A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon this picture. It was, of course,
accompanied by its title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self,
its date: 1980 and the artist who made it: Kerry James Marshall.
The portrait shocked me and it’s pretty easy to know why. It’s the depiction of
a black man against a black background and all you can see is the man’s white shirt,
eyes and teeth. It almost looks like a caricature and some have even likened it to blackface.
I wasn’t the first person to be shocked by this painting. When Steven Lebowitz bought
this painting in 1984 for 850$, he decided to hang it on a wall in his house. Some guests
took offence to it, deemed it racist and Lebowitz, to avoid further confrontation,
hung it in his bathroom where it would be hidden for 25 years. The painting would be invisiblized.
In the description of the painting, the novel “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
was mentioned and, admittingly, I hadn’t heard about it so I did some research and
finally read it. It’s an absolutely amazing book which I strongly recommend to anyone,
no matter your ethnic background. The book deals a lot on the topic of race,
more specifically on being a black man in early 20th century America.
The narrator, who’s also the main character,
struggles with racial inequality, wether through his relationship with white people
or through systemic violence with evictions and police brutality.
But there’s another topic, aside from race, which makes this novel an amazing Bildungsroman,
or a coming-of-age story. The author explores the theme of identity. Of course, many of us
have this existential struggle with the idea of identity. In Invisible Man, however, Ellison shows
how this struggle to discover or create one’s own identity is even harder when you mix race into it.
Throughout the novel, the nameless narrator finds himself in different
communities or groups of people and he tries, as we often do, to craft his identity through
his interactions with other people. But this turns out to be extremely
unproductive. Everybody he meets expects him to behave a certain way. When he doesn’t obey,
when he affirms himself and subverts these expectations, he finds himself alienated.
These expectations towards the narrator are more often than not linked to his
skin colour. He is reduced to his blackness. His character,
his individuality, can’t be complex, it can’t be nuanced, it can’t be human. While white
people can define their identity through their passions, their interests or their occupation,
black people can only define their identity through their blackness.
This reduction to one’s race is what renders the narrator invisible, it’s what makes him an
invisible man. When society looks at you and sees you, not for who you are, but for what you are,
your individuality is concealed. You are not, for example, “Ralph Ellison”; you are “a black man”.
This theme of invisibility through blackness is what is being shown
here. This isn’t a twisted joke on the appearance of black people,
but a statement on their disappearance in the public eye.
This painting is also a landmark in Kerry James Marshall’s own quest for identity. As
he explained, the painting has different elements of many different art movements which shows that
Marshall is experimenting and trying to find his own voice. For example, the painting is made
in egg tempera which is a medium with a lot of history, going as far back as ancient Egypt. You
can also see a touch of minimalism through, notably, a monochromatic portrait. Finally,
Marshall said to have experimented with surrealism through the title of the painting:
A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self.
One thing for certain is that the title speaks of Marshall’s artistic growth, but it’s honestly
slightly confusing and I’d like to hear your interpretation of it in the comment section.
As I was doing research for this video, I watched a conversation on the YouTube
Channel Tate Talks where Kerry James Marshall comments this painting. He explains how he wanted
to add nuance to the colour black, the same way Ellison wanted to add nuance to black identity.
Marshall disagrees with the idea that black is the absence of colour and argues that
black is actually a chromatically rich colour. He makes this point
through A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self because,
though the painting is black and white, we can tell the difference between the
different blacks. This difference is what allows us to differentiate the subject from
the background. This nuance in the different blacks is what allows us to see the subject.
A similar exercise was made a couple of years earlier, between 1957 and 1967,
by the abstract expressionist Ad Reinhardt. If we look, for example, at this 1961 painting titled
Abstract Painting, we see, at first glance, but a black canvas. Looking at a room full
of Reinhardt’s “ultimate paintings”, as he would call them, can be a bit underwhelming at first.
But if you stay a little longer to look at these paintings, if you spend time with them, if you put
effort into understanding them, then you’ll start seeing that they’re more than just black canvases,
but that they’re also complex and nuanced. Each black painting made by Reinhardt has different
nuances of black inside of them which can only be perceived if we look at them long enough.
For both Marshall’s and Reinhardt’s paintings, we need to give them time and look into them
to understand them. Without the research, Marshall’s painting is a racist joke and,
without time, Reinhardt’s painting is just a black canvas. To fully understand,
appreciate and accept artworks, they require openness and a will to actually understand them,
to see them for the complex creations that they are. Marshall’s work not only reminds
us of that, but it reminds us that this is also applicable to people.