Beauty Examined is a pivotal example of Kerry James Marshall’s revolutionary ability to synthesize formal rigor and contemporary social critique. A monumental rendition of an anatomical dissection of a Black female figure across a thickly painted and unstretched canvas, Beauty Examined stands as one of the artist’s most important works. Seamlessly interweaving text, found imagery, and art historical references with motifs of the artist’s own invention, Beauty Examined develops the richly diversified visual lexicon fundamental in Marshall’s celebrated oeuvre to deliver an incisive and poignant commentary on the racial and gendered paradigms of beauty. Executed in 1993, the same year as Marshall’s debut solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, Beauty Examined stridently declares the arrival of his mature and celebrated artistic project: the interrogation of the canon of Western art history to revise its traditions and counter the glaring absence of the Black figure within it. The present work also marks an ambitious shift in the scale and subject matter of Marshall’s practice in the early 1990s. It is one of the first paintings that Marshall executed on unstretched canvas, which augmented the scale of his dynamic work to that of billboards or theatrical backdrops, as well as one of his earliest major paintings to center the Black female figure, who continues to appear as a key figure in his purposeful exploration of race and gender in American society.

While many of Marshall’s paintings celebrate Black culture by representing the Black figure at picnics or in playgrounds, rendered in exuberant colors, Beauty Examined tackles a heavier discourse, critiquing and bemoaning the oppressive weight of Eurocentric beauty standards to which Black women remain subjected. The significance of the present work within Marshall’s prodigious career is evidenced by its appearance as a pivotal part of Kerry James Marshall: Mastry in 2016 to 2017, the major mid-career survey co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A startling yet elegiac inquest into the complex intersections of art history, aesthetic culture, and scientific racism, Beauty Examined incisively exposes the brutality of the gaze to which the Black woman has been subjugated, evincing Kerry James Marshall’s triumphant ability to reshape the artistic canon by recontextualizing its precedents to make sweeping political statements that reverberate with force and fury.

Lying naked on a cold grey slab, the anonymous woman in Marshall’s Beauty Examined gazes blankly towards the viewer, a surgical corpse whose arm is being dissected. Marshall’s scene draws from Rembrandt’s Baroque classic Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), which depicts a reputable surgeon as he explains the dissected musculature of a cadaver’s arm in an anatomy lesson, once a social event in the 17th century that welcomed the attendance of medical students and colleagues. While the deceased corpse of Rembrandt’s painting remains enclosed within his narrative representation of a private anatomy lesson, the nameless Black woman in the present work exists outside specific time and place, leaving her openly exposed to the omnipresent gaze of Marshall’s audience. Defenseless under the piercing scrutiny of a medical exam for all to see and observe, the supine subject of Beauty Examined suffers the degradation of a purely aesthetic evaluation, and serves as a proxy for Marshall’s own artistic and philosophical examination into the reprehensible histories that govern conventional beauty standards.

To heighten the intensity of inspection in this dehumanizing dissection scene in Beauty Examined, Marshall integrates his uncanny reference to art historical paintings of anatomical dissections with found imagery and text, displaying his ingenious ability to fashion a versatile visual vernacular of his own in his groundbreaking intervention into a hegemonic artistic canon. The artist affixes to the canvas diagrams of the human skeleton, heart, and other organs torn from a medical textbook, highlighting the analytical inquiry undergone by the Black figure in his contemporary painterly rendition of a traditional anatomical dissection. At the same time, Marshall inscribes emboldened textual descriptions that denote the subject’s age, height, weight, race, and sex above her figure, which further reduce her to an object of empirical study. Marshall presents this collage of images and signs on large unstretched canvas, revealing his interrogation into the fundamental structures of painting while confronting his viewers with a titanic and raw expression of resonant social commentary. Marshall has explained that his “overarching principle is still to move the Black figure from the periphery to the center and, secondly, to have these figures operate in a wide range of historical genres and stylistic modes culled from the history of painting...I am using African American cultural and social history as a catalyst for what kind of pictures to make.” (The artist in conversation with Dieter Roeltraete, “An Argument for Something Else,” in: Nav Haq, ed., Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff, Ghent, 2014, p. 26). Beauty Examined is thus an early testament to Marshall’s revolutionary painterly praxis, revealing the generative mode of visual and political expression that he has developed to reshape the artistic canon throughout his phenomenal career.

