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. 

John Singer Sargent, Éblouir Paris

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X, 1884

As the title of the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay promises, these paintings dazzle. While Sargent's Portrait of Madame X (1884) is on all the publicity material for the exhibition, the woman with the porcelain skin and the risqué dress strap is only one of many treasures in the exhibition. What we see here is an artist immersed in the radical experiments of his time, someone who goes beyond the boundaries of what painting knew in the late nineteenth century as he discovers new ways of depicting modern life. Even though Sargent spent time in Paris, training at the École des Beaux-Arts and showing at the Salon, his work is relatively unknown in Paris and France. He enjoyed receiving portrait commissions from patrons in Europe and acknowledgment at the Salon, but the majority of his paintings are held in American museums and institutions which could explain why they are not so well known here.

John Singer Sargent, The Derelict, 1896

Among the qualities of painting that dazzles the eyes is Sargent's ability to capture an extraordinary, diffused luminosity. The light is so bright in some paintings that it is as if the work sits on a light box. Two paintings in particular struck me as studies of light, Dans le Jardin du Luxembourg (1879) and The Derelict (1896) in which a small boat is engulfed in otherwise gentle waves at dusk. The light from the setting sun, all but disappeared behind a curtain of cloud, looks to light up the ocean, soft and serene. In In the Luxembourg Gardens, the sun is higher, yellower, but the atmosphere is more even. There is an apparent dullness to the day, but on Sargent's canvas, it still radiates luminescence. In both paintings, it is Sargent's handling of white, yellow, and cobalt blue that enables water and sky to shimmer and shine. Sargent is known as a portrait painter, but in the urban paintings when people appear, faces are not important; it's the atmosphere which becomes the real subject matter. 

John Singer Sargent, Dans le jardin du Luxembourg, 1879

It will be noted that, for all its radiance, In The Luxembourg Gardens and other paintings have a blurred vision, as if Sargent is looking through an out of focus camera lens. This is perhaps because he was aware of the growing popularity of photography in his time, or because he intended to emphasize the atmosphere, not the actions in the urban setting. 

John Singer Sargent, Gertrude Vernon,
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1893

In another striking innovation of Sargent's paintings, his brush could be so loose and fast that it's hard to imagine how the resultant sketchiness escaped criticism in his time. Beginning at the Ecole des Beaux Arts where emphasis was placed on the structure and rigorous academic approach to painting, Sargent soon moved to the atelier of Carulos Duran where he did away with academic requirements and loaded a brush with paint to be applied directly to the canvas. There is much to compare to the well-known painters of his day: Whistler's handling of white, Manet's realism, Monet's use of light as subject matter and theme. In addition, the loose, fast energy of impressionist brushstrokes resonate across Sargent's canvas. But, Sargent is unlike all these other artists, working in a style all his own. His portraits, often of women with clear, flawless faces, looking directly at the viewer and surrounded by a sea of brushstrokes are radical in ways that others were yet to discover. In this sense, The Portrait of Madame X is somewhat unusual in Sargent's oeuvre as it has a studied-ness and a build up that other portraits do not. 

John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d'Hiver, 1879-1880

A painting that is both quite different in its subject matter and similar in its fast and fluid brushstrokes, is that of an orchestra rehearsing at the Cirque d'Hiver. Here, it is as if the music carries the painting away, filled with movement and an energy that captures the dynamism of the magic that happens when the orchestra is in full swing in this arena. Sargent paints the orchestra from behind and looking down, primarily because this was the view from where he sat when at the circus. However, once again, it is not the faces that matter, but the swirls and sweeps of the architecture, the swell of the music, the energy of the event. In this, his paintings are impressionist, but because they depict the rhythms of modern urban life, they are also realist. This unconventionality, even among painters who were known for their radicality, is the dazzle of Sargent's paintings shown in this wonderful exhibition.

