Five Works to Know by Kerry James Marshall, One of Today’s Greatest Painters

De Style’s checkerboard tiling reappears in Knowledge and Wonder, but the latter is not quite a work about art history in the same way. Instead, it’s a work about how art can—and often does—help birth new realities for those who come before it.

In this 23-foot-long mural, a group of kids are shown constructing their world, with one toting a gigantic book covers and putting it in place. Meanwhile, a ladder toward the right suggests an opportunity for the children to ascend and achieve their full potential. A painter of the past—say, an exponent of the Renaissance or the Neoclassicist movement—would have made all these students white and wanted this painting to be seen in a museum. Instead, Marshall made the mural for the Legler Library in Chicago, the city where he has lived since 1987, and his figures are again all Black. At that library, the mural has lived up to its title, inspiring wonder.

In 2018, however, events surrounding the mural generated anger. That year, Chicago officials moved to sell the work at Christie’s at an estimated price of $10 million to $15 million. Marshall was among those who urged the city to reconsider, telling ARTnews that Chicago had “wrung every bit of value they could from the fruits of my labor.” Ultimately the city changed its mind and pulled the work from the sale. Since then, the mural has generally remained on view in the city, though it has voyaged abroad for the Marshall show at the Royal Academy.

Think of a painting of an artist at work, and you might imagine something like René Magritte’s La clairvoyance (1936), in which a white male who looks a bit like the Surrealist himself stares at an egg and paints the bird that may eventually hatch from it. Magritte’s painter is so schooled in the ways of form that he can represent the animal without even seeing it in front of him—a winking satire of the artist as a highly skilled craftsman. Marshall ups Magritte’s ante, then goes in a different direction with this untitled work, in which a Black female artist sits before a painting. The twist: She works not from her mind but using the paint-by-numbers method, which is intended to be so easy that anybody can do it. If she went to art school, she clearly didn’t pay much attention.

But Marshall’s work can’t exactly be considered parody in the way Magritte’s can, for Marshall’s painting seems to have more to say. In replacing the traditional white male with a Black woman, Marshall is proposing that our ideas about art making need to change, and that the barriers for acceptance need to be let down. Sure, she works using an amateurish method. Perhaps she’s even a Sunday painter. Yet she’s a painter all the same and ought to be seen as such. In Artforum, the painter Carroll Dunham wrote that, standing before this work, “one thinks of the parallel tracks of history not (yet) realized where our ‘great artists’ are black women and their contribution is a precise and literal mapping of the self in pictorial terms.”

This painting is a sequel of sorts to De Style, this time set in a hairdresser’s business with a focus on women instead of men. Symbols of Black culture are everywhere. The cover for an album by the beloved rapper Lauryn Hill hangs on a rear wall, and an awning in shades of red, green, and black—the colors of the Pan-African flag—is reflected in this salon’s mirrors. In the upper right-hand corner, there’s also a poster for a Tate show by Chris Ofili, the first Black artist to win the Turner Prize.

All these images and symbols collide with references to key works by white painters. Marshall himself can be seen in one mirror, photographing the scene—a reference to Diego Velázquez’s inclusion of himself via a reflective surface in Las Meninas (1656). Meanwhile, on the floor, there’s a tilted, warped image of Sleeping Beauty. That’s an allusion to Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), which features an anamorphic skull.

There’s a mismatch between this white art history and Black contemporary culture, and between Sleeping Beauty and the Black women pictured here. The resulting tension alludes to the unfair standards stacked against Black communities across the globe. That few of these women seem to care, continuing to primp their hair and strut their stuff anyway, suggests survival in spite of it all. The late critic Greg Tate accordingly called this remarkable painting “a paean to black looking as a form of black self-loving.”

Marshall’s art has never lent itself to neat, easily legible statements. But what to make of a troubling painting like this one, especially in light of so many highly visible acts of police violence committed against Black men and women? Is it easier or harder to see this painting, produced one year after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, because it depicts a Black cop? Does it even matter?

Further complicating this painting is the fact that Marshall has insisted it was not a response to Ferguson, or to any other recent police killing before it. Moreover, the painting is not based on a real policeman—Marshall used toys as his models for both the person and the car—and though this cop apparently works for the Chicago Police Department, given his badge and his vehicle, there are no obvious signifiers of the city itself. Untitled (policeman) is thus both embedded in our reality and slightly removed from it.

The key to unlocking this painting, as the art historian Darby English has proposed, is Marshall’s choice to place the viewer slightly below the officer. Tamir Rice or Aiyana Stanley-Jones “may have stood at around that height when their lives were ended,” English notes. But, he adds, the picture is not straightforward enough to rest only on that observation: “Marshall tells us not how to think. Rather, he asks us to hold the ideas ‘black’ and ‘policeman’ at the same time, and, further, to hold this possibly excruciating pose.”