Anneli Xie
Prof. Kimberly Cassibry
ARTH 100: Art and its Histories
2018/05/21

            In a lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art in his hometown of Chicago, African-American painter Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955) confidently claimed that: “the thing you’re least likely to see when you go to the museum is a figure that is black.” (Marshall 2016) At the Harvard Art Museums, that claim becomes blatantly obvious. Located at the edge of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard Art Museums have, in their own words, “played a leading role in the development of art history [...] and in the evolution of the art museum as an institution.” Compiled of three museums – the Fogg Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, and Arthur M. Sackler Museum –  the Harvard Art Museums contain “more than 250,000 works of art in all media and from nearly every corner of the world and period of history”; an “astonishing variety”, to describe the museum in its own words. (Harvard Art Museums) Each of the three museums, however, hold a separate focus in their collections. The Fogg Museum dedicates itself to art from the Western hemisphere (the Americas and Europe), the Busch-Reisinger Museum to art from central and Northern Europe, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum to works from Asia, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Even if the Harvard Art Museums claim to showcase art from “nearly every corner of the world”, there is not even mention of the African Diaspora in either of the three museum descriptions. Kerry James Marshall is right. Excluding the small gallery dedicated to African Art, only nine times across the 40+ other exhibition halls at the Harvard Art Museums does the viewer come across the depiction of a black figure or art created by a black artist.

The absence of black representation in the art world is something that Kerry James Marshall has taken as his mission to confront by “making pictures that aim to make their way into museums.” (Valentine 2016) A 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design, Marshall has over the years grown to become a world-renowned artist whose work is estimated to sell for $8 – $12 million[7] and can be found in the collections of several prominent art institutions. Having an “obsession with art history and [...] the mastery exemplified by artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael,” (Marshall, Sultan and Jafa 2000, 116) Marshall has aimed for artistic excellence himself, working to “close the gap between what they had done and what [he] was doing.” (Marshall 2016) In his own notes on his career, Marshall cheerfully tells stories of him as a child, “single-mindedly focused on learning how to do things,” reading about the methods of European painters, and experimenting with different media. As such, Marshall has gained knowledge of both the technical tools which allowed several European painters entrance into art history, as well as a deep understanding of art history and art as having to “mean something to people.” (Marshall, Sultan and Jafa 2000, 116) Growing up in Alabama during the civil rights movement in the United States, Marshall made it his obligation to be a voice for his people. “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955 and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility,” he says. (Moos 2003, 18) However, Marshall’s work shouldn’t be confined to only the socio-political realm, but rather seen to encompass a multitude of different domains. Writing about his own work, he says: “I never wanted to collapse into parochialism. I didn’t want it to be just about what happened in the black community. It’s parochial if people aren’t able to imagine anything beyond the blackness of those figures.” (Marshall, Sultan and Jafa 2000, 66)  As a result, Marshall has used his artistic knowledge to transform the black figure into a vessel of many, encompassing both aesthetic beauty and political power, as well as the ordinary and extraordinary. Simultaneously, Marshall challenges the 600 year long history of painting by mastery of the media, writing him, as well as the black figure, into the remarkably Westernized history of art. This essay will explore the aforementioned claims by studying Marshall’s painting “Untitled” (2008), and through the application of formal and contextual analysis investigate how he has aimed to combat both the underrepresentation of peoples of the African Diaspora, as well as the highly Western timeline of art that art historical institutions such as the Harvard Art Museums is narrating.

The title of Kerry James Marshall’s largest museum retrospective, “Mastry”, says it all. Assembled by three of the United States’ leading contemporary art institutions: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Met Breuer, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the rotating exhibition, documenting Marshall’s 35 year long career, is both an excellent example of Marshall’s mastery of the fine arts and a comment on mastery within the context of art history as it relates to the idea of “Old Masters” within painting. “The idea of mastery is important,” Marshall says in a video accompanying his retrospective, “because if you want to get into the game you have to get into the game at the highest level; to know what they know, do what they do, and then do all of those things together.” (Marshall 2016) Defined by the Oxford dictionary as “a great artist of former times, especially of the 13th to 17th century”, the list of Old Masters include big names such as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt de Rijn, and ranges from 12th century gothic art into the era of romanticism in the 19th century. (College Art Association 1980, 142)  Encompassing a multitude of different art historical styles and movements, all Old Masters nevertheless have one thing in common: they are all European.

