Biting, funny, astonishing, difficult, surprising, erudite and hugely ambitious, Kerry James Marshall’s The Histories is the largest show of the black American’s work ever held in Europe. Its effects are cumulative. The Histories charts the 69-year-old painter’s intellectual as well as practical development, his themes, his switches of media and of focus and attention. Everything is here for a reason.
How engaging Marshall’s art is, from the first. He takes us from the bar to the bedroom, to the Middle Passage, from the studio to the academy, from the beauty parlour to the dancehall. He paints scenes of abduction and enslavement in which both victims and perpetrators are African and of a black cop sitting on the hood of his squad car – I love the jagged stylised flare of the streetlights in the background. Marshall knows that everything is contended and complex and that there are no innocent images. Pustules of paint, like litter between the blocks, decorate the spaces between the housing projects, like flowers blooming in a riot. On an idyllic day in the park, black folks picnic, practise a golf swing, play croquet, water-ski on the lake and listen to the Temptations, the lyrics floating up like ticker tape from radios on a sunny afternoon. It is an absurd, impossible image. The humour in Marshall’s art is not to be underestimated. In a series devoted to the Middle Passage a Baptist flounders. There are water slides and swimming pools, ocean liners and toy boats and a woman about to dive from a board. The water is filled with drowned maps of Africa and carefully rendered fish, and there’s an exhortation to plunge.
