In “Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change review – the most radical show in the RA’s history,” Laura Cumming (The Guardian) writes, “Royal Academy, London: The latest institution to confront its colonial past, the RA does so to enthralling effect, using the art and its subjects – spanning 250 years, from Turner to Lubaina Himid – rather than the wall texts to shock and enlighten.”

The opening room stuns: a circle of magnificent 18th-century portraits hanging spotlit in a darkened rotunda. Ignatius Sancho, actor, writer, composer, the first man of African descent to vote in Britain, speech still quick upon his lips, sits for Thomas Gainsborough in Bath. A young man, half-smiling, but with care on his brow, poses for John Singleton Copley in London. Francis Barber, servant and cherished companion to Samuel Johnson, holds his beautiful head high in Joshua Reynolds’s Leicester Square studio. Barber will be Dr Johnson’s heir.

Every sitter in every great painting is Black (including Kerry James Marshall’s contemporary imagining of Scipio Moorhead, an enslaved African American artist whose life and work are known only through the fleeting praise of a 1773 poem). A whole gallery of Black subjects: this has never happened at the Royal Academy before. It is an ideal start to the most dramatic, enthralling and radical exhibition to jolt the RA out of its 256-year history.

For the explicit aim of this show, the curators say, is to explore how deeply the effects of colonialism have permeated the RA and its past, while presenting the actual experiences of Black and Brown people in those centuries. So Gainsborough’s portrait hangs near one of Sancho’s own coruscating letters: “I am Sir an Affrican – with two ffs – if you please.” And Turner’s paintings of tumultuous oceans, in which so many lives would be lost on horrific transatlantic slave voyages, appear alongside Ellen Gallagher’s apparently abstract paintings, in which tiny details prove to be drowning limbs and faces.

On the opposite wall, Frank Bowling’s enormous Middle Passage from 1970 tells the tale again in blood red and burning gold, the tragic theme reprised in the faint outlines of Africa and America held in that staggering force field of paint.

The historical art is judiciously selected to shock. Johann Zoffany’s 1769 portrait of the Young family got up in frivolous fancy dress, Sir William – governor of Dominica, enslaver – sawing away at a cello in the centre, positions an enslaved Black boy right next to the blondest and most pale-skinned Young scion, who looks angelically upwards for outrageous contrast. Copley’s portrait of Mary and Elizabeth Royall, daughters of a slaver in Antigua, gives only the smallest hint of their background in the Antiguan hummingbird supposedly alighting on Mary’s tiny white hand.

And before anyone starts to imagine that Reynolds, the RA’s first president, was an unqualified abolitionist, look at his soaring portrait of the future George IV in silver satin and blue velvet suffering his garments to be intimately adjusted by a Black servant whose face, of course, we cannot see.

A mahogany paint box of the kind used by both Reynolds and Turner appears much later in the show, lying in a period glass case. In fact, it is a superbly mordant mockup by Keith Piper, founding member of the pioneering 1980s BLK Art Group, each pan of pigment classified – as if for a British overseer – in minute gradations of dark-to-light skin colour.

Each gallery has a different atmosphere and theme, choreographed for constant syncopation. A room of quietly beautiful prints and watercolours travels from India to Tahiti through changing time schemes. Another juxtaposes 18th-century paintings of the Caribbean as a perfect paradise of peace and plenty, all social and racial equality, with Karen McLean’s epigrammatic 2010 installation titled Primitive Matters: Huts. Shifting photographic projections of vast houses in Trinidad flicker over wooden shacks no bigger than the fragments of parquet from which they are made. Wealth overshadows poverty; grandeur slithers over humble scale.

Isaac Julien’s film Lessons of the Hour plays in a gallery lined with velvet drapes. The American abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass, played by Ray Fearon, gives his visionary lecture to an audience of white Victorians over in Edinburgh. On a piano in that film you see a small edition of Hiram Powers’s sculpture The Greek Slave, a nubile nude that was insanely famous across America in the 19th century. In one version, Powers swapped the chains for manacles, in an allusion to the growing anti-slavery movement. But several variations are on show in Entangled Pasts, so that you can see the different stages of his propaganda.

This is creative, absorbing and highly intelligent: ideas embodied through art itself rather than via the deadening wall texts that instruct us round similar shows. For there have been other such institutional self-interrogations of late, including last year’s rehang of Tate Britain in the light of its foundations in colonial slavery. [. . .]

For full review, see https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/feb/04/entangled-pasts-art-colonialism-and-change-review-royal-academy-london-five-stars

[Shown above, photo by Graeme Robertson/The Guardian: The First Supper (2021-23), Tavares Strachan’s lifesize recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in the Royal Academy’s courtyard, the parts all played by heroes of Black history.]