Stephen Shore, Véhiculaire & Vernaculaire @ Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Stephen Shore, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975

Stephen Shore's current exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier Bresson is well-timed as people like me have America, cars, energy, and their relationship to each other on our minds. It's interesting to look at at Shore's best known photographs fifty years later, knowing what we do now about America, photography, and the car as vehicle of freedom, and independence. In America, the car is the enabler of mobility, not only in the obvious ways, but socially, economically, and today, it has become a political issue. Shore's snapshots and prints are nostalgic, showing an era when things were different. In the 1970s, the car was embraced as the carrier of so much promise and prosperity. 

The big Chevrolets, Dodges, Cadillacs in Shore's Uncommon Places series reminded me of my childhood, watching American cop shows on television. The thrill of watching the yank tanks—as we called them in Australia—ride the bumps and potholes in chase scenes around densely populated cities with their bad suspension was what kept kids like me entertained for hours. Watching the body separate from wheels on their axel was a neverending wow factor. These were the icons of what it meant to be American. Big cars, bad cops, and no following rules on the road. 

Stephen Shore, Meagher County, Montana, August 5, 2020

Once I looked past the nostalgia of my childhood, I recognized the isolation, loneliness and desolation of the worlds in Shore's photographs. Whether or not it is the isolation and emptiness of the American soul, I am not sure, but in this age of unexpected animosity and racial discrimination, it's difficult to look at Shore's photographs and see only perfectly composed vacant lots and empty streets. To a contemporary viewer, these spaces conjure up images of all the violence and injustice that has taken place in such streets over the years. But this is not necessarily the point of Shore's works. Rather, they show how the car has taken over the landscape and urbanscape of America as well as its psyche. 

Stephen Shore, 21st and Spruce Streets, Philadelphia, PA, 1974

This exhibition emphasized Shore's use of moving vehicles to picture the vernacular of American life. Even though these images are taken from moving cars, trains, and more recently, drones, the worlds they represent are static, empty, like ghost towns, perfectly composed nowheres, rarely with anyone in the streets. He often sees the "uncommon places" from unusual angles, making them curious, pushing us to look at everyday worlds we might otherwise not bother to notice. In Ravena, NY for example, we see highways and train lines caving up the face of the American landscape, dominating the environment. We see the land cleared to make way for vehicles, taking pride of place, ignoring needs other than its own.

Stephen Shore, Ravena, NY, 2021

Beyond carparks filled with cars, the photographs show highways, gas stations, advertising signs, landscapes carved up for cars, towns built to accommodate cars, with parking spaces taking up over half the road, highways like rivers coursing across otherwise empty landscapes. Of course, today, we look at the car differently; it is the cause of the destruction of the environment, the problem for the next generation, the making of billionaires from oil money. Today, we are too well aware that greed for oil to drive our cars and fly in planes has led to the destruction of the global south for its natural resources. Shore doesn't really comment on that side of the automobile culture that booms in the postwar years across America. He is more interested in how the car has been given priority in the construction of space, and its consequent isolation of people. Yes, it is possible to travel from coast to coast, but it also brings about the end of conversation, on trains, on sidewalks, on a walk through nature. Nevertheless, it is a testament to the power and longevity of Shore's photographs that they continue to speak to the most pressing concerns of our times.

Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, Colorado

Clyfford Still, PH-623, 1929-30

Visiting the Clyfford Still Museum in downtown Denver, I felt like a pilgrim. It was the highlight of my trip to Colorado, and one of the most memorable experience of my American travels. 95% of Still’s paintings are owned and held at the museum, meaning that the only way to see and understand the work is to journey to Denver. The artist stipulated in his will that the works must stay together, and that they must be located in the American city with the courage (my word) to house the entire collection of something like 800 works. After years of back and forth, Denver became that lucky American city. They contracted a Portland architect firm, built a concrete building to house the paintings, with a light-flooded exhibition space to show them. I recognize that this is abstract painting and is not immediately accessible to a wide ranging public, but the experience of being in the space itself, surrounded by Still’s enormous paintings is ethereal and exhilarating. I suspect that even skeptics of abstract art are transported within these walls.

