kerry james marshall better homes better gardens 1994

JPEG - 435.9 kb — School of Beauty, School of Culture, 2012

Sean Pathasema / © Kerry James Marshall

The artist relates to tradition with good manners, theft, emulation, envy, evasion, resentment, anxiety, competitive spirit and feigned or, rarely, honest contempt. This uneasy relationship is exacerbated in the Americas, where artists are unsure if they are starting afresh in a violent Eden or are just yokels banished from the metropolis. But for African-descended artists there, the link to artistic tradition takes a harsher twist: of what value are the stories and images of this civilisation that brutalised ancestors, and often contemporaries? What is the cultural past of metropolitan Europe: a treasure horde, a toxic waste dump or a private club too boring to join? Are Florence, Paris and New York even the right places to look for a usable past?

Maya Angelou wrote about falling in love with Shakespeare, and used to recite Sonnet 29 ('When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes') before telling her audience 'Shakespeare must be a black girl'. Toni Morrison made it clear 'Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio', challenging the Russian aristocrat's entitlement to universality while her own black milieu was dismissed as parochial.

JPEG - 349.7 kb — Bang!, 1994

© Kerry James Marshall

There is another answer to this question of influence, in Kerry James Marshall's painting: abstract, figurative, African American and European, contemporary and cinquecento, folk and highly trained. An artist of extraordinary talent, ambition and intellect, his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum's Breuer Building has been New York's great show of the season.

The colour line in colour and line

Marshall has worked in many media — including photograph, comic book and woodcut — but this show is all about painting. Consider his 1992 canvas Voyager, painted in acrylic for a smooth flat surface, with just enough modelling on the figures to give them a little depth. A ship, The Wanderer, is headed right for the viewer, a bowsprit maiden looking ahead, her male counterpart obscured by a sail with an Afro-Cuban nsibidi (1) glyph, all on stylised waves of unfussy brushstrokes atop a bleached skull. The Wanderer was built as a yacht but converted to a slave ship and brought back its last cargo to Savannah in 1858, long after the US slave trade had been outlawed, though the state never managed to convict the boat's owners. The sky is collaged with diagrams of a shotgun shack (the quarters of the poor) and a birth canal. Despite its many documentary elements, the canvas exudes mystery.

Marshall's life voyage is a microcosm of black American social history. He was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama — which, in the civil rights movement, was consecrated by the terror bombing that killed four girls at church in 1963 — and with his family moved to Los Angeles just in time for the Watts riots of 1965. They were part of the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of black southerners to industrial cities in the north and west, as captured by modernist painter Jacob Lawrence. Marshall was awarded a scholarship for summer study at Los Angeles's Otis Institute of Art when he was 15, and has dedicated himself to art ever since. He has lived and taught in Chicago for 25 years, with residencies from Umbria to Maine.

JPEG - 521.1 kb — Better Homes, Better Gardens, 1994

Denver Art Museum / © Kerry James Marshall

Wherever he resides, Marshall gives the impression of feeling most at home in a museum. 'I never get tired of going to the Met, to MOMA, and to be a part of that magnificent history has always been my dream,' he told the press at the opening of his retrospective. His canvasses are soaked with art-historical references, from Gulf Stream, an idyllic retort to Winslow Homer's canvas of imminent shipwreck, to De Style, a barbershop interior named with a wink to Mondrian's abstractionism. The references carry meaning: in School of Beauty, School of Culture, a tableau of a hairdressing salon, the image of a blonde Disney princess lies slanted in the floorboards, the beauty myth of the dominant culture haunting the scene like the anamorphic skull in Holbein's The Ambassadors.

Most of Marshall's works partake of storia, narratives from scripture, history or mythology, which Renaissance theorist Giorgio Vasari prescribed as essential to painting. As Marshall brings a new social history to canvas, he overturns old stories and genres with astonishing results. In Vignette, a naked man and woman of African descent run beside a grassy field. An expulsion from Eden? Pursued by slavers in West Africa — or North Carolina? There is what looks like a sidewalk jutting up in the foreground, making us question whether this scene is set in the traumatic past or a dystopian present, and whether the field is pasture or an overgrown vacant lot.

JPEG - 463.2 kb — Vignette, 2003

K J Marshall photo / © Kerry James Marshall

Social resonance is unavoidable in Marshall's works, communicated as much through symbolic form as through content and subject matter. Marshall's most important colour choice is his signature shade of black: a blend of carbon black, mars black and bone black, with touches of cobalt blue, yellow ochre and phthalo turquoise. This organic darkness is a realistic representation of skin tone, yet more powerfully comes to represent blackness itself, just as periwinkle blue signifies divinity in Mughal miniatures. Marshall takes on the problem of the colour line, but always through dedication to colour and line.

He is a traditional painter who has been around. If much of 20th-century art has been a race away from representation, then Marshall, on his return journey to figurative painting, has brought back many tactics from abstractionist schools. Black Painting retools the mid-century monochromes of Ad Reinhardt to depict Black Panther Fred Hampton's bedroom the night in 1969 that Chicago police and FBI agents broke into his apartment and shot him dead.