Having studied the Old Masters in art history, Marshall brings a new concept into the canon of painting: the black figure. Painted using seven shades of black, (Marshall 2016:2) the figures in his paintings are both extraordinary in their complexity, as well as their ordinaryness. Rather than posing for their portraits, many of Marshall’s figures are portrayed in the context of their everyday life: experiencing pain, pleasure, and desires; working in salons, as artists, and in gardens; recognizing the past, the present, and the future; being political, economical, and social actors. By presenting the black figure in a multitude of different settings and situations, Marshall brings African-Americans into the sphere of the commonplace and normalizes their presence and representation. Among the 79 works exhibited in “Mastry”, the black person becomes a complete human being, seen in the fullness of who they really are.


Playing on traditional concepts, Marshall introduces us to a universe of blackness, rich in culture and history. In a series of portraits: “Scipio Moorehead, Portrait of Himself, 1776” (2007) and four portraits titled “Untitled”, from 2008, 2009, and 2010, Marshall plays with the idea of self-representation as he portrays five artists, black-skinned like himself. Whereas “Scipio Moorehead, Portrait of Himself, 1776” makes an explicit reference to the enslaved 18th century African-American artist, Scipio Moorehead, none of the other paintings do. By instead labeling them “Untitled,” Marshall aims to bring to light all the yet-to-be-discovered African-American artists; present in the world, but excluded from the museum and its institutional legitimacy. Further remarkable is that in three out of the four untitled portraits, the figure is painting a self-portrait of themselves. The idea of paintings within paintings is a concept taken from Old Masters active during the 17th century Golden era of Dutch painting, in which paintings within paintings were used to display wealth and prosperity. (Westermann 2001) In Marshall’s works, however, the paintings within his paintings are all unfinished and to be completed by a ‘paint-by-number’ configuration – a concept that exploded in the Americas in the 1950s. With the birth of ‘paint-by-numbers’, anyone could complete a painting and thus be a painter. Ironically enough, looking at the history of art, this logic seems to exclude black artists; and as Marshall’s paint-by-number compositions are observed more closely, the filled in number blocks are revealed to be painted in arbitrary colors. In these portraits, several comments from different art historical moments are brought to life on the canvas. By painting his subjects an undeniable black, Marshall introduces the African-American artist into the legitimacy of the museum; by using the composition of a picture within a picture, Marshall plays around with ideas from the Old Masters of 17th century Dutch painting; and by referencing the “1950s paint-by-number craze” (Alteever et al. 2016, 267) that allowed everyone to become an artist, Marshall questions why black peoples are still excluded from the narrative of art history. In this way, Marshall both responds to and takes part of old traditions, rewriting the art historical canon to include figures it has previously excluded; and for Marshall, “that is the primary function of a picture: simply to show you something that you might not see if that picture didn’t exist.” (Marshall 2016:3)

At the art historical institution of the Harvard Art Museums, it doesn’t. Not even in the gallery of African Art on the second floor is there a naturalistic representation of the black figure. Instead, the small exhibition hall consists of objects originally from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; and while said to reveal the “enormous breadth and depth of the continent’s artistic production,” feel premature in their curation. (Harvard Art Museums 2018) All titled after their functional use, with names such as “Whistle,” “Necklace,” and “Knife,” the objects are exhibited with no other information except for materials and country of origin – not even the sculptures on display have a description attached to them other than their title: “Figure.” Although the lack of information can be justified by the exhibition wall, which asks viewers to independently “bind parts together” while revealing that African arts are “understood to be perpetually in process, temporarily fusing with other objects [...] or the spaces they inhabit,” (Harvard Art Museums 2018) the titles of the objects accord them only to their functional use and offer no instructions for the viewer to relate to them in any other way – making it hard, of course, to look beyond the archaeological feel the objects have still retained. Surely, with more resources and willingness to explore, the museum would be able to provide just a bit more context.


