The mad feast begins the minute you step into the Royal Academy’s courtyard: 13 wildly gesticulating figures in black patinated bronze and gold leaf entice you to their table in Tavares Strachan’s fizzing new sculpture “The First Supper (Galaxy Black)”.
Across shining goblets and heaped platters, each expresses a life story. Poet Derek Walcott declaims. Nurse Mary Seacole throws her arms open in wide embrace. Glittery drag queen Marsha P Johnson, Afro-Brazilian resistance fighter Zumbi dos Palmares and emperor Haile Selassie compete to hold court. At one end, astronaut Robert Lawrence, the first African-American in space, looks baffled, as if just landed on another planet. At the other, a glum guy in a hoodie turns away. This Judas is a self-portrait: the artist as betrayer of Renaissance tradition, restaging Leonardo’s “Last Supper” with icons from black history.
The Royal Academy’s Entangled Pasts, 1768-now, Art, Colonialism and Change stages several brilliant spectacles within an exhibition that offers no overarching argument as it explores, rather randomly, black experience in contemporary art, and its refraction in art history’s white mirror. By turns enjoyable and overburdened by ideology, it follows recent London shows — Tate’s Life Between Islands, the Hayward’s In the Black Fantastic — in celebrating an essential story: 20th- and 21st-century black art’s exceptional inventiveness and influence.
Burlington House was built for grand set pieces, and the opening one mesmerises. In London for the first time is Hew Locke’s gorgeous “Armada” (2019), a flotilla of 45 intricately decorated miniature boats — galleons, fishing vessels, cargo ships, models of the pilgrim pioneer “Mayflower” and immigrant liner “HMT Empire Windrush” — adorned with nets, medals, jewels, painted fabric. It conjures histories of arrivals, departures, hopes, desperation — “We live in a whirlwind of change and insecurity . . . History is complex and messy,” Locke says — and has an epic quality, conjuring timeless dramas of man and the sea.
In a wonderful pairing, the jaunty boats hang here from the ceiling above John Singleton Copley’s monumental, violent painting “Watson and the Shark”. This caused a sensation when exhibited at the RA in 1778 and, loaned from Washington, remains remarkable. Copley depicts Brook Watson, a 14-year-old sailor who, when his ship docked in Havana harbour, impulsively took a dip and met a shark. The pale adolescent flails in the water; the shark approaches (it severed Watson’s ankle); his shipmates struggle to save him. In pyramid formation, they are headed by a handsome, calm, compassionate black man, posed like a classical Apollo. While the others heave, tug, shriek, he throws the boy the lifeline.
“The sea is a great leveller,” Locke says. It is also, for many black artists, inescapably the site of the trauma of enslavement. The show’s second tremendous grouping places Turner’s luminous, tumultuous “Whalers” (c1845) — the wounded leviathan thrashing through foam and blood, borrowed from the Metropolitan Museum — with masterpieces of the tragic sublime from the last half century.
Frank Bowling’s “Middle Passage” (1970), hot reds and oranges surging across a map of Africa and ghostly figural outlines, is a glowing abstraction. In “Vertigo Sea” (2015), John Akomfrah converges footage of breathtaking natural beauty, David Attenborough-style, with ecological and human horrors: whaling, nuclear testing, slave murders, migrant drownings.
Standing beleaguered and silent among their noise and colour, a procession of driftwood logs, partly burnt, upended to resemble jagged, abstracted figures of uneven sizes, each with a dark block of a head, is El Anatsui’s “Akua’s Surviving Children” (1996). Like Giacometti’s skeletal personages, they evoke survivors of catastrophe, here slavery, but I thought too of all our journeys through life, each distinctive, fragile, worn down in different places, finding solace in the huddled group.
Kerry James Marshall, the most influential African-American painter, has commented that white viewers still rarely respond to black art as universal: while black viewers’ empathy with art’s white figures is assumed, he says, “when you put a black character in there, somehow the white audience isn’t expected to identify with them. That’s a problem.” A strength of Entangled Pasts is to ask how this happened, what could change.
Marshall redresses art history’s scarcity of black characters by rendering them in the language of traditional painting, insisting “the blackness of my figures is . . . unequivocal, absolute and unmediated.” Here his bold imagining of an 18th-century African-American painter, ebony-dark face, bright white smock, “Scipio Moorhead, Portrait of Himself, 1776” (2007), is the interloper in a marvellous, surprising gallery of Georgian black portraits, all borrowed from North American museums.
Copley’s “Head of a Man” (c1777-78), a black youth with alert eyes, strong features and a smile between friendly and hesitant, is as immediately present as someone encountered on today’s streets. Reynolds’ lofty, stargazing “Francis Barber” (c1770), who was Samuel Johnson’s secretary, and Gainsborough’s nonchalantly easy “Ignatius Sancho” (1768), writer, composer, abolitionist, are classicised, noble yet individual portraits of subjects born into slavery who climbed the Georgian ladder of social mobility. Together, they form a poignant “what if” moment.
The show’s clashes of past and present invite us, repeatedly, to look again. Yinka Shonibare’s batik-dressed cleaner with globe head, “Woman Moving Up” (2023), sweeps the stairs in a gallery of sanitised versions — deliberate, unconscious, ironic? — of colonial rapacity. In Agostino Brunias’ idyll “View of the River Roseau, Dominica” (1770-80), people of different races harmoniously bathe, chat, trade. Johann Zoffany’s “The Family of Sir William Young” (1767-68), set on a bucolic English estate, centres on music-making and riding; the black servant is the only allusion to the source of Sir William’s fortune as governor of Dominica and Tobago.
I dislike slavery narratives irrelevantly interjected into art history as much as the next gallery-goer, but these illuminate and matter. Only, though, to a point. The exhibition utterly loses traction when, too often, the RA dredges from its storehouse banalities like Frank Dicksee’s porcelain-skinned bathers “Startled” (1892) for a section on “whiteness”, or swamps us with contemporary flotsam such as Bharti Parmar’s holes on white paper, “Cotton Plant Morphology, Efficient pruning ensured maximum yield on slave plantations” (2021), or Barbara Walker’s “Vanishing Point 18 (Titian)” (2020), a graphite reworking of “Diana and Actaeon” — the arrogance! — bleaching out all figures except the black servant.
These works’ only claim is as anti-racist rhetoric, or historic racism. Art isn’t sociology; as the giants here demonstrate, it is poetic, rigorous, subtle, ambivalent.
The RA’s poster image is Kara Walker’s etching of black hands hoisting a white ship out of the dark waters of the past. A swimmer escapes; on shore, tiny silhouettes represent slaver and enslaved. Titled “no world”, this comes from Walker’s sombrely beautiful series “An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters” (2010): frightening, referencing historic atrocity, but perhaps expressing hope for the new, uncharted power in black art-making which, at its best, this exhibition triumphantly showcases.
To April 28, royalacademy.org.uk
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