Clyfford Still,  TO1498, 1953

Even though there is limited exhibition space—with only nine galleries—and we therefore see only a fraction of the holdings, the museum affords a compelling experience of Still’s oeuvre. Like a chronological display of any artist’s work, we get a sense of where he began, what his concerns were, and how the execution of those concerns changed over the course of a lifetime. At the top of the stairs as we enter the first gallery we are met with paintings of the harsh landscape that surrounded him in his younger years. In a painting such as PH-623 from 1929-30 we see the tension between the vertical and the horizontal, the agitation of paint, the struggle ignited between different versions of the same color, the introduction of a color that upsets the otherwise serenity of the space around it. The resulting sense of rupture, an unsettled and sometimes tumultuous emotional state and the feeling of a harsh exterior reality are already dominant on the canvas of his early work.

Clyfford Still, PH-77, 1936

As the display continues throughout the next five decades of Clyfford Still’s production in paint, these characteristics both become more prominent on the canvas and more subtly expressed. Thus, colors erupt out of a completely different color, disturbing them, changing them, transforming them into something they could never imagine being before the process was set in motion. And so we see in a work such as PH-1034 (1973), all the turmoil and agony of red with black at its centre, bleeding into the red around it, making it dark and dirty. But before he reaches these imagescapes of total abstraction, we have to wander through the early work of the 1930s. Grotesque figures with oversized breasts and emaciated bodies, hands and feet like those of monsters, suffering their fate as workers. The vision is depressing and verges on the apocalyptic. Of course, the obvious reference is to photographs of Walker Evans, but Still’s figures show little compassion for these exaggerated human figures.

Clyfford Still, PH-1034, 1973

Then in the 1940s the figures merge with the landscape until bodies and lands become abstract forms in a hostile universe. But we never forget the agony of the 1930s paintings. Throughout the galleries, the deep inner turmoil and painful conflicts remain on the surface of the canvas. Initially, the darkness comes literally, as great swathes of thick, lush black paint with little or no other colors let alone glimpses of canvas dominate the image. At best, lightning bolts of color—white, yellow, red, green—cutting through the surface of paint rather than offering hope on a horizon. When colors other than black fill the space of the image, they are often brooding, reflective, before their form is violently shattered by a line in another color. Critics discuss Still’s paintings as landscapes, but this seems to me to be only useful as something to hold onto, something to stop ourselves falling into the brutality and aggression of these early works. If they are about landscape, the paintings are not literal representations, but more like the feeling aroused by standing in the middle of a vast and brutal expanse of snow, desert, or on an unending plain.

Clyfford Still Museum, Allied Works, Denver

It’s not only the colors that are in struggle on Still’s most incredible canvases, but the multiple techniques for applying paint create tension, to the point of anger, on the surface of the image. Black can be thick and velvety, or it can be thin, like tears and rain, expressing some kind of disturbance or upset that has nothing to do with itself. No color is a single color, and no color is a single texture, a single material. The pigments are delicately applied with a thin brush, dripped, smudged with his hands, built up with a spatula, then diluted. This is an artist who searches throughout his oeuvre for ways to apply paint, to use it, manipulate it to express the most masculine of energies, and emotions. Paint becomes anger articulated out loud, danger, fire, storms and flight from the scene of chaos and confusion.

 

Clyfford Still, PH-960, 1960

As Still grows older, more mature as a painter, probably more tortured and more driven as a man, the amount of paint on the canvas diminishes. It remains very carefully and deliberately applied, but with its growing sparsity, the overall composition becomes increasingly complicated. Each painting is like a world unto itself in which the gamut of emotions is run, from peace and serenity to a raging anger in the agitation of what may be a few strokes of paint to the side or falling off the bottom of the canvas. At a distance, the works can appear pretty and aesthetically pleasing and then when we move up close, they are disturbing and disturbed by the penetration and infiltration of other colors, by the dense texture of a frenzy of reds, for example. Even in the final paintings which his daughter who is the curator for this installation of the work claims he was at peace, we are struck by a collision of color when the whites meet on the canvas, when the ochre form is sliced open by the blue line in a work such as PH-960, 1960.

