Masterstrokes rendered a shade deeper

Can an artist get much more successful than Kerry James Marshall?

Museums everywhere own his work. In 1997, he won the $500,000 MacArthur “genius'' award, an ultra-prestigious invitation to Germany's twice-a-decade Documenta show, and a place in the Whitney Museum's biennial.

In 2003, a big solo show of Marshall's work toured the country to rave reviews.

That same year, he was in the Venice Biennale. By 2007, Marshall had received an unheard-of second invitation to Documenta, where his ghetto-themed conceptual comics may have been the best thing in the 113-artist show.

Success after success, after success, such as few black artists have ever had. And not nearly good enough. Marshall says he has yet to measure up to certain of his best-known rivals: “Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. ... They represent the core of the historical pantheon of great artists, recognised worldwide. And a big part of my objective is to be listed in history among those artists.''

It is about “a longing to be fully a part of the story of some system you are deeply in love with'', Marshall says.
Until recently, black people have barely even been the subjects of pictures.

Marshall has set out to correct that imbalance.

Some of his pictures portray the living rooms of the black middle class.

There are also paintings of street toughs, dead before their time. Marshall has painted inner-city housing projects and black lovers by the sea. He has also worked a bit in installation art, photography, video and even puppetry.

But whatever the subject, or the medium, his works balance celebration and critique of black America; it is impossible to come to any simple reading of his pictures' point of view.
Marshall may be today's most eloquent artistic chronicler and most compelling analyst of the African-American experience.

His success beyond the black community means he has also opened mainstream eyes to it.

In his chaotic studio in a run-down neighbourhood on Chicago's South Side, Marshall talks about his own experience as a black American and as a black artist.

He is dressed in khakis and a jean shirt, with reading glasses on a string and his salt-and-pepper hair and beard cropped short.

Marshall was born in 1955, into a working-class family in Birmingham, Alabama. When he was 7 his father got a job in the kitchens of a Veterans Affairs hospital in Los Angeles, moving the family to the rough streets of Watts and then to south-central Los Angeles.

Home — the whole neighbourhood —was art-free, so Marshall launched his career at the local library: “You learn you can take books out. ... I just started walking up and down the stacks.'' By the third and fourth grades he knew “every single art book in the library''.

Marshall started copying from the Old Masters — Michelangelo and Raphael and others. “I saw myself as being one of those guys,'' he says, and assumed that if only he could acquire what he thought of as their “superpower'' skills — “a magical thing called The Mastery'' — he would be on his way.

It took Marshall a while to notice that “those guys'' almost never portrayed people who looked like him. “I just assumed that when you look at the figures in paintings, they were all white figures — but you don't think of them as white figures.

"They are just art figures. ... You never pick up a how-to book that shows how to draw a black man.''

That assumption only collapsed in the fifth grade, when a project for what was then called Negro History Week led him to a book called Great Negroes: Past and Present and its chapter on Charles White, a black artist who drew and painted African-Americans. By then, race consciousness was brewing all around Marshall.

He had watched the Los Angeles riots from up close, “almost like in a movie'', and his mum had given him one of the first Afros in his class.

The frustrated ambitions of Black America started to affect his budding ambitions as an artist. “When I picked up books on American art, [White] wasn't in them. Neither was Jacob Lawrence.'' At that point, he says, “part of my project starts to become to be in the books''. He also discovered there was a place you could go to learn how to get into them: art school.

He was already there by 7th grade, with a summer scholarship to Otis Art Institute.

“I was the only black kid in the class,'' he says. Which meant he just about fainted when the teacher brought that class upstairs — to a space where White happened to have a studio. “I didn't know Charles White was ‘alive'.'' White was in his fifties and a teacher at Otis.

“That was the turning point,'' Marshall remembers. “Charles White was ‘the' Old Master to me. ... I tried to be Charles White.''

Thanks to exhibitions, awards and mentors, and to several years of lousy jobs and scrimping, by 1977 Marshall had enrolled at Otis as an undergraduate.

He discovered that in an art world full of Bruce Nauman videos, the kind of Old Master skills he had always admired were now considered “antiquated''.

And he felt, and still feels, that left ambitious black artists out in the cold. “All those people'' — all those white people —''who were making a break from the past were making a break from a past they ‘had'.''

Black artists, he says, had to prove mastery of the tradition to own it and only then could think about moving on. “The lives of black people, in the US, have always been about proving your credentials.''

He sees that as the story of his career: proving his ownership of the very grandest European tradition and then seeing if he can take it somewhere new.

He thinks of it in military terms. “You've got to invade the space and occupy it in such a way that you can't be thrown out. The campaign allows you to reach a certain plateau from which you can launch the final assault.''

From the start, a big part of that campaign was about making sure that complex, compelling — and critical — images of black people would make their way into museum spaces, alongside all those closed ranks of whites.

“People like painting too much for them not to be able to enjoy the black figure in that space,'' he says. “It's unacceptable to have 600 years of black-free history,'' at least as told in works of art.

When Marshall paints the living rooms of the black middle class, he paints big, on the scale of Old Master altarpieces and history paintings.

Some of those living rooms have included icons of black victory: over-the-sofa pictures of civil rights heroes such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

But these same canvases also hint at consumerist complacency: Everything is too new and tidy in those living rooms. Goods matter too much.

Marshall depicts this black experience but he also questions it.

Other paintings have been about the experience of blacks way down the social ladder.

Marshall set one series (it won him his first Documenta gig) in public-housing projects with the word “garden'' in their names: Wentworth Gardens in South Side Chicago and Nickerson Gardens in Watts, among others. (He once lived in Nickerson, one of the first housing projects to come up in Los Angeles.)

The bucolic tone Marshall put into his pictures clearly has an ironic edge, given what we know about the troubles that such “gardens'' ended up breeding.

But there is also genuine affection there and a view of lost potential.