The Epic Style of Kerry James Marshall

For the first thirty years of his career, Kerry James Marshall was a successful but little known artist. His figurative paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and videos appeared in gallery and museum shows here and abroad, and selling them was never a problem. He won awards, residencies, and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, but in the contemporary-art world, which started to look more closely at Black artists in the nineties, Marshall was an outlier, and happy to be one. He had an unshakable confidence in himself as an artist, and the undistracted solitude of his practice allowed him to spend most of his time in the studio. This is no longer the case. The exhibition outed Marshall as a great artist, a virtuoso of landscape, portraiture, still-life, history painting, and other genres of the Western canon since the Renaissance. The return to figurative art in the past two decades has been embraced by a new wave of younger Black artists, and for many of them, it is now clear, Kerry James Marshall has been a primary inspiration.

 

“Kerry’s influence expands so far beyond his own project,” Rashid Johnson, who at forty-three is one of the strongest voices in contemporary art, told me. “He’s an electric and dynamic thinker who’s also had an enormous influence on those of us who use abstraction and more conceptual approaches. Marshall, whose calm manner and impeccable courtesy put people at ease, talks about his work with clarity and precision. “Everything I do is based on my understanding of art history,” he told me recently. “The foundation of art as an activity among human beings has always been some form of representation, and there isn’t a mode of art-making that I haven’t explored, and put into use when it was necessary.” His painting is figurative but not realistic. In 1993, he made two paintings that set him on a course that was entirely his own. He was thirty-eight years old, living in Chicago with his wife, the actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce, and he had recently moved into his first real studio, a three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot office space with an eleven-foot-high ceiling.

 

The new paintings were much bigger than anything he had done for quite a while-nine feet high by ten feet wide. “The Lost Boys” shows two young Black boys, one of whom sits in a dollar-a-ride toy car; the other stands nearby, holding a pink water pistol, beside a tree that has a yellow “Do Not Cross” police tape around its trunk. The boys look directly at the viewer, and there is something unnerving about them, a sense of sadness and vulnerability. The painting, Marshall said, came partly out of experiences he’d had during his own boyhood, in South Central Los Angeles, where his family lived in the nineteen-sixties. “This was the period when the Crips and the Bloods came into existence and everything changed,” Marshall recalled. “The level of violence grew exponentially. Before, gangs were groups of guys who hung out together and now and then they would have a fight, but it was a fight. When the Crips came, it was just shooting, and a lot of young people died.

 

My older brother, Wayne, narrowly escaped a drive-by shooting on our block. ‘The Lost Boys’ was built around a child who was killed by a police officer because he had a toy pistol that they mistook for a gun. When I finished ‘The Lost Boys,’ I stood back and said, ‘This is the kind of painting I always imagined myself making.’ It seemed to me to have the scale of the great history paintings, mixed with the rich surface effects you get from modernist painting. The other painting, which he began working on at the same time as “The Lost Boys,” is called “De Style.” The title is a play on the Dutch movement De Stijl, founded in 1917, which opened the way to pure, hard-edge abstraction in art and architecture, and the setting is a barbershop-the window sign reads “Percy’s House of Style.” A customer is in the chair, and three others wait, two seated and one standing. Behind them, red cabinets with white drawers form a structure of precise rectangles, echoing Mondrian.

 

Our attention is drawn to the men’s elaborate hair styles-sculptured masses on the standing figure, a tower of stacked braids on one of the sitters, who I could have sworn was a woman. He went on to explain how young men of his generation in South Central had been captivated by the blaxploitation movies of the seventies, which “gave us models of high style and sophistication that a lot of guys I was in high school with emulated. My brother and I did each other’s hair. I had mine in rollers when I went to bed. Guys were spending as much on their hair as girls did. And not only hair. We designed our own suits and had them made. You worked all summer so you could start school in the fall with a new wardrobe.” For a Black teen-ager in Los Angeles, life was in the details. “Just walking is not a simple thing,” Marshall told the curator Terrie Sultan.

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