KERRY JAMES MARSHALL AND HANS HOLBEIN
I don’t usually write these essays based on connections and analogies that the artists intended. I’d much rather find lateral channels through which differing artists and disciplines deal with the same themes, phenomena, mood, forces and so on—in ways often unexpected even to them. I make an exception this week however with a piece that is undoubtedly connecting itself to the past with full knowledge.
It is difficult to express just how excited I was when I saw School of Beauty, School of Culture for the first time. In it, one of my favorite living artists, Kerry James Marshall, makes reference to two of my other favorite painters (from the distant past), Hans Holbein and Jan Van Eyke. People familiar with my work know that these three artists are among those that move me the most and I have often bitten styles and methods from all three for my own purposes.
In Holbein’s famous Ambassadors painting, he uses an optical devise to remind us that any amount of worldly prestige and accumulation is largely irrelevant. Even the very wealthy should remember that death is haunting us. Marshall uses this same optical devise to show how the white-girl-beauty aesthetic quietly and insidiously haunts, even the rooms where black beauty is celebrated in earnest.
As a final, seemingly playful punctuation, Marshall shouts into history, proclaiming his arrival among the greatest masters in Western art by placing himself in the mirror opposite the viewer, in just the way that Van Eyke did in his famous wedding depiction.
The element that truly elevates Marshall’s painting is the fact that both children in the scene appear to notice the odd abstraction in the room and they are both puzzled by it.
Few things light me up this much. Thank you master Marshall!