panthers had their headquarters, and shoot-outs between members of their organisation and the Los Angeles Police Department were a common occurrence.

Marshall decided to be a painter at an early age, inspired by an enlightened kindergarten teacher who showed him books about the history of art and encouraged him in his own drawing and painting. He remembers going to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when he was young and being struck by the almost complete absence of representations of black people. As he studied art history in greater depth, he found the same pattern repeated. The occasional black king might appear in Renaissance depictions of the nativity; Rubens sometimes included blacks in his battle paintings, as did Hogarth in his scenes of London life; but otherwise, generally speaking, he found a gaping void. This was something that he decided, with the confidence of youth, to try to put right. At the age of 14, he decided that he would only ever paint black figures – and, as he says in an engaging interview with exhibition curator Deborah Smith, to make them “as black as black can be – as black as coal.”

One of Marshall’s earliest paintings in the Oxford exhibition, Two Invisible Men Naked , of 1985, looks like a tongue-in-cheek comment on the widespread invisibility of black experience in the world of high art. It is a diptych, formed of one black panel and one white. At first sight it might be a Minimalist abstraction. On closer inspection, a naked male figure can be made out, black on black, one arm raised above his head, one hip jutting out, to suggest he is performing some kind of dance. He is visible, principally, in the form of the gleaming whites of his eyes and his set of bright grinning teeth. He distantly recalls the stereotype of the happy-go-lucky slave perpetuated in Hollywood musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. The picture is a characteristic example of Marshall’s dry, sardonic wit – the image of a black figure emerging from invisibility, so to speak, only to disappear back into the realms of cliché.

The exhibition opens with a series of more recent works, to which the painter has given the collective title of Vignettes . They appear to have been inspired by the light-hearted spirit of eighteenth-century Rococo prints and book illustrations, evoking the carefree fantasies of Boucher and Fragonard. Lovers dawdle and dally in outdoor settings. A young man takes a young girl by the waist and lifts her playfully in the air, as love hearts fall on them from the sky. A couple sit in a park, surrounded by daffodils in bloom, lost in amorous conversation. The images are painted in grisaille, drained of colour as if to emphasise their self-consciously vacuous character. This also has the effect of making them somewhat resemble the images recorded by surveillance cameras, which is not, in fact, wholly inappropriate. The sylvan setting in which Marshall has chosen to frame these scenes is no utopia, but a housing estate somewhere in America. Lovers talk over a chain-link fence, or against the backdrop of a “$2 Wash Fluff and Fold” launderette. The figures are all, of course, black. They wear the clothes and sport the hairdos – huge afros and towering beehives – of the 1970s.

Marshall likes to take established genres of art and invest them with self-consciously “black” style and subject matter in order to expose – and enjoy – the resulting incongruities. He works on small scale as well as large, in a wide variety of styles ranging from greeting-card kitsch to comic-strip graphic simplification. He imitates the look of movie posters stuck to peeling walls and complicates the effect with collage – as in Black Goddess of the Silver Screen , of 1992, in which the portrait of a sulky starlet is juxtaposed with the covers of several bodice-ripping novels set in the Deep South. He takes the slogans of the Black Power era, such as “Black is Beautiful” or “Burn Baby Burn” , and reproduces them as pieces of word art in a series of relief prints made in 1998 – his point perhaps being that the phrases are now so emphatically a thing of the past that they might as well be refashioned into museum pieces. An ongoing series of works takes the form of a dystopian and fragmentary series of hand-drawn comics entitled “The Rhythm Mastr” – a kind of dour parody of Schulz’s Peanuts , featuring a series of characters trapped in dead-end lives on a soulless social-housing estate. At the opposite end of the scale, Marshall paints a version of the grand manner history painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – transposing into it, once more, his own preferred themes and subjects.

One such group of large-scale paintings from the 1990s, called Souvenirs , explicitly commemorates the American civil rights movement, albeit with such deadpan, surreal strangeness that the artist’s precise intentions are difficult to discern. Each of these pictures is set in a claustrophobically spic-and-span American suburban interior, circa 1970, painted with a Pop Artist’s attention to every last detail: a glass vase on a wood-veneer table laid carefully with coasters; a two-tone grey and white push-button telephone; a set of magazines – Jet and Ebony prominent among them – displayed in a rack set on a mottled pink carpet. On the wall hangs a gold-tasselled banner bearing the image of Martin Luther King, flanked by those of John and Robert Kennedy, inscribed with the words “We Mourn Our Loss”. In one of these works, Souvenir II of 1997, the lady of the house is present – a coal-black angel, with bright gold wings, wearing high heels, a flowery blue dress and an expression of absolute inscrutability. Like cherubim and seraphim floating in the air above her, the artist has included the silk-screened likenesses of numerous other, less well-known, less well-remembered heroes of the civil rights movement – a cloud of remembrance, hovering over a world where the past has been oppressively sentimentalised and tidied away.

Marshall paints commemorative portraits of a kind too, most notably in a series of works of the early 1990s called The Lost Boys . Here, his normally precise, even pernickety sense of draughtsmanship – faces carefully drawn, features exactly delineated – has been disrupted by screeds and swirls of paint evoking the surfaces of graffitied walls. The names of the sitters are suggestive – the likes of “AKA Black Sonny” or “AKA Lil Bit” – characters who once, presumably, enjoyed their brief moment of notoriety before dying, younger than they should have done, in some urban badland. The exhibition closes with another series of sardonic urban pastorals, in which characters camp and warm themselves by bonfires of old car tyres, or loiter by trees twined with tape announcing “police line – do not cross”. Marshall’s work is combative and challenging, full of wit and ingenuity. But it is also shot through with a spirit of unshakeable melancholy.