The Artist of Black Beauty and Reality

Some things are defined by the absence or silence around them. In The Histories by US artist Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy, we enter a giant visual world occupied solely by black figures.

They are not angry or sad. They are just ordinary people, working out who they are and what they are going to do next in their lives.

Because the bodies are all black skinned, we see less detail and facial expression than we are used to in western art. We have to think harder about what is going on and what the subjects are feeling.

For me, as white Brit, I pondered how these people were mostly descended from slaves in the USA, transported by my ancestors; and how they had been treated as commodities, simply bodies to carry out labour, with their price tag recorded in a ledger.

By a paradox I found myself viewing a procession of human souls, unable to stop myself imagining the inner experience of these people. And the way that they represented every group and every human who has been judged insignificant or invisible.

Make no mistake: this is a landmark exhibition, earning 5 Star reviews from the Times, Telegraph and Guardian. (How often do they all agree?)

So what makes these pictures so moving? There’s the wealth of cultural detail beautifully observed and painted: the shoes, the hairstyles, the clothes, the music – all the ways that people seek to make themselves beautiful. Shown with humour and sensitivity.

There’s the impact of modern history in the huge depictions of the Chicago projects – housing estates designed for black families fleeing from the Jim Crow era south. The estates are run-down, but they are also full of birds and flowers and people doing normal things. Not the news films of gangs or violence we half expect.

When Marshall was a kid, he was blown away by discovering the grand tradition of western art. Then he noticed that that there were no representations of people like him. A few years later he read Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel Invisible Man, which argued that black people in America were simply not seen: the aspirational images were all of white, blonde women and their partners driving open top cars, golfing, water skiing, exuding affluence.

Marshall ignored the art trends of his time (abstract expressionism and what came after.) He modelled his figurative paintings on the forms of classical and religious images from the past. And he used his skill and technique to record the experience of everyday black lives – and the bright colours of their African heritage.

The paintings are filled with significant detail, but they often contain surreal elements too, as in the children studying encyclopaedias and imagining space travel in the company of toys and monsters. Or the couple dancing with song lyrics coming out of their heads. “I’m for real, baby.”

They show romantic encounters, troubling scenes (when black Africans kidnapped children from rival tribes to sell as slaves,) and surreal representations of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. There are depictions of black heroes who resisted slavery and ghostly scenes of female angels remembering the martyrs of the 1960s in grey, dreamlike sitting rooms.

There are joyful pictures too: the female hair salon, the music club, the beauty pageant winner, the family picnicking and daydreaming by a lake. All shown in loving detail, but with elements of fantasy and abstraction.

One overriding impression is that Marshall is celebrating the distinctive beauty of black people and their bodies and their changing fashions. Another is a sense of generosity and attentiveness in this historian of a race uprooted from one continent and culture to another, and left to remake their lives and identity with minimal support.

Finally, strangely, by painting only black people, with such care and attention, Kerry James Marshall has painted pictures of us all.

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy until 18 January, 2026.