First published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’
Royal Academy of Arts, London | 20 September – 18 January 2026
Kunsthaus Zürich | 27 February – 16 August 2026
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris | 18 September 2026 – 24 January 2027
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This exhibition has been made possible as a result of the Government Indemnity Scheme. The Royal Academy of Arts would like to thank HM Government for providing indemnity and the Department for Culture, Media & Sport and Arts Council England for arranging the indemnity.
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With additional support from
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Catalogue supported by The Bob Rennie Collection
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Andrea Tarsia
Exhibition Curators
Mark Godfrey with Adrian Locke and Rose Thompson and Nikita Sena Quarshie, Curatorial Researcher supported by The Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust/John Silberman
Exhibition Organisation, Royal Academy
Rebecca Bailey
Sophie Clark with Grace Frazer
Exhibition Organisation, Kunsthaus Zürich
Nora Gassner
Cathérine Hug (curator)
Franziska Lentzsch
Kim Stengl
Exhibition Organisation, Paris Musées
Julie Bertrand
Julie Pierrat
Elise Kerschenbaum
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-915815-12-5
ISBN 978-1-915815-27-9 (limited edition signed by the artist)
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Editorial Note
Dimensions of all works of art are given in centimetres, height before width (before depth).
Page 2: detail of cat. 47; page 7: detail of cat. 18; page 9: detail of cat. 25; page 18: detail of cat. 67; page 22: detail of cat. 2; page 36: detail of cat. 16; page 60: detail of cat. 29; page 86: detail of cat. 32; page 118: detail of cat. 58; page 150: detail of cat. 69; page 186: detail of cat. 13; pages 202 and 209: details of fig. 72
Nikita
RADICAL PRAGMATISM
Kerry James Marshall in conversation with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
BB: As these conversations generally start, which origin stories and beginnings do you consider worth mentioning?
KJM: When I arrived on the scene making works, the history of modernism and postmodernism had been concluded before I was even born. Even so, you can’t make work under the naïve assumption that what you do will simply have a necessary value to the culture, the society and the moment you’re living in. You have to find a way to make your work earn some kind of relevance. Most of what you could call an avant-garde of painting had already run its course by the 1950s and 1960s, after Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. African American artists never seemed relevant to the development of either theory or practice. Black people lead developments in music and dance, but in painting, as in scientific and philosophical innovation, we were mostly followers.
BB: In my mind, you are a classical anti-modernist painter, continuing and expanding positions that have been formulated practically in every decade of the twentieth century under different historical circumstances and social conditions. They all have had varying aesthetic, philosophical and political motivations. You have criticised the modernist tradition in almost every statement and every painting that you have made, most explicitly perhaps in a work like De Style (cat. 21) – a manifestly parodic comment on modernism from Mondrian to Pollock. Paradoxically, it was also your first painting to be acquired by a museum in 1993.
KJM: You could define my position as anti-modernist, but I don’t regard what I do that way. It is not an absolute critique. I have always considered classical, modernist and even postmodern works on equal terms. But here is the thing: the history of art as I encountered and understood it – turning ten in 1965 – was available. Ancient objects, medieval pictures and sculpture, the Italian Renaissance, modern and contemporary art, all that could be seen and appreciated on the same day travelling through time in the LA County Museum and the Pasadena Art Museum (which became the Norton Simon). The museums did not motivate me to become an artist, since I had already made that decision much earlier. The power of museum collections helped me to sort out the things I respected and the things I didn’t. At that time, abstraction as a rejection of image-making didn’t mean anything to me. It was one way of making a picture among many.
BB: You are a pragmatist.
KJM: A friend of mine, Arthur Jafa, called me a radical pragmatist. I do see myself that way. As a strategy, as a technique, I try to know as much as possible about the operation, construction and appearance of works of art so that I can be more precise in the way I deploy whatever seems most effective for the project.
BB: Do you consider yourself an artist in the tradition of social, or even socialist realism? That tradition ranges from the artists of the Soviet Union after Anatoly Lunacharsky had published his declaration of Socialist Realism in 1933
Fig. 1 Arnold Mesches, Kerry James Marshall, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 121.9 × 109.2 cm. Private collection
1
HISTORIES
‘I’ve always wanted to be a history painter on a grand scale like Giotto and Géricault.’
Kerry James Marshall, letter to Arthur Jafa, August 19941
In 1980, Kerry James Marshall got on a plane for the first time in his life to travel from Los Angeles to New York to see the Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. He later said the trip was ‘really only to see Guernica’.2
The 1937 canvas (fig. 3) is acknowledged as the most significant history painting of the twentieth century. Some forty-five years after this encounter, Marshall is widely appreciated as the inheritor and transformer of this mode, codified in the French Academy as the highest of the genres of painting, a status later cemented by the Royal Academy in London, whose earliest Academicians gained their admission to the institution’s membership by presenting a canvas simply called a ‘history’.3
There are several obvious reasons why Marshall is hailed as ‘one of our greatest contemporary history painters’.4 He has made large works addressing the Middle Passage and the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; he has portrayed individuals such as Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Tubman; and he has created monumental scenes depicting contemporary Black life in barber shops, beauty parlours, parks and nightclubs, elevating the everyday to the epic just as Gustave Caillebotte or Georges Seurat did, to name two artists whose famous transformations of history painting can be seen near Marshall’s home in Chicago today.5
Yet as an exhibition entitled ‘Kerry James Marshall: The Histories’ makes clear, to address ‘history’ with ‘painting’ requires more than the representation of
moments or individuals from the past. I have organised the exhibition around eleven cycles of work, and in all of these, I would argue that the ‘histories’ at play are multiple and intertwining. Marshall thinks about the histories of painting’s conventions and genres. He considers the histories of materials that painters have used for centuries, such as egg tempera, and those they have not, such as glitter; the histories of perspective and flatness, of brushwork and gesture. Although he is most known for confronting the exclusion of Black subjects in the history of figurative painting and in modernist abstraction, in several projects he has looked back at the history of the inclusion of Black figures, and at earlier attempts to forge a Black aesthetic. Marshall occasionally touches on personal history, more frequently attends to individuals who have been forgotten, and increasingly confronts questions about history that few others wish to acknowledge. I believe he has worked on all these levels since 1980 because he recognises that this is what it takes for ambitious work to be widely discussed and exhibited, and because he regrets the way several Black artists before him have been romanticised precisely because of their disconnection from art history.6 He wagers that his layered approach to histories will mean that his work is taken seriously for centuries to come, and that his paintings will be thought-provoking and inspiring both for those coming into museums for the first time, and for those who have spent as much time studying in these places as he has.
1 The Academy, 2012
Acrylic on PVC panel, 182.9 × 154.9 cm
Collection of Dr Daniel S. Berger
18 (London and Zürich only)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2011.20.1
Great America, 1994
Acrylic and collage on canvas, 261.6 × 289.6 cm
Many Mansions, 1994
Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 289.6 × 342.9 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago. Max V. Kohnstamm Fund, 1995.147
Gulf Stream, 2003
Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2004
Acrylic and glitter on canvas, 274.3 × 396.2 cm
Purchased by the Tate Americas Foundation, courtesy of the North American Acquisitions Committee with assistance from Bob Rennie 2018
Untitled (London Bridge), 2017
Acrylic on board, 213.7 × 303.7 cm
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