Kerry James Marshall, The HIstories @ The Royal Academy

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, at the Royal Academy in London opens with some of Marshall's most brilliant pieces, summarising and portending the treasures to come in the exhibition. Included in the first room are paintings about painting: models, artists, studios, museums, students, visitors. All of the stages of production, exhibition and reception of painting are on display in this impressive introduction to his career. Ultimately, his oeuvre, in one way or another, is dedicated to the practice of representation in painting and what it means in the world, how painting has been commodified, or not, throughout history. Within this frame is another concern that runs deep into the oeuvre: blackness. How black people perform identity, are represented, seen, received and commodified, in art and in life. He asks what it means to be black, what it means to be seen as black. Marshall's concerns are sweeping and profound, ricocheting well beyond what lies within each painting's frame.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (studio), 2014

So many of Marshall's paintings are about looking; who looks, who is looked at, how we look, and most importantly, changing the perspectives and angles from which we look. From the opening of the exhibition, in works grouped together for their representation of the art world—models, studios, museums, students of art—paintings are filled with reflections, mirrors, and the performance of the one in the image. In a painting such as Untitled (Studio), 2014, the artist poses the head of her model before a spotlight, as if it is a photograph. The painting is already started on the left of Marhall's canvas, though it could be a different painting. A dog looks on, a nude model in the background appears to watch as does a man dressing behind a sheet that is both the red background in Marshall's painting and a screen for the man. There is so much going on in this painting, all of the layers skewed by the angle from which the viewer of Marshall's painting is anticipated. 

Kerry James Marshall, School of Beauty/School of Culture, 2012

In a later room, paintings set in a beauty school find related performances in mirrors and narratives of being looked at. As spectators, we are again placed at a very strange perspective, looking up as if watching a theatrical performance. The head of a blond white woman is shown in the foreground, skewed, elongated, compressed, in an obvious echo of the skull in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533). Rather than a reminder of the transience of life as is Holbein's skull, Marshall here seems to remind his viewer of the fabrication of the image of women. Where we stand in relationship to the image will depend on whether or not we see the entire woman's head. As with Holbein's painting, the out of place head is only fully visible from certain angles. As such, the curious motif is surely commenting on perspective and the importance of where we stand and how that takes on a larger thematic meaning. How we see women, depends on where we stand. In a twin work De Style (1993) [drawing on Manet's Bar at the Folies Bergères], men in a barber shop perform as if for a camera. Again through the use of mirrors, we see both opposite walls and the men having their hair done. Thus, Marshall draws on the history of art to converse on manufacturing an image, the importance of being seen in a particular way, and the distortions we bring to images. In addition, both of these works are particularly about creating a black identity, being seen as black, and being consumed by a viewer. That said, for Marshall all of the actors in his paintings are black, and therefore, the layers of representation and meaning are both racialised, and without borders.

Kerry James Marshall, Invisible Man, 1986

In a series of works that draws on literature rather than painting, Marshall cleverly paints invisible men. The faces and bodies fade into the black of the background, with only eyes and teeth canb be seen when standing at a distance. In these paintings he draws again on the racial stereotypes of how black men are seen (and consumed) by a white culture. For example, The Wonderful One, 1986 references the singing and dancing minstrel. What's interesting is that all of Marshall's figures are painted black, not brown, and black itself is rich and textured. Even when the works are not specifically about invisible men, there is always a facelessness to his figures because of their blackness. In a painting such as Vignette, 2003, a boy and girl are running through a love fantasy. The figures are silhouettes that have lost their corporeality to the fantasy of their love story, signified by butterflies and colourful birds all around them. This facelessness is also surely a comment on our blindness to them as people. White faces would have identities where black do not: black people are invisible in a particular way, and Marshall draws on this to show us that their skin colour (black) makes them less than human, diminished in the eyes of the beholder. 

Kerry James Marshall, Vignette, 2003

There is so much more to say about this exhibition, but people will need to go and see the brilliance of Marshall's paintings—both in their intellectual engagement and sparkling colour, even when the paintings are black—for themselves. The reworking of art history is everywhere, both in the representation and absence of black people. And always, Marshall does multiple things at once. To give a last example, in Gulf Stream (2003), he references Winslow Homer's famous painting and by painting gold netting around the frame, creates a keep sake, a lovely postcard of the charmed life of black people on the boat. He both confronts Homer's representation and the slave trade in a cheeky revision of the historical narrative. 

