Kerry James Marshall

The first painting of the cycle, Cove presents what appears at first to be an unremarkable scene in which several oarsmen loiter around three beached canoes, waiting to embark on their next journey. Apart from one reclining figure—an art-historical trope often used as a signifier of leisure—who lounges in the front canoe, the rest of the men look out towards the distance. There, chained captives are being led single file toward the boats.

 
The rowers are a de facto audience of complicity, one into which the viewer is necessarily incorporated, observing men of similar attire being herded toward a vastly different fate.

Haul, the last painting of the cycle, pictures the return from a trade. A canoe comes back to shore, laden with goods received: kegs of rum, guns, and great baskets of cowrie shells—all known to have been traded within Africa in those years—as well as a Victorian teacup, a mantel clock, and other such European prizes. 
 
A female figure bedecked in cowries—Marshall’s own La Grande Odalisque—reclines in the center of the canvas with her hand raised to the sky to block the sun. Idling seagulls dot the composition and placid sea, as though to suggest that the boat is moving at a leisurely pace; in fact, upon closer inspection, four rowers are required to move the canoe’s tremendous bounty through the water. 
 
The scene features a handful of anachronistic details, including objects in modern gift wrap, a blonde wig wearing a crown, and the 1970s-inflected outfit of a gunner who keeps watch over the horizon. On the rifle plate, Marshall has affixed his own monogram, as if to further stamp the artist’s presence and authorial subjectivity.

In Abduction of Olaudah and his sister, Marshall imagines the abduction of Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797) and his sister from their village of Essaka, located in present-day Nigeria, a real-life event that took place when Equiano was around the age of eleven. 
 
After being transported to the Caribbean, where he was sold into slavery in the Americas, Equiano eventually gained his freedom in 1766. He became a well-known writer and abolitionist in London, where he settled as a freedman. Equiano went on to detail his abduction in his 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which became a key text in England’s burgeoning abolitionist movement, of which he was a leading figure; the book remains an important primary source from this period. 
 
In the painting, the kidnapping is partially obscured by foliage—“a matrix placed to sew us into the view, a veil set to heighten care in observation,” as Darby English notes in the exhibition catalogue. 
 
The lush surroundings, with birds and monkeys roaming freely through the branches, stand in direct contrast to the nefarious act happening within. The perpetrators are dressed anachronistically in modern clothing, suggesting the continued occurrence of such events. Their hands are clamped over the children’s mouths, literally silencing them. 
 
In the center of the composition, a shirtless man stands wielding a rifle on which Marshall has included an elaborate ivory carving that replicates the titular figure from Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Just above, Marshall has affixed his own monogram to the gun’s medallion, to again make visible his authorial presence and subjectivity. As English suggests, the artist does this in order to “to fuse his action with the slavers’ grandiose shows of force, which at once signal the fragility of their operations and flex the muscle reinforcing those operations against threats from similarly opportunistic competitors.”

White Queens of Africa: Colette imagines the wedding portrait of Colette Hubert (1925–2019), a Frenchwoman who served as the First Lady of Senegal from 1960 to 1980. In 1957, in a small ceremony in France, she wed the Senegalese poet, intellectual, and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), a staunch advocate of civil liberties in France’s territories in Africa at the time. 
 
Notably, Senghor was one of the primary theoreticians of Négritude, a movement among francophone writers and thinkers that advocated for the affirmation of Black cultural heritage and identity, both in colonized Africa and the European diaspora, fighting against the threat of assimilation. Just three years after his wedding to Hubert, Senghor became the first president of the newly independent Senegal. Senghor referred to Hubert as the love of his life; she was both a muse for his literary endeavors and a ballast in his political life. 
 
In the painting, Hubert, dressed in full Western bridal regalia, walks alone down a makeshift aisle leading out of the presidential palace in Dakar, led by a single flower girl who gazes out at the viewer. Hubert is veiled by the shadow of a canopy made from French and Senegalese flags that are literally stitched together, held up by attendants wearing green and yellow outfits adorned with Senghor’s face. 
 
Of course, Marshall has put Hubert in front of a building that in 1957 she did not yet live in, surrounded by the green, yellow, and red tricolor that had not yet been adopted, in a country where her wedding did not take place. And, as with Ruth Williams, Marshall puts the focus on her presence during this early postcolonial era.

As his point of departure for this imagined scene, Marshall uses a line found in a European slave trader’s journal (referenced in the artwork’s title): “They used to give 12 men for one horse. Now they only want to give 6.” Indeed, a large horse stands regally in the foreground of the painting, presumably acquired in exchange for six people. A gaggle of attendants fawn over the animal, shielded from the hot sun by a colorful umbrella reminiscent of the parasols prevalent in nineteenth-century depictions of bourgeois leisure. (European horses were not well suited to the climate of West Africa.) Several people dress the horse, braiding its mane and tasseling its hooves, while a small child waits nearby, holding the reins in a basket. By contrast, the oba, or chief, is relegated to the background of the composition, and appears diminutive. 
 
Marshall emphasizes the collision of African and European cultures throughout the composition, evident in the activities and appearances of the range of individuals he depicts, as well as the architecture. The space of the painting is grounded by a large rectilinear structure in the background, its thatched roof dotted with chickens and framed on either side by the low trees native to the region. 
 
The oba appears on the building’s portico wearing a red cassock, an indicator of the arrival and adoption of Christianity—and a sign of not only Western goods, but also ideology, being imported. Behind him, two large bronze plaques (made by melting down the Portuguese currency paid for slaves) punctuate the façade and feature imagery emblematic of the oba’s power. A leopard and a rifle-wielding sentry patrol the ground in front of him. 
 
Throughout this body of work, the artist borrows numerous compositional and perspectival strategies from Renaissance and neoclassical painting—styles that have crucially informed the Western tradition and are noted for their illusionistic treatment of space—and uses them to question the ways in which history is constructed. In the center of the painting, a single female figure dances gleefully, arms outstretched in revelry. Her pose and positioning echo Jacques-Louis David’s The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799), another history painting that depicts the consequences of a mass abduction. To the woman’s left, a cavalcade of drummers and revelers contribute to the festive atmosphere, as do five individuals who hold aloft horns made from carved ivory elephant tusks—rarified and valuable objects they have chosen to keep rather than barter as a sign of respect for the oba. 
 
The composition, as with each work in this new series, is placed in a black aluminum artist’s frame, calling attention to its status as art-object and acting as a reminder of the constructed nature, as well as untold complexities, of all historical accounts. Moreover, in debuting this series at London’s Royal Academy, Marshall mounts a direct challenge to the hegemony of the West in constructing and upholding the dominant historical and art-historical narratives, which frequently gloss over any involvement with slavery. 
 
Yet, in Six for one, the slave trade is referenced only obliquely, and Marshall instead shifts focus to how its introduction affected African society, pushing it towards a Western idea of modernity. As Darby English elaborates: “Folding slavery into a larger story suggests, not coyly, that we have a larger story. This episode concerns the desires slavery aroused in some Black people. As Marshall says, it opens ‘a more realistic view of what we are willing to do to each other in order to get some stuff.’”