An affable and portly 18th-century gentleman in a fine red waistcoat, his cheeks flushed with mirth and eyes registering a delicate intelligence, sits comfortably for his portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. All is as it should be, apart from one small detail: the sitter is black.
This familiar portrait is placed as a gentle entrée to the Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts. Arranged in three sections – Sites of Power, Beauty and Difference, Crossing Waters – the RA’s exhibition attempts to reflect how “art has collided with [the British] empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture”. Depicting Charles Ignatius Sancho, the portrait was completed in 1768, the year the Royal Academy was founded. The portrayal of this renowned “African Man of Letters” is atypically sympathetic for its time. He is not racialised: he is an individual whose character is sensitively captured.
Historically, black people were not part of the establishment. They would definitely not have been invited to join the kind of gentlemanly cognoscenti depicted in Frederick Elwell’s The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee (1938). The painting, showing a group of cigar-smoking elderly white men in three-piece suits at a silver-service dinner, is emblematic of the exhibition’s intentions to critique the exclusive and impenetrable RA, whose members’ consciences were pricked in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter in 2021.
With 100 works, including pieces from past and present Royal Academicians, the institution announces its grand ambition in the courtyard with Tavares Strachan’s dominating sculpture The First Supper (Galaxy Black), inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Mirroring Elwell’s painting of the RA’s 1930s selection committee, here the life-size dinner guests are significant figures from black history, with Haile Selassie as the Christ-like figure surrounded by proxy apostles including Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey and Mary Seacole. Unfortunately the scale of the sculpture cannot disguise its lack of nuance. Spanning more than 30ft in bronze, black patina and gold leaf, decorated in a similar manner to the RA’s ornate entrance gates, it feels garish; an unsettling, overwrought “takeover” of the space in front of the permanent statue of RA founder Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Barbara Walker is more successful in redressing the marginalisation of black subjects with Vanishing Point 18 (Titian). This reworking of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, in graphite on embossed paper, is a perforated, stripped-down composition emphasising the solitary black figure. Walker’s approach is to make all viewers aware of such peripheral subjects – who are keenly noticed by people of colour when they find themselves in front of racialised works of the western canon.
For too long, the RA has advanced a version of art history that has sidelined people of the global majority, their position akin to black servants, portrayed almost as pets on the fringes of 18th- and 19th-century portraits of aristocratic European families.
The historical tension between enslaver and enslaved is to be expected in Entangled Pasts. But there’s another surprising tension in its curation, with the RA’s determination to include, alongside practising black British artists, high-profile African American counterparts, such as Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley. The latter’s painting of a contemporary young African American, inspired by Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Captain Arthur Blake, seems shoe-horned into the exhibition. Walker’s etching, called no world, from the series An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters, is a better fit. It speaks poignantly to the theme of crossing waters: giant black hands hold up or capsize a slave ship, while a pregnant enslaved woman is thrown overboard into a watery grave – her unborn child may yet join myriad others in building a new subterranean world.
The perils of the Middle Passage are also echoed in Hew Locke’s Armada, a ghostly flotilla of battered model boats and ships, suspended from the ceiling; and in John Akomfrah’s terrifying yet beguiling Vertigo Sea, a triptych installation of film archive and new footage, with the lively animation of ocean life contrasted with mournful images of the dead lost at sea.
In exhibiting the work of Royal Academicians such as Akomfrah and Locke, as well as Yinka Shonibare, Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce, the RA has taken a small step, but it risks nothing to its conservative reputation. Despite the shocking subject matter, the show ultimately appears to be tame in reproducing familiar work such as Isaac Julien’s reflections on Frederick Douglass, Lessons of the Hour, which was exhibited at Tate Britain last year. Perhaps a more surprising and impactful note would have been struck by spreading the curatorial love and inviting younger, less established artists of colour, even if they’d baulked at revisiting a subject many of them feel is well-trodden.
The RA’s declared aim is for this large-scale exhibition to become a barometer “of public discourse and debate”, redressing “some of the legacies of colonialism”. If that were even possible, then the institution – which struggles to attract non-white visitors – should waive the entrance fee to Entangled Pasts for formerly colonised people and their descendants. If anyone were to object to this, they might be reminded of the British Caribbean family who hurried past the ticket office at Penrhyn Castle in Wales, built for George Hay Dawkins Pennant, whose wealth was generated by slavery. Chased and upbraided by the usher because they hadn’t bought a ticket, the family answered: “We paid before!”
• This article was amended on 2 February 2024. An earlier version said that Kehinde Wiley’s painting of a contemporary young African American was inspired by Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Samuel Johnson, whereas it was inspired in part by Reynolds’ of Captain Arthur Blake. The related image has been changed.
• At the Royal Academy, London, 3 February-28 April.
