At nine feet tall and 13 feet wide, Kerry James Marshall's "School of Beauty, School of Culture" doesn't just tower over museum visitors—it draws them into a vibrant world where contemporary Black life meets centuries of art history. The monumental painting, currently featured in the largest European survey of the acclaimed American artist's work at London's Royal Academy, presents what appears to be an everyday scene in a bustling hair salon, but closer examination reveals intricate layers of coded references spanning from Disney animations to Renaissance masterpieces.
Marshall, who set a groundbreaking auction record in 2018 when his "Past Times" sold for $21.1 million—the highest price for a work by a living African-American artist at that time—has earned widespread acclaim as one of the world's most important living artists. The Royal Academy exhibition "Kerry James Marshall: The Histories," which opened recently, has garnered glowing reviews with critics using words like "staggering," "triumphant," "ingenious," and "astonishing" to describe the show. Art historian Mark Godfrey, who curated the exhibition, explains that the painting's massive scale allows it to compete with other major museum works and can be viewed from as far as 200 feet away, commanding its own dedicated wall in the gallery.
Completed in 2012, the painting depicts a lively scene inside a beauty salon where the community gathers for transformation and conversation. In one corner, a woman gestures animatedly while chatting with her hairdresser, while groups of men and women congregate throughout the space. Slightly off-center, a poised woman dressed in a yellow-and-black shirt and striped pants stares directly at viewers, her knees bent with one arm resting behind her head and the other on her waist as two children play at her feet. The scene buzzes with the energy of a local business that serves as both a commercial establishment and community hub.
"I'm more interested in the specificity of beauty shops and barbershops for Black subjects because that's where I am and who I am," Marshall explained during an advance showing of the exhibition. The artist, who has lived in Chicago for nearly four decades, draws inspiration from a beauty school around the corner from his studio where students learn cosmetology and manicuring. He views such establishments as places of both ordinary life and transformative magic, where "people go in and they come out transformed: they come out polished, they come out made up, they come out done."
The 2012 masterpiece continues a conversation Marshall began almost 26 years earlier with "De Style" (1993), which depicted a Black barbershop. Named after the Dutch art movement De Stijl founded by Piet Mondrian in 1917, that earlier work used primary colors and precisely arranged salon furniture to reference abstract paintings of the era. Most striking were the gravity-defying hairstyles of two figures and the Christ-like hand gesture of the barber, signaling the spiritual importance of such institutions within the Black community. Marshall notes that "School of Beauty, School of Culture" was "a painting I meant to do when I finished De Style," though other projects intervened before he could complete his vision of representing "the entire scope of the way in which people go to places to make themselves into the best version of themselves."
Marshall isn't alone in recognizing the cultural significance of these spaces. Many Black artists, filmmakers, and writers have explored similar themes, from Nigerian writer Inua Ellams' 2017 play "Barber Shop Chronicles," which examines the setting across five African cities, to British-Jamaican painter Hurvin Anderson's ongoing examination of barbershops since he first painted one in Birmingham, UK, in 2006.
However, the painting's true complexity lies in its dense layering of art historical references. Most notably, in the foreground, a distorted, anamorphic depiction of Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty in yellow catches the attention of an intrigued toddler in overalls. This detail directly references Hans Holbein the Younger's "The Ambassadors" (1533), where two friends stand among various artifacts while a distorted skull lurks at the bottom of the composition. "In that painting, Holbein was thinking about how their lives were haunted by death," Godfrey explains. "Kerry uses that idea to think about how white standards of beauty might intrude upon the beauty salon."
Marshall also strategically places mirrors throughout the composition, nodding to Jan van Eyck's "Arnolfini Portrait" (1434) and Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (1656), two works renowned for their sophisticated use of reflection. Van Eyck's curved mirror offers viewers an expanded view of the domestic scene, while Velázquez's mirror placement reveals the reflection of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. In Marshall's interpretation, as the central woman poses for the viewer, the mirror behind her reveals the flash of a photographer's camera as he raises his arms to capture the moment. "Those are all very deliberate and direct references," Marshall confirms, "but in general, for the average person, without any of those references, this place looks familiar."
Contemporary Black culture receives equal attention in the painting's rich tapestry of references. A signed poster of singer Lauryn Hill and another advertising UK-born artist Chris Ofili's 2010 Tate Britain exhibition decorate the salon walls. At the time of that Tate show, Ofili was widely considered the most famous Black artist in British history. Marshall first encountered Ofili's work in New York and was immediately impressed: "They were the best paintings I'd ever seen because they were rich, complex, and layered." He believes Ofili "operates at the highest level that paintings can be made."
Godfrey sees Marshall's diverse mix of references as central to his artistic genius: "He will refer to Raphael and Holbein because he is a scholar of painting and its history, and he'll refer to Lauryn Hill because he's a person in the world and he listens to great music." This approach reflects Marshall's philosophy that "I'm always trying to make the densest, most compact, complicated pictures I can make. More is more."
The most striking aspect of "School of Beauty, School of Culture," however, remains the figures themselves. Every person in the salon is painted in a deep shade of black, which Godfrey says forces viewers to confront "the presence of Black people within large-scale paintings." He explains that "in the '60s and '70s, especially in the States, people were beginning to use the word Black with a capital B to refer to themselves and their identity. At that point, Marshall decided to make figures that were also black, literally."
Marshall's approach to painting Black figures has evolved significantly over his career. In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self" (1980), the figure's blackness appears one-dimensional, with only the whites of the eyes and a wide, toothy grin defining the facial features. Since then, he has added increasing visual richness to the jet-black skin. "You start with black and then work from there to build up the most complexity you can by making the colors richer and richer and more sophisticated," he explains. "Over time, you end up not with a flat cipher, but with a figure that's fully dimensional."
The figures populating Marshall's paintings are fictional rather than portrait-based. "I don't take pictures [photographs]," he clarifies, gesturing toward his interviewer. "I wouldn't take your picture and then paint you black." In his artistic vision, the figures he depicts have always possessed their degree of blackness. "These figures were born black," he emphasizes. "They are fundamentally black figures. They are black to the core."
"Kerry James Marshall: The Histories" runs at the Royal Academy in London from September 20 through January 18, 2026, offering European audiences their most comprehensive look yet at one of America's most significant contemporary artists and his ongoing project to center Black life within the grand tradition of Western painting.
