Executed in 2016, Untitled (Woman Looking Left) is an exquisite example of Kerry James Marshall’s pioneering practice exploring themes of visibility, black identity and the history of painting. Set against a vivid lime green background, a woman dressed in colourful patterned textiles looks to the left, slightly leaning in as if caught mid-conversation. Capturing a candid moment of an unnamed subject, the painting beautifully presents Marshall’s technical mastery in a celebration of the painterly medium, whilst also critically examining the absence of black subjects in the Western art historical canon. Painted in the year of Marshall’s major retrospective at The Met Breuer, Untitled (Woman Looking Left) exemplifies the sustained evolution of Marshall’s artistry and his continued dedication to painting black subjects. Marshall was also recently elected as an honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, attesting to his growing significance in the history of contemporary painting.

A learned scholar of the Western traditions of painting, the present painting of an unnamed black woman revisits not only an absence of black individuals throughout history, but also of female subjects in the history of Western portraiture. Portraits of women throughout Western history have often represented them as a role such as goddesses, religious or historical figures, muses or allegorical embodiments for virtues or beauty. From sixteenth century Venetian artists such as Titian and Giorgione to eighteenth century French and English portraits of the Three Graces, paintings of women tended to be less individualized than those of men, leaving them unidentifiable and anonymous. In Untitled (Woman Looking Left), Marshall places his twenty-first century subject within the art historical lineage of female portraiture, acknowledging the complex history of black, female subjects and their erasure from this particular genre of painting, as well as their omittance in the wider cultural discussions of beauty. In the present work, Marshall’s unnamed subject is not posed, but rather appears carefree and unaware of herself as a subject of a painting. Hair tied in two tight buns, the woman in the painting wears a wide collared shirt with an array of patterned textiles, accessorized with a pearl earring. Her anonymity, while nodding to the invisibility of women throughout history, has not confined her to the standardized notion of beauty which has removed her individual quality. Instead, Marshall’s careful rendering of her facial topography has endows the subject with a distinctive story and character that is consistent with the artist’s insistence that his picture is representing exactly what it is depicting, and is not symbolic nor allegorical. Demonstrating the artist’s recent tendency toward claritys and a heightened sense of objectivity which characterizes his recent output, the woman in the present painting radiates with unambiguous selfhood.

The subtle tonal modulation of the woman’s face not only captures the ambiguities of her expression but is also demonstrative of the formal importance of the black pigment in Marshall’s oeuvre. From jet black, ebony black, inky black and charcoal black, Marshall’s portrait unapologetically emphasizes the blackness of the woman’s skins. For Marshall, politics of representation and artistic ideology is inseparable to the technicality of painting, and in what he calls “a rhetorical blackness,” Marshall purposefully pushes the blackness of his subject’s skin to the extreme. When questioned about the uncompromising blackness of his figures, the artist remarked, “extreme blackness plus grace equals power. I see the figures as emblematic; I’m reducing complex variations of tone to rhetorical dimension: blackness.” (Kerry James Marshall quoted in :Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, 2016, p. 59) Marshall achieves this by mixing several types of black pigments such as ivory black, carbon black and iron oxide black, with different hues to create subtle variations in skin tones. “Most people will automatically say, ‘Black people aren’t black, they’re brown’,” explains Marshall. “But then, if you use that rhetorical figure of blackness, why not make it concrete, artistically? So that’s what I do. But I do it in such a way that it doesn’t become a reduction, it becomes rich and expansive. That’s really been of critical importance to me – the development of that black figure as a device.” (Kerry James Marshall quoted in: Gabriel Coxhead, “When you put black people in a picture, what should they be doing?,” Apollo Magazine, 13 July 2019, online)

Marshall is impassioned not only about the visual language and narrative tropes of the Western art historical canon, but also for appropriating their technique. Marshall’s career is characterized by a preoccupation for painterly mastery. Fascinated by the history of painting from a young age, Marshall recalled reading about Charles White in Russell L. Adams’s children’s encyclopedia Great Negroes, Past and Present (1964) and presenting the artist’s biography for Black History Week in fifth grade. Later enrolling in Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County in 1968, Marshall enrolled in White’s class, where his message about black representation and power had a defining impact on Marshall’s artistic mission. White become the most important.mes ntor throughout Marshall’s early career, and his influence on Marshall’s work is most evident through his absolute commitment to technical mastery and the skillful representation of the black figure. In the late 1960s and 1970s, many artists abandoned figuration for abstraction, which was considered the only way to enter the mainstream art world. Abstraction was seen to be the advanced and modern form of expression, whilst figuration, and black figures in particular, were not considered subjects which could obtain recognition in the prominent art circles. Yet despite the movement away from figuration in the mainstream art scene at that t.mes , Marshall’s oeuvre has remained largely faithful to black figuration, and he describes his commitment to it as a form of resistance against the social power structure. Indeed, the present work, and Marshall’s significant body of unnamed portraits of black people, place the question of presence and representation at the foreground, redefining the traditions of a genre which has historically marginalized non-white subjects.

Challenging and recontextualizing the canon to include themes and depictions that have been historically omitted, Marshall is a truly visionary painter whose practice continues to forge new grounds. Blissfully radical and remarkably executed, Untitled (Woman Looking Left) catalogues and celebrates a distinctively contemporary vision of portraiture.