Frauke Josenhans, former Horace W. Goldsmith Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

This painting is by the American artist Kerry James Marshall. It's a part of a series on African American painters that Marshall did around 2008, 2010. It is a untitled painting, which shows a woman, a female artist, sitting in front of an easel with an unfinished painting sitting on top of the easel. The female artist holds a giant palette in her hand, which, of course, is the tool of her trade. She really dominates the composition. She looks directly at the viewer, Then immediately after that, you see what's sitting behind her. The unfinished painting, sitting on the easel, is actually a self-portrait of the woman. It's a painting in the painting.

As you can see, some parts of it have already been painted, in very bright colors, but the major part of this painting is still white. So really we see the artist in the act of painting. It looks like she just stopped to turn around and look at the viewer. That's also obvious through the tool that she's holding in her hand. It's enormous; it really dominates the composition as well. It's almost as large as a torso of the woman, and it has all sorts of colors on a palette, as you would imagine. But surprisingly, the color black is absent from the palette. So you have blue, you have green, you have yellow, and you have a lot of white on this palette, but no black. That seems rather curious for a self-portrait that is supposed to depict the female artist, that you don't want any black on this palette.

Here, Marshall is going back to art-historical sources. I mean, the tradition of self-portraits by artists really goes back to the Renaissance. A lot of very famous artists, especially in European art, have used the self-portrait as a way to depict themselves but also to give themselves validation. You have artists like Courbet and Monet; all of them have painted these portraits. Here the fact that Marshall depicts a woman is not something that he would find very commonly in Western art. And here, he not only depicts a female artist in the act of painting her self-portrait but a Black female artist. That is a very strong statement coming from Marshall. But then he kind of uses all these historical sources and links them to very contemporary issues: of course the absence of Black people in the traditional canon of Western art and then also the question of figuration and abstraction.

Many African American artists felt that abstraction was a way for them to express themselves and find a new way of creating a visual language which could reflect their own identity. Marshall instead here depicts a very figurative subject, but he also uses abstraction in it. When you take a close look at the palette itself—if you only really focus on the palette—you almost have another abstract painting in the painting. So you have this very, very finished painting, with a very smooth surface, for most of the canvas, and then, when you look at the palette, you have this very abstract composition, with a lot of thickly applied paint, sitting on the pallette. So it's almost like here he is referring to these two tendencies in art history and embracing both of them and saying that it is okay to work in both directions and not be limited to either abstraction or figuration. Here he combines both of these tendencies.

Then it's also a very political statement as well. It's a little bit hidden, as is very often this case with self-portraits. Here you have all these historical references, the posture of the woman, the fact that she sits in front of her easel holding the palette. That is something that he would've seen in many historical paintings. But here the way he depicts a woman in a very nontraditional costume, a costume that you can't really connect to a specific time period or style, really makes us question to which period this painting refers.

Also, she has this very elaborate hairstyle. It almost looks like a beret, more like a hat that she's wearing on top of her head. Then, if you take a look at her left hand that is holding the palette, you can see that her thumbnail is actually painted as well, and it represents the colors of the Pan-African flag. That, again, is a very political statement by the artist that is very hidden but visible once your eye wanders down the palette.

Hello! My name is Lukas, from the Class of 2024, and I’m a Gallery Guide here at the Yale University Art Gallery. On my tour, titled "Instruction," I bring visitors to "Untitled" from 2009, painted by Kerry James Marshall, to think critically about where instructions are coming from and what it means when one chooses not to follow them.

Let’s focus our attention on the figure of the Black woman, particularly her body language and expression. When I give my tour, common responses are "severe," "determined," "proud," "grim"—her life-size, unsmiling face meeting our gaze directly. The artist in the painting takes up space, holding her giant palette and paintbrush like a sword and shield. In the tradition of Western portraiture—a tradition that was exclusionary toward Black people—portraits often featured white subjects holding objects in their hands, which were intended to communicate a key part of their identity.

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, Kerry James Marshall visited many museums and found few representations of people who shared his identity as a Black person. One of his goals as an artist is to establish what he calls "a simple Black presence," where Black people are portrayed not in pain or suffering but in control, proud, and with agency.

This approach is evident in Marshall’s "Untitled" painting here at the Gallery, in which he subverts the tacit rules of portraiture by not revealing an identifying name of the woman. Instead of relying on a title to instruct us, we must look to the painting itself and at her. She is an example of the type of Black figure that Marshall paints using eight different shades of black—one of his "figures in the extreme," as the artist puts it. I invite you to pause this audio and look closely at the painting before you: how else do you see color working in this piece?

Some people on my tour are drawn to the palette that is held in the woman’s hand. The lack of black paint and the way in which the painter is gesturing with her paintbrush toward the white and pink paints—two colors that could be combined to produce a white person’s skin tone —indicate that the artist is restricted in her ability or has chosen not to paint herself realistically. Others are drawn toward the paint-by-numbers self-portrait peeking out from behind the woman. Here, instruction is on full display in the reference to a paint-by-numbers composition, a type of premade template with numbers that indicates where certain colors of paint are supposed to be applied. This mass-produced, commercial product originated in the United States in the 1950s and was intended for those who had time to pick up a hobby—often white, middle-class women and children. The majority of compositions were drawn from the European art-historical canon, while other kits depicted exoticized scenes of Latin dancers and Indigenous peoples in tribal costume. Black people were almost never depicted in paint-by-numbers.

Learning this history might change the way you see the power dynamics working within this painting. While the artist’s palette of colors is limited, her decisions to use green for the background and red for her hair in the self-portrait challenge what we might consider to be real. Looking very closely, we can observe that, where she has painted her hair, the numbers 68 and 89 would correspond to two different colors but have been painted the same shade of crimson.

In this way, the artist in the painting has chosen to not follow the instructions that she has been given. Likewise, the artist of the painting, Kerry James Marshall, has also refused to adhere to the traditional instructions about who is deemed worthy of portraiture, who is deemed beautiful, and who can be an artist.