In the American galleries too, the Harvard Art Museums have failed in representing the black figure. Out of the 139 works displayed in the seven “Modern and Contemporary Art” galleries on level one, only nine reference the African diaspora in their motifs, and less than half represent the African figure in a naturalistic manner. Furthermore, among their creators, only two are black. One of them is Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), an African-American artist from Seattle with two works currently displayed in the “Social Realism” gallery at the Harvard Art Museums: “We the people[...]” (1955) and “Ventriloquist” (1952). Whereas the works are meant to depict African-Americans, Lawrence’s figures are abstracted from his painting, overshadowed by his kaleidoscopic compositions taken from his influence of cubism. (Hughes 1999, 436) The turn to abstraction among African-American artists was not uncommon, with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Norman Lewis being other renowned African-American artist engaging with the abstract, and is something that stems from the invisibility of the black figure; not invisible in itself, but invisible in institutions of legitimacy. In order to become a mainstream artist represented at museums, it makes sense to abandon the figure of invisibility – much like Lawrence, Basquiat, and Lewis all did.

Instead, the only naturalistically painted black figures are made by white Americans. Among these is “Negro Soldier” (1945) by Robert Smullyan Sloan. Exhibited in the same gallery as Lawrence’s work, Sloan’s painting, beautiful in its realistic portrayal of a black man, immediately draws the viewer in with the help of the subject’s alluring gaze. Dressed in a US army overseas cap and a jacket adorned with medals, the black man is facing the viewer in front of a Harlem window. Upon first impression, it seems like Sloan, by bringing the black man’s presence into the US army – a place solely for Americans – introduces him into the commonplace of the nation, calling out to end the racial division between black and white peoples by unifying them under the label of ‘American.’ However, whereas the man in the portrait has the potential to be so much – a young man, a rewarded soldier, a New York resident –, Sloan has accorded him to only his race in the title of his painting, “Negro Soldier.” Whereas the Harvard Art Museums obviously cannot change the titles of the works on display, it nevertheless becomes interesting that the most naturalistic and realistic depiction of the black man (excluding African-American artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photography series “Notion of Family”) is one made by a white painter using racial slurs in his title.


In the “European and American Art, 17th-19th Century” galleries on the second floor, representation of the African diaspora is even more scarce. Among the 208 works on display, only one object – a vessel – makes an explicit reference to the presence of black people in the Western hemisphere. Hidden among European silverware in “The Silver Cabinet: Art and Ritual, 1600–1850”, sits the Abolition Jug (c. 1810-1820.) The vessel, a pearlware ceramic, depicts a chained black man on the shore and a slave ship roaring in the distance. Much like the artifacts on display in the African Art gallery, the museum provides neither description or artist of the object, and the anonymous jug remains the only item in the eight galleries to showcase traces of black presence in Europe and the Americas. Instead, the walls of the seven other halls dazzle of silky white skin – many of them from the period of the Old Masters, with names such as Rembrandt and Botticelli standing behind the works exhibited. With the third floor dedicating itself to arts of the Ancient Greece and Mediterranean as well as the museums’ University Study Galleries, it is at the second floor that the commercial galleries end; and after having visited all corners of the first and second floor, the absence of dark skin within the museums has become (literally) blinding.

This is where Kerry James Marshall comes in – or at least, this is where he should. In 2008, the Harvard Art Museums namely laid claim to one of Marshall’s painter portraits: “Untitled” (2008), a painting that if displayed effectively could both respond to and counter the highly Westernized canon of art that the museum is displaying. Previously featured in the galleries of “European & American Art since 1900” and “Contemporary Art”, the painting left the museum in 2016 to partake in Marshall’s retrospective, “Mastry.” Since its return in 2017, it has, however, not been put back onto public display. Instead, the painting has retired to the University Study Galleries at the third floor of the museum, tucked away from the commercial audience and its superficial nods and chatter, intended instead for the analytical gaze of Harvard University students. Currently, “Untitled” serves as a teaching supplement for the class “What is Black Art? African American Cultural Production from the Early Republic to Civil Rights”, taught within the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University. With many different artworks and artifacts scattered across the room – each serving a different class at the university – “Untitled” is the only hanging work on the west wall of Room 3620, responsive to the indisputable presence that Marshall’s paintings have the power to emanate.


