Kerry James Marshall’s “The Histories” Finds a Fitting Home in Paris

There has been a visible uptick in Black American artists being shown in Paris. Mickalene Thomas’s “All About Love” was at the Grand Palais (December 2025-April 2026), and Henry Taylor’s “Where Thoughts Provoke” was at Musée Picasso Paris (April-September 2026), plus a Faith Ringgold show in 2023. Palais de Tokyo presented Melvin Edwards’ last living show (October 2025-February 2026). In continuing with this pattern, which is hopefully not a mere trend, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris has the first retrospective in France of maestro Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955, Birmingham). His monumental figurative works centering Black life punch through the longstanding racist exclusion of Black communities within the art historical canon. “You’re never gonna see the range of treatment of Black subjects anywhere else, by anybody,” the artist said in a video interview near the end of the exhibition. He is correct.

Kerry subtly references art historical archetypes from which Black lives were excised, inserting their place after the fact within nuanced scenarios, where racist indignation is sublimated. He also creates counterfactual portraits for figures for whom there is no visual record, like the abolitionist David Walker, or a wedding portrait of Harriet Tubman, as a way to depict them “fully fleshed out” with a “full humanity” rather than heroic if flattened figures, as he explained in the interview.

The show, titled “The Histories,” comes to Paris from the Royal Academy of Arts in London after Kunsthaus Zürich. The exhibition showcases more than four decades of work, pulling from public and private collections (notably, the Pinault collection and Fondation Louis Vuitton in France). The 70 paintings in the exhibition include eight newly made works, though only one new relative to London and Zurich. The colonial pasts of the U.S., U.K. and France have their own respective realities, and these different histories are certainly interesting in terms of what visitors bring to the show.

The exhibition is divided into 12 sections, spanning 1980 to the present. One of the differences relative to the Royal Academy show is the order in which those cycles appear. The changes are in relation to the architecture, reconfiguring the flow of the show: in Paris, everything is displayed against white walls and there’s one way through the space, while the 18th-century Royal Academy venue offered an enfilade of rooms, giving long sight lines. “The first priority was to make things look great,” curator Mark Godfrey told Observer. Because Kerry’s work has not been seen as much in Paris as in London, Godfrey felt it imperative to organize these series more or less chronologically, barring the last third of the show.

Marshall draws on 19th-century French painting, and it is powerful to see his take on contemporary culture and Afrofuturism in conversation with a historical patrimony. “In the wall text in London, we made reference to Manet and to Caillebotte and to Géricault and to David, and we’re doing that here as well. The nice thing here is that those masterpieces are in museums that are a 20-minute walk away,” Godfrey pointed out.

The show starts with a work that didn’t make it to Paris, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), although it is depicted within the frame of Portrait of the Artist & a Vacuum (1981), hung on the wall. While Marshall was doing a residency at the Studio Museum in the mid-’80s, he made the Ralph Ellison-themed painting Invisible Man (1986). Setting a Black figure against a black background, it’s part of an ongoing theme of Kerry addressing the idea of invisibility, a way of confronting stereotypes. Kerry was also thinking about the legacies of 20th-century abstraction, notably Malevich’s Black Square—in this way, Kerry’s works “are as conceptual as they are visual,” Godfrey noted. These paintings are joined by a much later canvas from 2008, Untitled (Painter), that continues formal ideas about a Black figure—this time an artist, smeared painting palette in the foreground—against a dark background.

The next sequence of four works is a series made in the early 90s about the legacies of the Middle Passage when enslaved Africans were forcibly taken to Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States. Enslaved Africans on a ship in shackles is not Kerry’s approach, but instead a complex and allusive crossover between that history and everyday life in the ’90s. In Plunge (1992), a figure is about to jump into a swimming pool “that doubles as the Atlantic Ocean, or a diving back into a very traumatic history,” Godfrey said. African religions are also coded here: the red crosses “might strike European viewers as things connected to the symbol for help, but in Yoruban symbology, the red cross is associated with Eshu, who’s one of the pantheon of Yoruban gods,” Godfrey explained. There are also veves—pencil diagrams drawn to summon gods—in Voyager (1992), which come from Haitian voodoo.

The next sequence engages with everyday life, as painters in France did. Kerry spent a lot of time with Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which influenced Past Times (1997). It’s from a series of paintings called The Garden Project—three of which hang here—set in project housing built in the ’40s and ’50s for communities of Black Americans who were migrating from the south. They were built in a spirit of optimism and hope, but by the time Kerry painted them, they’d become run-down and under-resourced. Rather than painting suffering and crime, Kerry paints people gardening, children playing, teenagers dating. There are Chicago skyscrapers on the horizon, references to the music of the Temptations or Snoop Dogg, and the Black middle class enjoying pursuits like water skiing and golf.

Godfrey noted that they’re as interesting in terms of fabrication as for their spirit: they were made on large unstretched canvases, painted on sheets of paper glued onto the surface, sometimes with collage elements. “Why I enjoy looking at them again and again is as much because of how they’re made as what they might be pointing to or about,” Godfrey said. This hybrid of history and leisure as related to the Black experience feels emblematic of Kerry’s work, but Godfrey notes that Jacob Lawrence’s paintings—although on a smaller scale—depict moments of important history, like the Haitian revolution, but also people playing pool, or children playing games on the streets of Harlem. “That combination of commitment to history and everyday, I think Kerry’s not the first Black artist to do that.”

