In this complex and enthralling show, there is a gallery entitled Constructing Whiteness. It contains perhaps the most boring work I’ve seen at this gallery. Frederick William Elwell’s painting of the Royal Academy’s Selection and Hanging Committee in 1938.
Every one of them is a white, middle-aged or elderly man, sitting stiffly at a table after dinner. As the writer Alayo Akinkugbe says in the show’s catalogue, the artist Augustus John that year described “the predominant junta of deadly conservatism” at the Academy. Elwell’s picture embodies it.
A marker of the fierce intelligence of Entangled Pasts is that the curators don’t merely point out the historical stuffiness of the Royal Academy, but link it to more sinister and systemic biases. Next to Elwell’s picture is the hideous Startled (1892) by the Victorian painter Frank Dicksee, in which two pure-white redheaded girls are surprised while bathing by a Viking longship and flee in pristine classical nakedness. Dicksee’s depiction wasn’t just aesthetic, it was ideological. The president of the Academy between 1914 and 1928 had written chillingly of how “our ideal of beauty must be the white man’s”.
Across the gallery, a piece by the African American sculptor Betye Saar, I’ll Bend but I Will Not Break (1998), reflects the real-life outcomes of the white supremacist views Dicksee espoused. It features a wooden ironing board, on which is the infamous diagram of the inhumane conditions on the 18th-century slave ship Brookes, an iron manacled to the board, and a sheet of cotton hanging behind with the letters KKK embroidered into it.
This is perhaps the most provocative of many thoughtful and bold juxtapositions between historic and contemporary art in the show which, alongside Tate Britain’s rehang, is perhaps the clearest statement yet by a major London gallery that it’s taking decolonisation seriously. The aim, the curators say, is to use the history of the Royal Academy to explore its umbilical links to empire, colonialism and slavery, foregrounding the subjective experiences of Black and Brown people across that period.
The artist Lubaina Himid – whose marvellous and moving sculpture and sound installation Naming the Money, featuring 100 life-size painted wooden figures, each representing an enslaved person, servant or refugee, is found across two rooms of the show – has said of historical injustices: “We need to ask the questions and give the answers: creative people are the best people to give the answers.” It’s as if, here, the historic works are the question and the contemporary pieces offer answers by way of critique or poetic reflection. The show doesn’t trash the past or historic artists, rather it points to contexts that were always there, but long ignored.
And it’s illuminating and compelling, from the moment you step into the RA’s courtyard and come across Tavares Strachan’s revisiting of Leonardo’s Last Supper (a copy of which is in the Academy’s collection), where the table is occupied by heroes of African American history.
The richness grows with each room: among 18th-century portraits of Black figures including the once enslaved Ignatius Sancho by Thomas Gainsborough is Kerry James Marshall’s 2007 imagined self-portrait of Scipio Moorhead, an 18th-century enslaved African American painter who was mentioned by the poet Phillis Wheatley, but none of whose work survives. Hew Locke’s Armada, a flotilla of boats reflecting the many ways in which the ocean has carried people as well as goods, with varying intentions and effects, hangs amid a room of history paintings and grand manner portraits, each revealing complex networks of power and exploitation.
The most devastating room is called the Aquatic Sublime. It brings together violent paintings of oceanic spray and spume by JMW Turner, the magnificent paintings of Ellen Gallagher, reflecting lyrically on the Drexciya myth – the tale of a subaqueous community founded by the unborn children of pregnant enslaved women thrown overboard in the Middle Passage between Africa and the Americas – with Frank Bowling’s swirling blood-red sunset-orange painting, Middle Passage, with the African and American continents faintly outlined. They're also joined by John Akomfrah’s visionary three-screen video installation Vertigo Sea, which charts colonialist extractivism’s inexorable progress toward climate catastrophe.
Elsewhere, Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour, a poetic biopic of the African American abolitionist and photographer Frederick Douglass, is superbly paired with 19th-century classicised and exoticised images of enslaved figures, including the Greek Slave by Hiram Power, which became synonymous with the abolitionist cause. A figurine of Power’s sculpture appears on Douglass’s piano in Julien’s film.
The curators of Entangled Pasts, led by Dorothy Price, acknowledge that this can only be a partial engagement with an enormous theme, but one they hope will create a forum to reflect on these shared, often troubling histories through the eyes of artists working today.
Inevitably, ancestors of those “deadly” conservatives in Elwell’s picture will cry “woke”. But for me, this is an admirable model of imaginative self-reflection.
