Published as a continuance of Kerry James Marshall’s solo exhibition of the same name at David Zwirner London in 2018, History of Painting is a newly published book featuring 35 of the works from the show. The hugely influential American artist examines how the medium of painting has engaged with race and gender for six centuries. In doing so, Marshall addresses the absence of black bodies in the Western canon of figurative art and goes about realising his own “counter archive” that paints his people into his own irrefutably bold and beautiful narratives.

Marshall’s paintings are astutely elucidated in two texts specially commissioned for this book, one written by author, essayist, photographer and curator Teju Cole and the other by eminent art critic Hal Foster.

In Cole’s essay, ‘Shadow Cabinet’, he discusses the ideas of “shadow and substance” and how Marshall wants to “address absence with a capital A”. The artist does this by ensuring that “blackness is non-negotiable” in his paintings, both physically dominating the canvas, and spiritually exuding from his confident likenesses.

Foster’s essay, ‘Underpainting, A Real Allegory’, goes on to situate Marshall’s work within the context of art history’s greats. One of the points he makes is that many before him, including Degas, Manet and Picasso, disrupted high art by introducing “new content into old forms”, they still remained within its fold. But it is different with Marshall: “On the one hand, his black subjects are deep inside American culture, central to many of its greatest inventions; on the other, even as he participates in the grand tradition of painting, he registers the difficulty of doing so for a black artist.”

Read more about and purchase Kerry James Marshall: History of Painting here

Published on 11/09/2019