Kerry James Marshall’s Paintings Are Looking at You

There’s history (the past) and history (the official account), and then there are the huge, colorful, time-bending canvases of the American artist Kerry James Marshall, which blend Black history and art history to show us that there is never just one way of seeing the world.

There are many kinds of history in “The Histories,” the largest survey of Marhsall’s work ever presented in Europe, which opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last week. Seventy canvases depict the Middle Passage, the slave rebellions of the American South, and the U.S. Civil Rights and Black power movements. But there are also more daily scenes and sites: a barbershop, a club, domestic interiors and housing projects, like the one Marshall and his family lived in after moving from Birmingham, Ala. to Los Angeles in the 1960s.

Some of his historical scenes explore episodes that artists have hardly tackled before, like the works in a new series called “Africa Revisited,” depicting the powerful African leaders and merchants who took part in selling Africans to European slave traders. Marshall recently told The New York Times that he didn’t understand why anybody would find these depictions controversial: “The history is what it is,” he said.

That isn’t to say that these paintings, or any that Marshall makes, are straightforward depictions. It’s not just what these works show, but how — their composition, style, texture, surface, palette and details — that makes the artist’s oeuvre so vivid.

There is a radical flatness to the works, which are sometimes painted on fiberglass, PVC panels or wood. Paintings on canvas are frequently tacked directly to the wall with metal grommets. Figures are depicted in a compressed picture plane, and scenes are so packed with detail that they have an almost graphic quality.

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