“I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea,” wrote the cultural critic Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born descendant of enslaved Africans. But today he’d have trouble convincing those who still couch Britain’s imperial past in terms of its civilising mission that a refreshing cuppa is an act of complicity in the Atlantic slave trade.
Research increasingly reveals, however, the extent to which Britain’s wealth was predicated on the centuries-old rapacious plunder of millions of African people. It was not confined to bank accounts and bequests. There are charged traces of slavery’s legacy throughout the land, in fine art and botanical gardens, and in stately homes and museums, such as Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam.
The Black Atlantic exhibition is not an attempt, argue the curators Jake Subryan Richards and Victoria Avery, to detoxify the art and artefacts of slavery. Rather it intends to frame the discussion of this aspect of British history in a way that invites reflection. “We all tend to be lazy lookers,” says Avery. So, she says, Black Atlantic is concerned with “letting go of entrenched ideas” and “unlearning”, rather than defaulting to faux anti-woke outrage. “The exhibition isn’t one side in a culture war,” adds Richards. “It’s the start of a conversation.”
A highlight of the 120 exhibits is the 16th-century painting by Jan Mostaert, thought to be the earliest portrait of a black person in European art. Its personification of dignity also echoes through the modern pieces by artists such as Jacqueline Bishop and Barbara Walker, who repurpose the constituent parts of historical works where black figures are dehumanised.
Bishop’s History at the Dinner Table, an 18-plate dinner service, is a “reinterpretation of historic porcelain collections”, explains Avery. Drawing on botanical illustrations as well as “violently pornographic” 18th-century images of enslaved women being abused, Bishop depicts the women on plates “clothed with flora, restoring their dignity”. In Vanishing Point 29 (Duyster), Walker recreates a 17th-century portrait of a wealthy white family but makes the unknown black attendant the focus.
Also featured are two contrasting, elegant 18th-century portraits, Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit and Portrait of The Hon Richard FitzWilliam (the museum’s founder). The paintings are “effectively in dialogue”, says Avery. “We know the provenance, the whole deal” about the Richard FitzWilliam portrait but “nothing about the other sitter … We open with this fundamental question [about privilege]: who gets remembered and why?” Richards adds a fascinating detail about Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit, which was originally called Portrait of an African until curators in Exeter (from where the portrait is loaned) deleted African, “because quite reasonably those curators didn’t know for sure where this man was born, or how he might have identified himself”.
Richards’s explanation inadvertently draws attention to the labelling in the current exhibition, namely the problematic decision to capitalise “black” in the captions and throughout the catalogue. Critics would argue that Black Atlantic’s critique of the racial taxonomy that underpinned the slave trade is not served by the exhibition’s reduction of enslaved Africans and their descendants as “Black”. Richards argues the decision to capitalise draws “attention to the fact that enslaved and free people who fought against slavery saw ‘Blackness’ as a source of power and strength and pride”.
The decision distracts from an otherwise innovative exhibition that is also keen to reflect how racial enslavement became normalised. Examples are myriad but their relative isolation in Black Atlantic more clearly reveals paintings such as Frans Post’s bucolic A Sugar Mill … as knowingly fictionalising plantations as idyllic or harmonious. “We didn’t want to whitewash the traumatic histories of slavery,” says Avery. “But nor did we want a lot of images of shackles or examples of violence to the enslaved.”
Finally Black Atlantic comes full circle from the anonymous red-suited man to end with Ifa, Alexis Peskine’s self portrait, made with nails, pigment, gold leaf, coffee and earth on lumber wood core; a self-actualising work that evokes the precolonial divination system of Yoruba ancestral wisdom. Ifa is emblematic of a bold show that feels like a landmark in revealing art as a carrier of suffering but also as an agent of activism and instrument of repair.
‘It’s the start of a conversation’: five highlights from Black Atlantic
Vanishing Point 29 (Duyster) by Barbara Walker, 2021 (main image, above)
“I use erasure as a metaphor for how [black people] are overlooked, ignored and even dehumanised by society,” says Walker. “In previous works you see me wash away, cut out, isolate or diminish certain aspects of an image and bring others to the forefront. In the Vanishing Point drawings, embossing achieves that erasure.”
Breadfruit Tree by John Tyley, 1793
“Unlike most European botanical artists, John Tyley, a man of colour from Antigua, remarkably includes a figure, an enslaved man, enjoying a precious moment of rest,” remark curators Jake Subryan Richards and Victoria Avery in the show’s catalogue.
Portrait of a Man in a Red Suit, Jan Mostaert, c.1525–30
“Considering his costume, sword and badge of pilgrimage, this man was probably an important person in Flemish courtly circles,” says Avery. “It’s poignant and tragic that after this point we have so few European images of black people that are not demeaning, racialised stereotypes.”
Ifá by Alexis Peskine, 2020
“I’ve always been frustrated with the idea of race,” says Peskine. “The fact that we don’t address it or do so in a hypocritical way. [As] an artist, I looked around but no one looked like me. I used to ask myself if I was an exception or was this a white vocation?”
Sasa Boa by Osei Bonsu, 1935
“The vampire-like sasabonsam, known as a sasa boa, speaks to the question of power at the heart of enslavement and colonialism,” says Richards. “The creature represents the slavers who make people disappear; they are eaten into the slave trade.”
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance is at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 8 September 2023 to 7 January 2024.
