Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 05/Oct 09:52

Art as politics

The exhilarating current exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London is simultaneously deeply political and wonderfully beautiful. The African-American Kerry James Marshall is one of America’s leading painters, now well known and much admired for his work reclaiming black life. The venerable Royal Academy is not a shy institution that avoids challenging the expectations of its dedicated patrons and millions of tourists. After all, it displayed the controversial The Holy Virgin Mary by British-Nigerian, TT-resident Chris Ofili that for the first time in the academy’s history exhibited elephant dung on its walls. However, it has never sought to tell exclusively the story of black American life going back to slavery in such completeness. And what an extraordinary pictorial narration it is! Over 11 rooms the exhibition entitled The Histories unapologetically shows paintings of firmly centred black subjects as Marshall engages with the history of Western art and shows his mastery of those histories that routinely dehumanised black people or excluded them entirely. The paintings range from eight inches high to the 8.5-by-ten-foot barbershop painting De Style (1993), for which Marshall first became known as a large-scale painter, and the towering hairdressing salon nine-by-13-foot School of Beauty, School of Culture painting (2018) that is visible from 60 metres away. In its grandeur and grace, steeped in European tradition, Marshall’s Histories does not appear to be an act of resistance, but that is exactly what it is. From the very first room it is evident that Marshall is painting back, just as Caribbean writers have written back to Western literature, to create stories that structurally are very familiar, since they belong to well established conventions and styles – but their content is anything but familiar. Against blood-red walls in the very first room we come across a large painting of a striking, ebony-black female figure holding a paint palette and a brush with a deeply contrasting splotch of white paint. She is ready to fill in the numbered gaps in the empty canvas behind as she chooses. It is how we once became cricketing greats – learn the rules, master them and then turn the tables and move from the edges of history and time to claim your rightful place. [caption id="attachment_1182484" align="alignnone" width="683"] -[/caption] Readers familiar with American art, and African-American art in particular, may know Marshall’s painting Past Times, which in 2018 fetched the highest auction price then to date for the work of a living black artist – US$21 million for a painting estimated to fetch US$8-12 million, and which had been bought for US$25,000 from the artist in 1997. That 800-times increase pushed Marshall into a different league, confirming his importance as an artist and renewing interest in black figurative art among institutions, collectors and artists. Marshall’s paintings are immediately familiar to anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with French Impressionist paintings like the ones we saw in our school art books. It portrays ordinary middle-class individuals at leisure in a park (in Chicago, where the artist lives). In the foreground the figures listen to music while resting on a red-chequered blanket and play croquet, while others around them are waterskiing, golfing and boating – scenes borrowed from French holidays. The colours Marshall uses, however, are not after the French painters – every body is inky black, for a start; and we recognise in Marshall’s use of solid, vivid blocks of colour the modernist painting style of well-known 20th-century African-American artists William Johnson and Jacob Lawrence. Like that of his predecessors, equally schooled in Western art, Marshall’s art is never accusatory. The uncompromising and striking use of the colour black is immediately arresting. No shades of darkness anywhere, only deep blackness, as if to say: That is the only opposite to light and whiteness. Either you see me or you don’t. The artist also unnerves us by the placement of the figures in settings where we are unused to seeing them. Marshall’s approach to painting black figures moved quite early on from using more abstract collages to black figures in everyday settings. In an interview for the exhibition catalogue Marshall explained to the show’s curator that as the famous painters Dürer and Rembrandt did, he used the practice of self-portraiture to signal a new direction in his art. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), he depicts himself as a stereotypical one-dimensional black figure in a black coat against a black backdrop. Almost invisible, the only defining facial features are the whites of his eyes and his wide, toothy grin revealing one missing tooth. As his work evolved Marshall added increasingly visual richness by layering the jet-black skin. For anyone who questions why black art is inherently political, be guided by WEB Dubois’ words, “Until the art of the black folk compels recognition, they will not be rated as human.”   The post Art as politics appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.