At some point in the past, this show might have been a shock, it might have caused uproar.
But this isn’t the past, this is 2024, so seeing room after room of paintings of Black figures by Black artists in the National Portrait Gallery isn’t shocking: instead, it’s just totally normal.
The artists here depict the Black figure in endless ways and contexts. As straight portraits by Amy Sherald, as forgotten figures from art history by Barbara Walker, as characters of memetic mythology by Michael Armitage. The Black figure, like Blackness itself, isn't one thing, it’s complex, indefinable.
The exhibition is filled with personal narratives. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s huge, semi-collaged vision of a mother and child is beautiful and deeply intimate, Henry Taylor’s portrait of the artist Noah Davis (who died in 2015) is achingly tender and joyful, Jennifer Packer’s images of those closest to her feel too private to even look at.
History rears its ugly head over and over too. It’s in Noah Davis’s vicious depiction of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, it’s in Michael Armitage’s beautiful but frenzied scenes of social upheaval in the media age, it’s in Godfried Donkor’s gleaming image of Black heavyweight champ Bill Richmond, born into slavery but punching his way to freedom.
Skin tone plays a central role in the show. Henry Taylor uses thick slabs of brown and ochre, but Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kerry James Marshall go for a deep, tenebrous onyx, and Amy Sherald paints her sitters in washes of grey. It’s Blackness not as a colour, but as a construction, a culture, an identity.
A gorgeous display of some of the best painting happening today
But the most political thing of all is the idea of presence, existence. It’s Barbara Walker isolating solitary Black figures from classic western paintings, it’s Noah Davis depicting Black kids diving into a pool, it’s Amy Sherald painting traditional, refined, elegant portraits of demure Black sitters and situating them in a historically white context.
This isn’t the only show of Black painting at a major London institution right now, the Royal Academy and Dulwich Picture Gallery both have shows that were similarly commissioned in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the birth of the Black Lives Matter Movement, all of which feel like they’re addressing an urgent topic four years late.
There are some very bad artworks here, and many of these pieceshave already been shown recently in London, but these are missteps in an otherwise gorgeous display of some of the best painting happening today. Michael Armitage, Kerry James Marshall, Njideka Akunyily Crosby, Hurvin Anderson, they’re as good as the form gets.
But it’s hard to pinpoint what this show is trying to say other than ‘there are good Black painters’, which is a statement that’s jarringly obvious. But it’s also absolutely, brilliantly true, and seeing a major art institution celebrating that fact is no bad thing, especially when the work looks so completely at home on its walls.