April 2024
Notes from London
Entangled Pasts: 1768 to Now at the Royal Academy of Arts
Sascha Behrendt
Britain’s relationship to colonialism and slavery makes the title of this exhibition loaded words indeed. The Royal Academy was founded in 1768 by architects and art stars, including Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, at a time when slavery had yet to be abolished. The Academy grew over centuries to become a bastion of tradition, the epitome of the British establishment. I had steeled myself before going to see the show, feeling a sense of duty rather than an anticipation of being surprised or enlightened.
The very first room demanded hushed attention, with its dark, octagonal rotunda revealing a dramatic spot-lit, black bust at its center, overlooked by mirrors. Flanking the walls were portraits by Kerry James Marshall, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and John Singleton Copley. All of the Black subjects were magnificently painted. It was both exhilarating and unsettling, so unused are we to glimpsing rare paintings like these to experience the technical virtuosity of these skilled painters, but of people historically erased and forced out of sight. Yet despite the precision of the brush marks, sitters still lacked proper identities. Reynold’s painting’s title was Portrait of a Man, Probably Francis Barber (c 1770). John Singleton Copley’s sensitive rendering of an unknown sitter was so full of vitality and yet sadness, vastly superior to any of his schmaltzy, overwrought epic sea dramas elsewhere in the exhibition. Copley himself was a slave owner.
Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA, Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber, c. 1770, Oil on canvas. 78.7 x 63.8 cm. The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston.
John Singelton Copley RA, Head of a Man, 1777/78, Oil on canvas. 53.3 x 41.3 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Gibbs-Williams Fund. Photo © Detroit Institute of Arts
Other notable works of the 100 on show include Hew Locke’s poignant Armada (2017-2019), a flotilla of model ships suspended in poetic formation. Akua’s Surviving Children (1996) by El Anatsui was an unexpected installation of what looked like charred and water-ravaged wood, precariously balanced, as perhaps spiritual grave markers, referring to the sea and the Middle Passage. Other artists included J.M.W Turner, Betye Saar, Frank Bowling, Kara Walker, Keith Piper, John Akomfrah, Kehinde Whiley, and Lubaina Himid. All works were intelligent choices due to the rigor of the curatorial contexts given.
Since Black Lives Matter, art institutions in the United States have started the work to address those unheard and unseen, even if it is still vastly inadequate, with shows like Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility (2024) at the Guggenheim, Barkley l. Hendricks (2023) at the Frick Collection, and Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North (2024) at the American Folk Art Museum.
Bravo to the co-curators of this Royal Academy show, Dorothy Price and Dr. Esther Chadwick, both art historians and specialists on visual culture and the transatlantic slave trade. They avoided just juxtaposing the usual Black art stars with history. Instead, they made thoughtful past and present connections with the few fragmented artifacts available, beginning the necessary questioning of Britain’s relationship to its past and Empire from the inside.
Lubaina Himid RA, Naming the Money, 2004, Mixed media installation with sound, dimensions variable. National Museums Liverpool, International Slavery Museum, Gift of Lubaina Himid, 2013. Courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London and National Museums, Liverpool © Spike Island, Bristol. Photo: Stuart Whipps
Entangled Pasts: 1768 to Now
Royal Academy of the Arts
February 3 - April 28, 2024
Editor Sascha Behrendt is a writer with an in-depth knowledge of arts and culture in the US and UK. Interviews and profiles include artists Stan Douglas, Arthur Jafa, Sakiko Nomura, Walter Van Beirendonck, Francesca Woodman and Wolfgang Tillmans. She writes for the Sasson Soffer Foundation in New York, and is currently working on a comedy thriller novel.