Black dominates the compelling, eye-testing exhibition “Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” the largest, most comprehensive retrospective to date of the Chicago-based artist at The Met Breuer. A matte, light-absorbing, sometimes blinding black turns the paintings’ faces and figures into silhouettes and sometimes devours them, as it spreads across backgrounds, punctuates zones of chromatic color, threads through them, or sets up syncopated rhythms across the picture.1 The history of art is full of eloquent black. Name the color and we think of the elegant clothing of Philip IV in Diego Velázquez’s images of the Spanish monarch, Ad Reinhardt’s all-but-unseeable canvases, Frank Stella’s severe Pin-Stripe paintings. We envision the velvety jacket in Edouard Manet’s portrait of Emile Zola or the coat worn by the dapper sixteen-year-old Léon Leenhoff, lounging against a table, in Manet’s Luncheon in the Studio. We conjure up Henri Matisse’s turning black into dazzling light. And we remember that the aged Pierre-Auguste Renoir didn’t like Matisse’s paintings, but told his young admirer that he was a “real painter” because he used black without making a hole in the canvas. Marshall, an informed student of art history, is obviously well aware of these, and many other, examples.

For Marshall, as for all these artists, black is not the absence of color, but a real, vital hue. Yet no matter how brilliantly black functions in formal terms in his work, no matter how much his use of the color makes one think about precedents in Velázquez or Manet