Kerry James Marshall offers a fresh lesson in art history at his London retrospective – The Art Newspaper

In Kerry James Marshall’s The Academy (2012), which will open the American artist’s retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London, a male life model strikes a Black Power pose, his clenched fist raised in the air. The work, says Mark Godfrey, the exhibition’s co-curator, attests “to Marshall’s interest and involvement in the academy as an educational institution”. The RA is, after all, home to not only a renowned art school but also one of the oldest life modelling studios in the world. The work is just one of many paintings that combine pivotal moments in history with elements of art historical significance in Marshall’s own inimitable way.

The Histories, an exhibition conceived by Godfrey in collaboration with Marshall and Adrian Locke, the RA’s chief curator, is Marshall’s largest show to date in Europe and is timed to celebrate his 70th birthday. After London, it will travel to Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

The exhibition’s title speaks to the layered histories in Marshall’s work, to the history of painting as well as African and transatlantic history. Early paintings such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) and Invisible Man (1986) can be read as referring to a historically constructed “racial” identity, as well as, through Marshall’s painterly handling of Blackness, the point at which the figurative is brought to the edge of abstraction.

Other highlights in the show will include De Style (1993), with its title borrowed from a neighbourhood barbershop in Los Angeles, where Marshall was partly raised, and a play on De Stijl, hence the prominent use of the Dutch art movement’s signature primary colours.

Meanwhile, the works of the 2010s are cryptic and painterly, full of extravagant citations and references. For Godfrey, the relevance of Marshall’s painting today lies in its “many layers and complexities” as well as the meticulously created and intentional compositions. The enormous School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012) is a richly decorated beauty salon, walls adorned with posters that advertise Black beauty and a Chris Ofili exhibition at Tate Britain. The anamorphic projection of a blonde woman’s head riffs on Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors, while the flash of light in the mirror echoes Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas.

The exhibition will be in the RA’s main galleries, building on a strand of programming over the past few years that has given the autumn slot over to a major contemporary artist—Royal Academicians like Michael Craig-Martin or, in Marshall’s case, honorary Academicians—with the ambition, as Locke puts it, to shine a light on long careers but also to celebrate recent work.

Marshall will be including eight new paintings in the show, each exploring underacknowledged episodes of African history and the transatlantic slave trade. The artist’s entire project can be seen as a wake-up call for painting, reminding us of its potential to open onto a space in which the relation between past and present becomes the subject for a fresh set of narrative possibilities.

• Kerry James Marshall: the Histories, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 20 September-18 January 2026