Kerry James Marshall, Gulf Stream, 2003

I came away convinced that Kerry James Marshall is the Manet of our time. Like Manet, he is a painter who is deeply concerned with the social issues of his time, motivated more than ever to shift painting beyond its familiar limits, while all the time paying homage to those limits as what enable his brilliance. In addition, like Manet, Marshall paints in a realist style that is not quite realist, altering the perspective through which we look at and see the world, drawing our attention to our blind spots.This might be the best exhibition of 2025, and as it makes its way to the Kunsthaus Zurich in 2026 and Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris in 2027, my hope is that not only more and more people will see the works, but that Marshall's work continues to receive the recognition and applause that it so richly deserves. 

The House on Utopia Parkway, Joseph Cornell's Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson

View of exhibition from opposite side of rue de Castiglione

Gagosian has outdone itself, yet again, with an exquisite exhibition in its rue de Castiglione window. Filmmaker Wes Anderson has recreated Joseph Cornell's studio in which he lived and worked until his death in 1972. The studio was in the basement of his mother's house in Queens where he lived. Cornell was known in his neighborhood as the solitary figure walking the streets of Queens and sifting through odds and ends in flea markets and antique shops. He was obsessive, and meticulous, a man who created beautiful worlds that meant everything to him. He may have been a recluse and somewhat of an oddball, but as a collector, an archivist of memories and emotions, and creator of curious worlds inside boxes, his work also enjoyed an enormous influence on mid-century American art. 

Installation View Gagosian Gallery, rue de Castiglione

Anderson's installation—done together with some of his longtime collaborators—is not the studio itself, rebuilt and transposed to Paris, but a recreation. Some of Cornell's possessions are too fragile to move, and others not available, so Anderson remade these objects as close to the original as possible. That said, a number of Cornell's most well known boxes, themselves now archival objects, are in the display. I must say, knowing the sheer amount of junk that Cornell kept in the basement, I was expecting his studio to be messier, more like Francis Bacon's than Cezanne's orderly arrangement of objects. But, of course, Cornell's studio as represented in this exhibition, was scrupulous, with every object in a box, labelled, ordered, neatly stored and within easy access. In addition, Cornell's tools and materials—glues, brushes, pliers, and metal wash basins—looked as though they were waiting to be used. 

Joseph Cornell, Rose Hobart, 1936

For me and my students, Cornell is known for his found footage film, Rose Hobart (1936) one of the earliest examples of surrealist collage on film. Cornell took images of the actor Rose Hobart from a B-movie adventure, and re-edited them into a hommage to the actor, replaced the soundtrack with Brazilian samba, slowed it down, and projected his 19 minute film through a blue filter. The film says everything about the eccentric Cornell who was fascinated from a distance with the exoticism of film, the eroticism of the star, and his drive to creatively reconceive the world as the rest of us saw it.

Installation view with reflection of Gucci sign

The most glorious thing about this exhibition was how the installation became a repetition of Cornell's boxes. Viewers peered in through the gallery windows at all the objects, drawings, and everything in its place in the same way that we would before his boxes. Along with some of Cornell's most well-known boxes—Lauren Bacall and the medicine cabinet—there were film cans, photographs, drawings, boxes waiting to be filled, pictures from books, books with the pictures town out, pieces of wood, iron, biscuit tins, scrap books, little bottles, jars, baskets—all the bits and pieces that would eventually make their way into Cornell's boxes. As I peered through the windows of the gallery on a bitterly cold January 2, hoards of tourists walked past, their legs and feet reflected in the window together with the exquisite tiles of the arcade. Further complicating the view into Cornell's studio is the reflection of the Gucci hoarding on the building construction on the opposite side of the street. This Gucci kind of consumerism would be the antithesis of everything Cornell valued: his love of things thrown away, deemed to be of no value to anyone else, but of great value to him. The forgotten, that which has been left behind by capitalism and the drive to entertain - like the genre actor Rose Hobart—was his treasure trove. 

Installation view @ Gagosian Gallery

Cornell never left America, in fact, he rarely ventured far from New York. But, he was the sort of person who had a voracious appetite for the world, for things, for adventure. National Geographic magazines, Baedekers, well-read and loved books, films watched, these were the source of Cornell's fascination for the world. He knew Paris from the movies, fellow artists, and from encyclopaedias, books, and magazines that he found in junk sales, so I am sure, he would have been tickled to see his work on display through a prominent city window. That said, I can't imagine that he would have felt comfortable on rue de Castiglione, just up from the Place Vendôme with Napoleon looking down on him. What Cornell would have thought aside, well done Wes Anderson and Gagosian, for inviting us to peek into the past, so lovingly recreated, as Cornell did his boxes, amid the freneticism of contemporary Paris.