Exhibited in front of a bench, the painting is curated for close study as the viewer is invited to sit down and reflect upon what stands before her; a painting of remarkable size. Measuring 184.79 x 155.58 x 10.16 cm in its dimensions, “Untitled” isn’t the only painting of Marshall’s that take up a substantial amount of physical space. Rather known for his large-scale work, Marshall’s paintings aim to assert “a presence in the narrative [of art history] that's not negotiable, that's undeniable.” (Marshall 2017)  For the viewer in Room 3620, the grandness of scale certainly makes “Untitled” hard to overlook or deny. However, the undeniable presence of the painting is limited to the University Study Room, a room with significantly less traffic than the commercial galleries on the lower floors of the museum. Taken out of the context of the commercial galleries, “Untitled” is unable to interact with the other works in the museum, incapable of responding to the museum narrative as a whole. The painting has entered the museum, much like Marshall wished, but in contrast to its intention, it has been tucked away from the common gaze.

Studying the work more closely, the exaggerated use of the color black is the first thing that stands out, and is something that plays a major role in all of Marshall’s work. Much like the three other untitled painter portraits – as well as all of Marshall’s other figurative work – the subject in “Untitled” (2008) is uncompromisingly black. However, the figure, a black man, remains amazingly sophisticated in his complexion; his plump lips beautifully outlined and the creases in-between his eyebrows painted to convey a stern gaze and serious facial expression. The highlights on his forehead, nose, and cheekbones are remarkable too; the jagged gray lines on the forehead almost resembling two lighting bolts, suggesting two spotlight-like light sources casting light on the sitter. The skin also differs from the rest of the painting in its glossy element, easily distinguishable from the matte paint in which Marshall has painted the rest of the work. As the light of the museum interacts with the exterior of the painting, the interior literally glows as the glossy element of the subject’s black skin makes it shimmer in response. Playing with the idea of blackness both absorbing and reflecting light, both in the painting’s exterior and interior, the uncompromised blackness and the complexities of its formation are good evidence of Marshall’s mastery of painting.

In this image too, Marshall plays with different traditions in art history. Unlike the three other painter portraits, the man in “Untitled” (2008) is not engaging in the practice of self-portraiture in the background. Rather, the man sits face-forward in front of a monochrome background of dark blue, layered with thin rectilinear brushstrokes of cream yellow, black, and a lighter shade of blue. Framed by the connections of horizontal and vertical lines in the background, the man is painted with naturalistic features and a high degree of realism. In his hands, he holds a disproportionately big artist palette containing a multitude of colors, mixed and displayed on the palette in different thicknesses and textures. With face and clothing beautifully shaded, the hair – taking the shape of an afro – stands out as a feature on its own. Framing the face, Marshall uses the afro – a symbol of black pride in the 60s and 70s – to create a halo around his subject. The halo, introduced in the arts of Ancient Greece and a common motif in painting until the rise of realism in the Renaissance, is a “radiant circle or disk surrounding the head of a holy person.” (Encyclopedia Britannica 2018)  By framing a black man using a symbol of black pride, Marshall brings a sacred element of blackness into his painting while simultaneously commenting on old traditions within art. Playing with more modern traditions too, the background, reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s abstract compositions from the 1900s, and the representation of the disproportionate and messy palette, make a commentary on abstract art. Introduced in the early 20th century as “a complete, break with the age-old tradition,” (Barasch 1998, 293-307) abstraction, as mentioned earlier, was also many African-Americans’ entryway into the art museum. In Marshall’s painting, however, the color black has a steadfast presence centered among the mix of colors on the palette, with the subject’s own brush dipped in it. By both representing the color black among other colors on the palette, as well as engaging the subject’s own actions with it, Marshall encourages black artists, like himself, to create black subject matter rather than turning to abstraction. 

