Kerry James Marshall, whose highly anticipated retrospective, "Mastry," opens Oct. 25 at the Met Breuer, is steeped in classical training more thoroughly than almost any painter of his generation. He's spent hundreds of hours in figure-drawing classes and anatomical studies, honing techniques developed over centuries by idols like Veronese and Rembrandt, to "get up alongside them on the wall," as he says.
But the other day in his studio in the Bronzeville district on this city's South Side, he took me upstairs to show off some painting implements certainly unavailable in Renaissance Venice or Baroque Amsterdam. Opening a plastic bin, he produced a handful of plastic noggins severed from bobblehead dolls—mostly of professional basketball players like James Harden and Sheryl Swoopes, along with the odd Michael Jackson or Muhammad Ali.
"These have become really invaluable to me," said Mr. Marshall, who turns 61 next month but glows with childlike intensity when he talks about how he does what he does. "Working from live models is too much trouble; it takes too much time. These things are actually incredibly accurate." Turning a head appreciatively between his fingers, he added, "I can look at them from any angle, and they give me a basis of facial structure and head shape."
The heads are a perfect illustration of the dual mission Mr. Marshall has been pursuing with a kind of holy fervor for almost 40 years now: building a sturdy bridge for figurative painting from the 15th century to ours, over treacherous spans of recent history that declared both figuration and painting to be finished—and at the same time trying to rewrite history itself.
The second part is, for Mr. Marshall, the most crucial and the task the most herculean. Too few black painters like himself have gained entry to the canon of Western art, leading to a stunning dearth of black faces and bodies on museum walls, an absence only recently being rectified in a serious way. Mr. Marshall has been trying to rectify it since the first time he picked up brush.
It's no accident that all of the plastic heads packed into the drawers in his studio depict black people: He has always painted only black figures, at leisure, in love, in extremis and in practically all the forms the genre offers (portraiture, history painting, allegory, fête champêtre, even seascape). "If I didn’t do it, how else were they going to be seen?" he said. "That really was the simple way I thought about it. I had to do it."