De Style, a 1993 work featuring five guys at a barber shop, is one of the first paintings Kerry sold to a museum (LACMA). Meaningfully, Kerry visited that very museum growing up; he was both impressed by the large paintings there but also hyperaware that none featured Black subjects. The title namechecks Mondrian’s established movement, De Stijl—moreover, there are visual references to Mondrian with the planes of blue, red and yellow. “It’s both what you might expect to find in a barber shop and also not,” Godfrey reflected. “He’s very attentive to the organization of a picture” and, moreover, motivated by “different strategies of pictorial craft.”

Then there are four souvenir paintings that were made for an exhibition in 1997 at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. At the time they were made, Kerry was thinking about what the legacies of the 1960s meant in the 1990s. “Other people were doing that as well—Spike Lee made the film Malcolm X in this decade,” Godfrey noted. Middle-aged, middle-class Black women in domestic interiors (with Ebony magazines, lace doilies, floral sofas) appear as angelic figures under commemorative presences: the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, the four teenage girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, freedom riders, Malcolm X, members of the Black Panther Party like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were killed in Chicago in 1969.

A work first shown in the Venice Biennale in 2003 is the polished floor-based sculpture Wake—it summons the journey made by enslaved Africans, but it also accumulates medallions depicting African Americans every time it’s made, growing and growing. As such, it draws on the legacy of the sacred power Nkisi Nkondi and the idea that, in West African sculpture, the more elements added, the more powerful it accrues. “Instead of having a vision of ongoing trauma, Kerry replaces that with this sculpture which is about increased cultural achievements,” Godfrey explained.

Changing scale, an interlude in the museum showcases original sketches from his comic Rhythm Mastr, which was self-published but officially reissued in 2025 with Rizzoli. Begun in 1999 and ongoing, it features fighters pushing back against the problems that affect Black American neighborhoods in a substitute for the South Side of Chicago; Kerry did the visuals and the text. (In London, an independent show dedicated to Rhythm Mastr happened alongside the main painting show.)

Further in, the ongoing painting of modern life is beautifully evoked in School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), made 20 years after Kerry painted the barbershop scene: it acts in dialogue with it, as a kind of sister work. People are seen getting ready for a night out, posing, taking photos of each other. Kerry sometimes makes his own clothes in order to see how they fall on a figure; some of the fabrics therein are based on silhouettes he will have made.

Kerry was looking at Fragonard, Watteau and the tradition of rococo Romantic painting for the early 2000s series Vignettes. Love scenes are taking place, yet Kerry makes it clear there is no romantic space outside of politics for Black couples. The glittered painting that is maybe the most spectacular of the series, Vignette #14 (La La La), includes a Pan-African flag, a fire in the distance, the toppled torch of the Statue of Liberty. “The tune is ‘Ma Cherie Amour’ from Stevie Wonder, but the look on the guy’s face is one of concern rather than great love,” according to Godfrey. That unease is just as much a part of these works as the dominant gauzy pink.

The elaborate, heterogeneous 2014 painting Untitled (Studio), from the Met’s collection, acknowledges the tradition of studio painting in Paris, as in The Painter’s Studio (1855) by Gustave Courbet. In a close study on the Met’s website, it is noted that the table is crowded with cans of paint, brushes and knickknacks, including a jokey-looking skull and a small bust of President Abraham Lincoln (“assassinated just months before the 13th Amendment enshrined freedom for enslaved persons across the country”). There are two nude men and two clothed women, and an easel on which the scene is not being replicated. It is elaborate and contains multitudes, oddities mixed with classicism.

The show ends with a sequence of eight works newly made for this exhibition, which premiered at the Royal Academy. Here, the history of slavery includes how one African tribe would enslave people from another. In Cove (2025), slaves are being walked onto a beach to be loaded onto canoes and then shipped out. Nearby, a painting shows the return journey to shore where the canoe is now laden with the booty from the slave sales. Some things Kerry put into this painting are historically accurate, like cowry shells, kegs of rum and guns—but some are absurdly fictional, like gift-wrapped presents. “He’s often blurring or confusing the idea of what a history painting is and what a fantasy painting is,” Godfrey said.

The last painting in the show, from 2025, also blurs history and fantasy: Léopold Senghor, one of the key figures within the Négritude movement, wrote about the beauty of Blackness shortly before becoming president of Senegal and married Frenchwoman Colette Hubert. The wedding happened in 1957; Senegal became independent in 1960. Kerry’s depiction is “as if Senegal and France were almost sewn together”—quite literally through a union of flags, as if proposing a speculative history, mixing accurate research and total fabrication.

At the time of the show’s opening, Godfrey accompanied Marshall to the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, where he was “deeply happy” and an eager observer of the “compression of space” among older paintings by, say, Ingres. Although reimagination is intrinsic to Marshall’s work, Godfrey noted that he looks to artists of the past to consider “pictorial compositional challenges… in such a way that it will be engaging five hundred years after you’ve made it.”

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