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拍品專文
Kerry James Marshall’s powerful portrait Lost Boys: AKA Black Al belongs to an important series of paintings from the early 1990s in which the artist redefined the nature of contemporary portraiture. The result of Marshall’s forensic study of the history of Western painting (including portraiture, self-portraiture, history painting, genre painting, landscapes, and even abstraction) was a remarkable series of canvases which reintroduced the Black figure into modern painting. As the artist himself noted, “the overarching principle is still to move the black figure from the periphery to the center and, secondly, to have these figures operate in a wide range of historical genres and stylistic modes culled from the history of painting. Those really are my two overarching conceptual motivations. I am using African American cultural and social history as a catalyst for what kind of pictures to make. What I’m trying to do in my work is address Absence with a capital A” (quoted in “The artist in conversation with Dieter Roeltraete” in “An Argument for Something Else” in N. Haq, ed., Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, exh. cat., Museum van Hedenaagse Kunst Antwerpen, 2014, p. 26).
Sporting a well-worn gray t-shirt, the subject of Marshall’s mesmeric painting stares out of the picture plane with a look that defiantly engages with his audience. Immediately surrounding his head appears a green halo, over which has been painted the letters A K A, these in turn have been overlaid with a series of swiftly executed decorative floral motifs intertwined with dramatic curlicue flourishes. It is only when the eye settles on the date 1973-1989 in the lower register, that the viewer fully comprehends that this is a memento mori for a young man who died at the age of just sixteen.
Although the artist has stated that the idea behind these painting was, in part, a reaction to the Western canon and paintings such as Sandro Botticelli’s Giuliano de’ Medici (circa 1478-1480, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) which memorialized a murdered son of the famous Italian dynasty, the Lost Boys paintings also hold a highly personal meaning for Marshall. Shortly before he embarked on the series his younger brother was sent to jail, and this traumatic event brought home to the artist the realities of life for many African American men.
Marshall had also always been interested in children’s literature (early in his career, he had wanted to be a children’s book illustrator) and J.M. Barry’s Peter Pan, a story of a group of boys who had never really grown up had personal resonance for him. “…if I apply that concept of being lost in a Never, Never Land to a lot of young black men,” he once said, “where in some cases it wasn’t that they had a willful desire never to grow up, as much as they often never had an opportunity to grow up because there were far too many young black men cut down very early in their lives… so it was thinking about that book and that concept of being lost from Peter Pan and then applying it to a concept of being lost: lost in America, lost in the ghetto, lost in public housing, lost in joblessness, and lost in illiteracy. And all of those things sort of changed… all of those things came together with the fact my brother now seemed to be one of those lost” (quoted in C. Rowell, “An interview with Kerry James Marshall” in Callaloo, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 263-272).
The resulting series has become one of Marshall’s most important. Part of his response to his upbringing and the effect that this had on his life, it has become an iconic piece that reflects the experience of a generation and creates a complex vision of the modern African American experience. He uses the somber childhood references for profoundly critical ends. The faithful rendering of the human figure alongside the surreal and abstract passages of paint work to subtly undermine the historic genre of portraiture, creating a complex and compelling image that is steeped in a sense of lost innocence.
Sporting a well-worn gray t-shirt, the subject of Marshall’s mesmeric painting stares out of the picture plane with a look that defiantly engages with his audience. Immediately surrounding his head appears a green halo, over which has been painted the letters A K A, these in turn have been overlaid with a series of swiftly executed decorative floral motifs intertwined with dramatic curlicue flourishes. It is only when the eye settles on the date 1973-1989 in the lower register, that the viewer fully comprehends that this is a memento mori for a young man who died at the age of just sixteen.
Although the artist has stated that the idea behind these painting was, in part, a reaction to the Western canon and paintings such as Sandro Botticelli’s Giuliano de’ Medici (circa 1478-1480, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) which memorialized a murdered son of the famous Italian dynasty, the Lost Boys paintings also hold a highly personal meaning for Marshall. Shortly before he embarked on the series his younger brother was sent to jail, and this traumatic event brought home to the artist the realities of life for many African American men.
Marshall had also always been interested in children’s literature (early in his career, he had wanted to be a children’s book illustrator) and J.M. Barry’s Peter Pan, a story of a group of boys who had never really grown up had personal resonance for him. “…if I apply that concept of being lost in a Never, Never Land to a lot of young black men,” he once said, “where in some cases it wasn’t that they had a willful desire never to grow up, as much as they often never had an opportunity to grow up because there were far too many young black men cut down very early in their lives… so it was thinking about that book and that concept of being lost from Peter Pan and then applying it to a concept of being lost: lost in America, lost in the ghetto, lost in public housing, lost in joblessness, and lost in illiteracy. And all of those things sort of changed… all of those things came together with the fact my brother now seemed to be one of those lost” (quoted in C. Rowell, “An interview with Kerry James Marshall” in Callaloo, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 263-272).
The resulting series has become one of Marshall’s most important. Part of his response to his upbringing and the effect that this had on his life, it has become an iconic piece that reflects the experience of a generation and creates a complex vision of the modern African American experience. He uses the somber childhood references for profoundly critical ends. The faithful rendering of the human figure alongside the surreal and abstract passages of paint work to subtly undermine the historic genre of portraiture, creating a complex and compelling image that is steeped in a sense of lost innocence.