Of all European countries, the United Kingdom may be the one that has taken the questioning of its thorny colonial heritage most seriously. Exhibits dedicated to artists of African descent have abounded in its museums for years. This season, the National Portrait Gallery is dedicating an exhibition to portraits of black models, while the Dulwich Picture Gallery is dedicating another to landscaping by Afro-British artists. The South African Zanele Muholi is preparing to star in a retrospective at the Tate Modern, while the Tate Britain reorganized its collection in 2023, giving a leading role to the social history of the United Kingdom, the imperial regime, mass immigration and the minorities that resulted from she. Around the same time, the Hayward Gallery dedicated an exhibition to Afrofuturism with 11 artists from the diaspora.
However positive it may be, this growing representation does not always imply a true examination of conscience, but rather just a facelift. On paper, this spring's exhibition at the Royal Academy, an institution founded in 1768 and with an artistically conservative reputation, seemed to be part of a non-threatening pursuit of the
status quo
. That is why the result is so astonishing: the exhibition manages to formulate a very brave self-criticism about its links with the colonial order, aesthetically and politically. Its members were not slave owners, but they did benefit from the support of patrons enriched thanks to triangular trade, and they always put art at the service of power, almost without exceptions. Its first director, the painter Joshua Reynolds, swore that the Royal Academy would be “an ornament” of the British Empire.
The exhibition suggests, but never underlines, and exemplifies its ideas through art and not with theoretical harangues on its walls.
“The master's tools never dismantle the master's house,” said Audre Lorde. As if doing an audit, the institution originally commissioned an exhibition on slavery from an external curator, Dorothy Price, a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a specialist on the issue. The result, despite its corny and colorless title (
Entangled Pasts
), goes far beyond the original plan and is not afraid to get into gardens. The exhibition compares historical paintings with colonial themes signed by artists who were part of the Royal Academy with contemporary works that refer to the same imagery, only to subvert or deactivate it. It is not about recalibrating the canon in a cosmetic way as so many others have done in recent times, but rather about confronting the official story with the critical narratives typical of any somewhat healthy post-imperial society.
The first rooms of the exhibition are exemplary in form and substance: they condense portraits of slaves and servants made invisible by art history, in the manner of what the Orsay Museum did with
Le modèle noir
in 2019, and also large oil paintings such as
Watson and the Shark
(1778), by John Singleton Copley, where a black character tries to save, with discreet heroism, a teenager who is drowning in the ocean while the rest of the luggage panics. The contemporary counterpoint, which appears in each of the rooms of the exhibition, is provided by Hew Locke, member of the Royal Academy, with Armada (2017-2019), an installation that summarizes Great Britain's colonial adventure through an endless number of hanging ships, many of them rusty and precarious, as if insinuating that the grandiose imperial project was, in reality, of considerable shabbyness. In the neighboring room is Kara Walker, who presents her fascinating sketches for the anti-monument that she erected at the Tate Modern in 2019, which she ironically, rather rudely, about the ridiculous nineteenth-century imaginary.
'Watson and the Shark' (1778), oil painting by John Singleton Copley in the London exhibitionMuseum of Fine Arts Boston
Not all the juxtapositions are perfect, but they are original and daring, the result of a team of four curators who demonstrate an admirable capacity for comparative exercise. The exhibition suggests, but never underlines, and exemplifies his ideas through art and not with theoretical harangues written on its walls. The best example is the incredible room that confronts Turner's murky and almost abstract seascapes, in which we seem to glimpse the lives lost at the bottom of the Atlantic, with a recent series by Ellen Gallagher in which, after a few seconds of observation, it seems to us see limbs floating in the sea. John Akomfrah, a British man of Ghanaian origin who is preparing to represent the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale, updates
Moby Dick,
talking about whaling on our damaged planet, while Frank Bowling, the first black artist to enter the Royal Academy, paints abstract landscapes stained blood red, an avowed allegory about the
middle passage,
as the slave trade was euphemistically called.
It is the climax of the exhibition, of unparalleled theoretical, artistic and emotional intensity. Next, it is logical that the colorful statues of Lubaina Himid, named after former slaves and their market price (zero pounds sterling per head), seem like a populist and somewhat oversized exercise, taking up two entire rooms of the exhibition . The same happens with the recreation of
The Last Supper
by Tavares Strachan in the museum courtyard, which replaces the figures painted by Leonardo da Vinci with great names in the history of blackness, such as Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia — in the role of… Jesus!—, the American politician Shirley Chisholm or Robert Lawrence, the first African-American astronaut to travel to outer space. And, despite those small concessions intended for those who were only looking for a cool selfie, the exhibition arouses a certain amount of envy if viewed from other latitudes. Especially, from places that still deny their history of exploitation and extractivism, and that do not even accept their relationship with colonialism. They only governed viceroys.
'Entangled Pasts, 1768-now. Art, Colonialism and Change'.
Royal Academy. London. Up to april 28th.
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