By drawing on formal analysis, it becomes clear that Marshall’s painting, “Untitled,” battles many of the issues of underrepresentation that the Harvard Art Museums present. The monumental physical presence of the painting and its uncompromising black subject makes it a hard painting to overlook, although this is something the museum has still chosen to neglect. Curated for a small population of Harvard University students attending the class “What is Black Art? African American Cultural Production from the Early Republic to Civil Rights”, rather than the general public, “Untitled” loses a lot of its purpose. The painting is supposed to be operating in the sphere of the commercial, intended to be put in a place of normality, rather than being singled out to be seen as an exception to the common rule. Placing the painting in one of the galleries on the lower level of the museum would make it respond more effectively to the art historical record as it relates to the presence and absence of a black figure representation in painting. Think for example about Sloan’s “Negro Soldier”, and how powerful it would be to exhibit “Untitled” in its near proximity. A painting five times bigger, with an even darker shade of skin, “Untitled” accords its subject to no prejudices in its title, instead opening up for endless interpretation of who the subject can be or become. Or think of the possibility of “Untitled” entering a gallery of Old Masters; being the single black object in the entire exhibition hall, yet with the same attribute of shimmering skin as the porcelain white of the Old Masters’ subjects. Exhibited in this way, “Untitled” would also have unlimited potential to respond to the traditions of African Art, “temporarily fusing with other objects and the spaces [it] inhabit[s].” As a museum that has taken the furthering of the art historical narrative into its mission, one would expect it to understand and respond to the features and intention of Marshall’s work, although one remains disappointed. It is a smart decision, however, to have the painting supplement the class with a question of “What is Black Art?”, because in “Untitled,” you find all the answers. An important commentary and combatant on African-American representation, bringing “Untitled” into the light of the general public would unlock its full potential – and maybe, just maybe, will the Harvard University students enrolled in the class “What is Black Art? African American Cultural Production from the Early Republic to Civil Rights,” find a more efficient way of display. With the academic year coming to an end, we can only hope.

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References 

Alteveer, Ian., Helen Molesworth, Dieter Roelstraete, Abigail Winograd. Kerry James Marshall: Mastry. New York: Rizzoli, 2016.


Barasch, Moshe. “Abstract Art: Origin and Sources.” In Modern Theories of Art 2: From Impressionism to Kandinsky, 293-307. New York: NYU Press, 1998.


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Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Halo,” accessed May 18, 2018,https://www.britannica.com/art/halo-art.


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Harvard Art Museums. “Unforgettable works, astonishing variety.” Accessed May 10, 2018. https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/tour/unforgettable-works-astonishing-variety.


Hughes, Robert. American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.


Marshall, Kerry J., Terrie Sultan and Arthur Jafa. Kerry James Marshall. New York: Harry N. Abrams Incorporated, 2000.


Marshall, Kerry James. “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry.” Talk for the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, May 19, 2016. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2bmHE7MRQU.


Marshall, Kerry James. “MCA Talk: Kerry James Marshall.” Lecture for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, May 19, 2016. Video.
https://mcachicago.org/Publications/Video/2016/MCA-Talk-Kerry-James-Marshall.


Marshall, Kerry James. “ Kerry James Marshall: A Black Presence In The Art World Is 'Not Negotiable’.” Interview by Susan Stamberg. Fine Art, NPR, March 28, 2017. Audio, 06:39. https://www.npr.org/2017/03/28/521683667/kerry-james-marshall-a-black-presence-in-th
e-art-world-is-not-negotiable


Marshall, Kerry James. “Portrait Black.” Interview by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, September 12, 2016. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDIRWS2QLNg.


Marshall, Kerry James. “Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Studio).” Talk for the MetCollects of Museum of Metropolitan Art, Episode 11, 2016. Video. https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/kerry-james-marshall.


Moos, David. “Back to Birmingham: Notes on Kerry James Marshall’s Method.” In One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics, 17-21. Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003.


Oxford Dictionaries. s.v. “Old Master.” Accessed May 14, 2018. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/old_master.


Sotheby’s. “5A: Kerry James Marshall, Past Times.” Accessed May 15, 2018 http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2018/contemporary-art-evening-auction-n09858/lot.5A.html.


The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry.” Last modified October 24, 2016. https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2016/kerry-james-marshall


Valentine, Victoria L. “‘The Figure Remains Essentially Black in Every Circumstance’: Kerry James Marshall Previews His Master Paintings at MCA Chicago.” Culture Type, May 2,2016. http://www.culturetype.com/2016/05/02/the-figure-remains-essentially-black-in-every-circumstance-kerry-james-marshall-previews-his-master-paintings-at-mca-chicago/.


Westermann, Mariët. “‘Costly and Curious, Full of pleasure and home contentment’: Making home in the Dutch Republic.” In Art & Home: Dutch interiors in the age of Rembrandt, 15-81. Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2001.

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