Kerry James Marshall’s monumental “School of Beauty, School of Culture” headlines major London retrospective

A new exhibition at the Royal Academy is turning the spotlight on one of the most acclaimed living painters of our time: Kerry James Marshall. Opening today, Kerry James Marshall: The Histories is the largest survey of the US artist’s work ever staged in Europe — and at its heart stands School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), a towering nine-by-13-foot canvas that transforms an ordinary salon into something extraordinary.

The work, alive with the chatter and movement of a bustling beauty shop, captures more than a scene of hair styling. Every detail is layered with coded references, drawing on centuries of visual culture from Hans Holbein to Disney. “If you want to make a painting that many people can look at together and that can compete with paintings in big museums, then it’s got to have scale,” says curator Mark Godfrey. The painting, he adds, “has its own wall” and can be seen from 60 meters away.

Marshall, whose auction record reached $21.1 million in 2018, has long used everyday Black life as the foundation for monumental art. In School of Beauty, School of Culture, a poised woman in a striped outfit stares directly at the viewer while children play at her feet and clients chat animatedly with stylists. “People go in and they come out transformed,” Marshall said of beauty shops at an advance viewing. “They come out polished, they come out made up, they come out done.”

The painting echoes his earlier work De Style (1993), which reimagined a Black barbershop through the lens of modernist abstraction and cultural symbolism. Together, the two works explore salons and barbershops not just as places of grooming but as vital cultural institutions, where community, identity, and artistry converge.

For Marshall, complexity is the point. “I’m always trying to make the densest, most compact, complicated pictures I can make — more is more,” he says. With School of Beauty, School of Culture, the artist delivers exactly that: a vivid, layered vision of transformation, community, and representation that now dominates the walls of London’s Royal Academy.