JPEG - 125.2 kb — Kerry James Marshall

Metropolitan Museum Of Art

Marshall's painterly prowess is on display in his large pastoral canvases set in public housing estates, where so many black migrants wound up after their journey from the South. In Better Homes, Better Gardens, lilies against a brick wall are Abstract Expressionist gorgeousness, spray-can graffiti'ed urban blight and flowers of mourning. These remarkable works take the outdoor frolics of fêtes champêtres — a major genre from Titian to Fragonard and Manet — and infuse it with a different social history of flight from the Jim Crow south to upward mobility and middle-class wages and housing in the never particularly welcoming north and west. In Past Times, black picnickers disport before an idyllic lake with a water skier, yet the scene is still and melancholy, with housing block towers over the horizon. In the US, public housing units are associated with working-class African American life, and the national consensus now is that this housing is a social blight.

A few architecture critics have blamed the problems of underfunded and under-invested social housing on modernist architecture, with St Louis's Pruitt-Igoe tower complex — built in the 1950s to designs by I M Pei and demolished by 1976 — as the archetype (2) of modernist, social-democratic hubris. (That similar towers flourish all over the nation when maintained by middle- and upper-class residents, usually white, is ignored.) Marshall's ambitious canvases on this subject are a new urbanised pastoral, a meditation of ambivalence, disappointment, but also happy memories of this unfulfilled invitation to middle-class life.

Crisis of representation

Given the stereotypes, caricatures, and mediatised personae, who can see black America clearly? Majorities overstate, in panic, the size of minorities in their midst. According to a Gallup study in 2000, white Americans estimated the black population at 30%, while the real figure was 13%; there are similar overestimates of the Muslim population in France.

Idealised representations in art and politics have their limits. Barack Obama's presidency did not usher in a post-racial age of harmony and equality; the economic recovery since the 2008-9 financial crisis has largely bypassed black America, with middle-income households hit much harder than their white counterparts, who tend to have more wealth outside home ownership.

Nevertheless, Obama's presidential terms might soon seem a golden age of tolerance, dignity and social harmony. Donald Trump's speeches and election debates gleefully described black America as a wasteland with 'gangs roaming in the streets' and shocked many for its bigotry couched as concern: 'African Americans and Hispanics are living in hell. You walk down the street and you get shot' (3). These visions of black America are taken as the truth by many white Americans whose daily lives rarely cross other ethnicities in a country that still identifies as 70% white.

I asked Marshall at the opening what he thought of Trump's stereotypes. He replied: 'This is what most people tend to elevate as the dominant narrative of black people in the United States. It's an integral part of the history, you can't deny it, but what I try to demonstrate in my work is that there's so much more than that.' Marshall captures the decorum and everyday dignity of black life, but no one could accuse him of sugar coating it. A few of his heroic-scale canvases meditate on violence in black America inflicted from within, or by, the state. Bang! evokes the fireworks of the 4th of July, independence day in a country that has denied freedom and autonomy to so many non-whites. The Lost Boys is a sober hallucination of children cut down by gunfire.

JPEG - 473.7 kb — Untitled, 2009

© Kerry James Marshall

How much to accentuate the negative is a critical question for black artists, given the racist imagery in circulation. Other black American painters like Ellen Gallagher and Kara Walker re-appropriate racist imagery and give it grotesque twists to tame and neutralise it. Some of Marshall's earlier work is in this vein, with the urban and urbane Marshall putting art-school spin on naïf outsider styles. As Marshall notes in a catalogue essay, for much of the 20th century, the art world showered more attention on black folk artists like Horace Pippin than on cultivated black painters with MFA degrees, less easily fitted into the noble savage mould. Some of Marshall's earlier work traffics in deliberately faux-folksy simplicity: his Invisible Man portrait (named for Ralph Ellison's novel of black anomie) is an effort to find a niche in an art world that has often had difficulty seeing black artists.

"Trump's stereotypes are an integral part of the history, you can't deny it, but what I try to demonstrate in my work is that there there's so much more than that"

Since the early 1990s, Marshall has matured confidently into a virtuosic painter's painter. 'I gave up on the idea of making Art a long time ago because I wanted to know how to make paintings,' he wrote in 2000 (4). He is the friend of defenders of a traditional studio education in the visual arts that values life drawing over noisy self-expression: 'I've found no evidence in history that having a rigorous academic training ever prevented an artist from developing an identity or generating new approaches.'

JPEG - 333.5 kb — Voyager, 1992

© Kerry James Marshall

What this means for his human figures is an Apollonian serenity and equipoise, on fullest display in his portraits of painters. None is Marshall, but all are — his art-ancestor Scipio Moorhead, a black painter of colonial-era Boston known through the work of black poet Phyllis Wheatley, and the Untitled image of an elaborately coiffed female painter holding her palette, her canvas barely started behind her. Both look at the viewer with poise and assurance, masters of their canvases.

And why shouldn't they? Marshall's art is the fruition of learning, discipline and intellect at a time when all of those values are under unexpected stress in a nation that is suddenly difficult to recognise, from within as from without. Amid so much new uncertainty in social norms and public aesthetics, one thing is clear: painting will not be the same after Kerry James Marshall.