Clyfford Still, PH-665, 1968

In contradistinction to the man’s name, this is painting that is constantly in motion across fifty years. It is forever going somewhere, but the destination never arrives. As visitors to the museum, we are drawn into the almost frenetic, and at times, pensive search for this something. Each painting is a world unto itself, and as we stand before it, we cannot help but get caught up in its powerful energy, its ups and downs, and the surprising turn of events that unfolds before us, over time. And yet, they are a family of paintings who belong together, make sense together in their own narrative across Still’s lifetime. Like any family, we see them argue with each other, contradict each other, and yet, lay the grounds for the next painting to be born. The museum likes to say in the wall plaques and literature that Still was unique in these heroic abstract narratives of colour. I am not so sure: he may have been isolated from the art world, but there’s a reason Clyfford Still’s painting  sits at the center of what is known as Abstract Expressionism. His paintings depict the emotion of abstraction at its most exquisite, in a body of work that nevertheless speaks at every turn with the masterpieces of Motherwell, Newman, Frankenthaler, Mitchell, and de Kooning.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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Pittsburgh's Perfect for Runners

My first ever visit to Pittsburgh offered insights into an America that I rarely encounter, and yet, one that we are all too aware lurks around every corner. I was in Pittsburgh the week following the senate hearings for the new Supreme Court Justice. And yet, I found people whose lives could not have been less connected to the drama of their politicians in Washington if they had tried. As a gritty, one time thriving industrial center, Pittsburgh is a city in transition, and with that, displays a growing emphasis of the divisions between rich and poor.

Carrie Furnace from the Homestead

I ventured out to Carrie furnaces and what is left of Homestead where the steel strikes took place in 1892. As is often the case with old blast furnaces and steel mills, they were located outside of the city and weren’t easy to get to. The journey to Rankin on buses and walking through the surrounding areas gave me plenty of opportunity to observe the social results of industrial decline. The American economy may be booming, but for many of the people I encountered, there was no sign of prosperity on the horizon. I asked people sitting on their porches with broken glass in the windows and overgrown gardens for directions to the furnace that it turned out was less than a mile away. They had no idea of what I was talking about. Once there, it was wonderful to see the great things that Rivers of Steel are doing with the mines. Their activities and tours tick the obligatory boxes of both reaching out to the community as well as educating visitors on the history of mining and milling. They run art classes using the materials of Pittsburgh industry – keeping the culture and history of industry alive in the region—have open days, stage concerts, talks, and guided tours. But getting there meant confrontation with the heartbreaking reality of America.

 

On the other end of the economic scale, Pittsburgh is still dominated by the Titans of Steel and Industry. There’s no mistaking who built the city: Carnegie, Mellon, Heinz, and families such as Rooney and Frick. Their wealth dominates the very skyline of the city, with their names displayed on the buildings, and when they weren’t, it’s clear their success defines them. The magnificent US Steel Tower in Grant Street with its 840 ft of exposed corten steel made at the Homestead works being a case in point. It stands tall and proud, the icon of Pittsburgh’s success. I understand that the family businesses all adhere to a philanthropic mission, but one can’t help noticing their dramatic contrast with the world surrounding the manufacturing plants.

