History weighs on Kerry James Marshall, though not all that heavily. When he talks about the hefty subjects of his art – from slavery to civil rights – he does so with a disarming, disquieting lightness. Maybe that’s because at almost 70 years old, and at the peak of his popularity, he’s seen it all.
Marshall grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, just a few blocks away from where the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, a white supremacist attack that killed four young black girls, took place in 1963. When his family moved to Los Angeles, they ended up right in the middle of the 1965 Watts riots, a six-day uprising fuelled by growing racial tension in the poorest part of the city.
I set my own goals. They don’t tell me what I’m supposed to like and not like
All of this has undoubtedly fed into his journey to becoming arguably the US’s greatest living painter. Today, seated in the galleries of the Royal Academy in London, where his jaw-dropping, large-scale, colourful paintings are going on display for a major show, he reels off a list of traumatic, shocking events from his youth. Beatings, murders, injuries, robberies, “and that’s not even half of it,” he says with a smile, chuckling.
“I came this way against the odds, given the time that I entered art school and the way people told you that you’re not supposed to do this kind of stuff,” he says. “That had no effect on my ambition, because I set my own goals. They don’t tell me what I’m supposed to like and what I’m not supposed to like. I don’t accept that.”
Picnic time … Untitled (Blanket Couple), 2014. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London/© Kerry James Marshall
From the start, Marshall’s vision has been knowingly defiant. The cultural environment he emerged into after graduating from art school in the late 1970s was one heading full bore into conceptualism, and still trying to deal with the afterglow of abstraction, pop and postmodernism. He ignored all of that, and chose instead a notably classical take on figuration. Yet what he did was startlingly modern: he used the language of classicism to elevate ordinary, everyday and – crucially – black subject matter to the level of Titian, David or Velázquez.
Think of the giant paintings that line the walls of the world’s great art museums: Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents. Big, important paintings on big, important themes. And then look at Marshall’s 1993 masterpiece De Style. It’s on the same enormous scale, and given the same prominence and heft, but this isn’t a scene from the Bible, or a pivotal moment in history. It’s a barbershop. It’s someone getting their hair cut while a couple of customers wait their turn. It’s a snapshot of everyday black life, heightened and celebrated.
Marshall’s work sets out to prove that scenes of black life “can be as grand and spectacular” as anything from the history of art. “The significance in part was that you couldn’t walk by that thing and say you didn’t see it. You couldn’t pretend you didn’t notice it. It was there, and it was there in a big way.”
De Style became his first painting to be bought by a museum when it was purchased by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It’s astonishing, saturated with ultra-intense colour, bright reds, vivid yellows and deep, mesmerising blacks. It’s clever and assured, joyful and celebratory. And it cemented Marshall’s place at the forefront of American painting.
Yet he seems wary of embracing the outwardly political nature of his painting. “I’m not making pictures because I want to be a ‘political artist’,” he says. “I’m making pictures because I like what pictures do. I like seeing them. I like making them.”
His priority, he says, is people, especially the ones that inhabit his canvases. “There’s nothing more interesting than other human beings,” he says. “There’s no set of patterns, no combinations of colours, no textures. Human beings are more interesting to other human beings than anything else you can find and encounter on the planet. And making pictures of human beings still remains as fascinating an enterprise as anything you could do.”
Complex reality … Abduction of Olaudah and His Sister, 2023. Photograph: © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy David Zwirner, London. Photo: Kerry McFate
That attitude feels a little hard to square with the subject matter as you walk through the Royal Academy show, his biggest ever in Europe. Early works deal with the absence of black figures from art history; other paintings look at the civil rights and black power movements. A central gallery is dedicated to images of the Middle Passage, the journey that took enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the US. These are heavy, powerful topics, and painting them in his grand, colourful, precise style feels like a political move.
“I’m not interested in how people interpret the work, because I’m not providing people with an open-ended canvas in which they can say anything they want to say,” says Marshall. “I’m very particular about the things I want them to know about the particular image I’m making. These are very straightforward. These aren’t difficult things to interpret. Being obscure is not an objective that makes much sense to me.”
And there’s the point. You don’t really need to talk about political motive or narrative intention when you see a work like his portrait of rebel slave Nat Turner brandishing a bloodied axe, his master’s severed head left rolling on the bed in the background. It is, indeed, very straightforward.
Which makes his new series, painted just in time for this show, all the more unsettling. The works see Marshall tackle the “sensitive” and “polemical” (the Royal Academy’s words) history of black involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. The opening work depicts two African children being abducted from their homes by black figures, ready to be shipped across the ocean. It’s a bright, vibrant, verdant but deeply shocking painting, based on the story of Olaudah Equiano, an 18th-century writer who was abducted from Nigeria as a child before buying his freedom and settling in London.
“Olaudah had been passed on through a network of people,” says Marshall. “He got exchanged over four or five times. He didn’t see a white man until he got on the boat. That’s the slave trade too. It’s not just the boats. It’s not just the trip across the Atlantic. It’s everyday people who wanted some value from whatever was transpiring during the slave trade, people who participated as freelancers to get what they could. They didn’t care any more about abducting children than anybody else.”
So why does he think people choose to ignore these sorts of stories?
“Because they don’t fit the narrative of white people evil, black people good. It doesn’t fit.”
The reality is more complex?
“It’s always more complex than that. Always.”
So what, I wonder, does painting it achieve?
“It makes it available,” he says. “Pictures can be a catalyst for investigating or taking a look at areas of history that people tend to not find their way to.”
This is what I always wanted – to be counted among the artists I admired
On a basic level, these works are Marshall fighting for nuance in a society that he sees growing more divided by the day, pushing viewers to take responsibility and own their circumstances. “Human beings are much more complicated than any of us would like to recognise,” he says. “It’s easier to create boogeymen and scapegoats. And it’s also easy not to take responsibility for being a part of any of that. It’s always somebody else. I think this is critical: in all of the works I do, black people have agency.”
It’s agency that got him where he is today. Before we part, I ask him if being here at the Royal Academy makes him feel as if he’s “made it” as an artist, like he’s written himself properly into the art history he has loved for so long. “This is what I always wanted,” he says. “I always wanted to be counted among the artists that I admired.”
And like he said, he’s here against the odds, against centuries of societal repression, millennia of conflict. “Violence is at the root” of humanity, he says. “The opportunities to be killed are many and various, and we’re lucky to get to be as old as we get to be sometimes. We’re lucky to be alive.” He laughs his warm laugh. “We’re lucky to be alive.”
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is at the Royal Academy, London, until 18 January