Marshall’s incisive inquisition into the politics of race and gender within bodily aesthetics in the present work appropriately mines from traditions of Western painting, where the canonical focus on anatomical study found in classical masterpieces by Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michaelangelo is rooted in the ancient Greek principle that ideals of beauty are measured and expressed in the nude human body. In Marshall’s Beauty Examined, judgements on the Black female figure’s attractiveness are determined along Western aesthetic standards by the stereotypical annotations that label her dissected naked anatomy part by part: “big legs,” “big thighs,” “big hips,” “big tits.” Seen together with the brightly red text “Exhibit A” on top of the canvas, Marshall’s diagrammatic composition serves also as an eerie reminder of the pseudo-scientific case studies and ethnographic exhibitions of Black corporeality throughout Western colonial history. The blunt dehumanization that the subject undergoes in Marshall’s Beauty Examined is reminiscent of the disturbing story of Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman taken by Dutch traders in the nineteenth century who would perform laboratory studies on her body and then display her both alive and posthumously throughout Europe under the pseudonym “Hottentot Venus”. Part of a larger ethnographic practice that exhibited Black women’s bodies as “freak show” attractions and analyzed their physiology to support white supremacist scientific theories, the dehumanizing presentation of Baartman echoes in the trauma experienced by the ruthlessly inspected subject in Beauty Examined, who similarly occupies a dialectical position as both corporeal spectacle and objectified figure. Harking back to the disquieting histories behind the aesthetic evaluation of the Black feminine figure, Marshall pointedly illuminates the menacing irony behind the maxim “beauty is only skin deep.” This revelation becomes particularly striking as Marshall inscribes the written aphorism along the recumbent subject’s dissected arm in Beauty Examined, which curator Janine Mileaf astutely points out “has been flayed out to expose muscle, tendons, and blood vessels – skin removed to show the sameness of bodies bereft of race and the cruelty of judgment applied to that missing skin.” (Janine Mileaf, “The Subjects of Women’s Health,” Inside Out Loud, St. Louis, 2004, p. 69, illustrated)

Seemingly lifeless on the examination table, the woman in Beauty Examined is encircled by a bed of roses, which evoke the commemorative flowers of a vigil while calling to mind Cy Twombly’s famous corpus of Blossom paintings. White paint translucently coats some of the stenciled roses, imbuing them with a ghostly presence to lend the politically charged work a tone of lamentation and sorrow; from other roses, drips of crimson paint trail down the canvas, blood that we do not see on the body itself. Behind the floral imagery and streaks of paint, Marshal blankets the massive canvas in rosy pinks, verdant greens, soft greys, and pastel yellows, a pale-colored field that stands at odds with not only the starkly Black skin of the subject, but also the harsh violence of the experience she is undergoing. Achieving a delicate balance between pointed critique and tragic poignancy in its representation of historical injustice, Marshall’s Beauty Examined profoundly reinforces the intricate tension between beauty and brutality in aesthetic evaluations of the human body.

In Beauty Examined, Marshall valiantly confronts the artistic canon upon its own terms, boldly usurping the grand artistic gestures of past movements to assert the primacy and presence of an African American narrative within the legacy of Western painting and history. Testimony to Marshall’s continuing legacy of driving forward necessary revisions to the artistic canon and inspiring new generations of artists of color, the celebrated contemporary painter Rashid Johnson proclaims, “Kerry’s influence expands so far beyond his own project. He’s an electric and dynamic thinker who’s also had an enormous influence on those of us who use abstraction and more conceptual approaches. There are two artists without whom I probably would not have become one – David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall” (Rashid Johnson, quoted in: Calvin Tomkins, “The Epic Style of Kerry James Marshall,” 2 August 2021, The New Yorker (online)) Both a resounding manifesto and an emotive soliloquy for the scrutiny to which Black women’s bodies have been subjected for centuries, Beauty Examined from 1993 is a seminal example of Marshall’s titanic contributions to art history by reconfiguring and expanding its paradigms in service of contemporary cultural enlightenment.

Artist

Kerry James Marshall