Warhol - in the space between abstract and figurative

I was disappointed by the Warhol museum, perhaps because I have been spoiled by recent exhibitions at the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. I appreciated the crowds on a Sunday afternoon, telling me that the museum was alive and well. But presumably for the interest of the crowds, the exhibition installation was of a certain genre.  It was possible to appreciate his enormous creativity and his neverending curiosity, always ready to experiment in a new medium, to discover new ways of making his point. One thing that I love most about Warhol is how he was a fine artist – some of his photographs and even the paintings have a passion and ethereality that is otherwise antithetical to his renown as the don of mass cultural vision. This side of Warhol’s art is more difficult to identify in what is effectively the fun house atmosphere at the Warhol museum. The emphasis is on Warhol’s work as entertainment with interactive displays, crayons and paper for kids, an opportunity to sit before a camera and enjoy 15 minutes of fame, sit back and watch Empire and Sleep as if they are images on a museum wall, and other such activities. I missed the side of Warhol the artist that is necessarily omitted by the museum’s display.

Heinz

Otherwise, I loved running along the Allegheney River. The views were amazing and the blue skies always a reminder of what they are not, that is, filled with the fires of the steel mills. Many of the local people I met were delightful, showing what I deemed a nearly mid-western friendliness mixed with east coast open mindedness and worldliness. There were also interesting, experimental art exhibitions with works by young and emerging artists, indicating that Pittsburgh is a city on the move. The cost of living and the available spaces would surely make it an attractive option to the more economically prohibitive New York. That said, Pittsburgh still has a way to go before becoming a cultural capital or artistic mecca. Though it definitely warrants a “watch this space” sticker, I hope that it also strives to grow in the social equality and justice espoused but not always practiced by the most esteemed of its industrialist ancestors.

Robert Rauschenberg—Salvage, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Robert Rauschenberg, Rollings (Salvage), 1984

Continuing on my Autumn of American postwar modernist painting, today I went to Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac’s Marais space for their appetizer to the Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at Tate Modern, opening December 1. It’s called Salvage, a cryptic title that could be taken in a number of different directions. Of all the postwar American artists, Rauschenberg is probably the one I am least familiar with. Not because his work doesn’t interest me, but more because of circumstance. I haven’t seen a lot of his work since the MoMA retrospective in 2000. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Shade (Salvage), 1984

Salvage is a series of works made in 1984, but there is something about the images that makes me want to see the 1960s salvaged from the shelves of history. There is something, not nostalgic, but many traces of the lost past in both the things that are seen in the images and in Rauschenberg’s technique of silkscreening and overpainting. The remnants of the past in the images are obvious – old cars, statues, old photos, death by hanging, and worlds that have emptied out and become ghost like. In the techniques Rauschenberg uses the past is more difficult to pinpoint. I see the past, for example, in the not fully articulated–ness that results from the screen print process. The visible traces of a blade or squeegee pulled across the screen so easily translate to the remnants of a lost past. In addition, I immediately associate the technique with Warhol and Rauschenberg’s work in the 1960s. Thus, in my mind, even the technique is from another era. And because it’s got the reference to Warhol, I see death everywhere – the repetition of the press photograph ad infinitum, that can only ever indicate emptiness and superficiality. Plus, in the pictures in Salvage there are skulls, tyres hanging from hooks that immediately bring up ideas of lynching, next to a stenciled photograph of black faces. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Razzle Down (Salvage), 1984

I was struck by the relative sparsity of the painted canvas. There is a thinness of paint, especially because we, or I, immediately think The Combines when I think of Rauschenberg. His most famous works are cluttered, filled with things and objects, they are canvases that have things pasted onto them and extend well beyond the frame. Here in Salvage the flatness of screen printing is exacerbated by their contrast to our expectations. Despite the flatness and sparsity, my overwhelming response to Salvage was one of sensing their anger. Again, the anger is generated by the reproduction of violence and decayed scenes from the newspaper. But in addition, there is a proliferation of fences, barbed wire, icons, flags, cars—old, decayed smashed up. Over the top, thin and sometimes thicker layers of overpainting work to mask, erase, and cohere the fragments underneath. It is as though the anger is alleviated by overpainting. However, we interpret them, Rauschenberg’s work retains a political edge, if in a traditional form, that makes these images just as relevant today.

Robert Rauschenberg, Bumpter (Salvage), 1984