People say we're in the middle of a second civil rights movement, and we are. The only surprise is that the first one ever ended. The artist Kerry James Marshallwas there for it. He was just a kid then, born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1955. But kids take in a lot.
He was in Birmingham in 1963, when white supremacists dynamited a Baptist church and killed four young girls. He was 9 and living in Los Angeles in 1965 when Watts went up in flames. He remembers all that, just as he also remembers growing up in those years in a loving family: mother, father, sister, brother. Home.
Artists take in a lot, too. Mr. Marshall has absorbed enough personal history, American history, African-American history and art history to become one of the great history painters of our time. That's the painter you'll see in "Kerry James Marshall: Mastry," the smashing 35-year career retrospective that opens on Tuesday at the Met Breuer.
The first thing you may notice about him as an artist is that he's an ace storyteller, so good that you realize how rare that is. Sometimes he spells out narrative scenes, even somewhat fantastical ones, straightforwardly as in the sublime 1997 painting "Souvenir I," in which a middle-aged matron arranges her living room as a shrine to 1960s civil rights martyrs. What's fantastical is that the woman has glitter-encrusted wings, like an angel.
Just as often, stories are merely implied, and they can be perplexing. One of the earliest of the show's 72 paintings, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self," dates from 1980, two years after Mr. Marshall graduated from what was then called the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. It's a small image–he would later typically work at mural scale–of a bust-length, black-skinned male figure whose contours are barely readable against a slightly lighter black background. His only clear features are the whites of his eyes, and his broad, gap-toothed smile.
You may think, with a twinge of unease, of cartoons, or of old racist stereotypes, or of race as performance: blackamoors, Sambos, Madea. What Mr. Marshall was thinking of was Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel "Invisible Man," whose African-American hero knows that his color makes him unseeable as a person in white America: He’s a black; that’s it. Mr. Marshall complicates this idea by taking it in two directions: His "self-portrait" is simultaneously recessive and unmissable, with his eyes and his assertive, mock-cheerful, near-skeletal smile that shine like pin spots in the dark.
Black skin is a constant in Mr. Marshall's art. More than three decades ago, he resolved to devote himself to creating a new, disruptive art history, one that would insert–big-time–the absent black figure into the tradition of Western art, which was a tradition he loved and identified with.