When We See Us, Basel review — a compelling century of Black figurative painting

Steve Biko grabs the birthday cake with its flickering candles and thick yellow icing, dons a pink Arsenal hat and laughs at the camera, pulling the grinning crowd around him. On posters across Basel, this bright image, a Pop Art rendering of a rare photograph showing the charismatic South African activist at a private gig in Durban, invites you to the feast that is the Kunstmuseum’s compelling new exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting.

Esiri Erheriene-Essi’s “The Birthday Party” (2021) distils the show’s spirit: exuberant, full of life and colour, promising a good time, but with politics rarely absent. Biko’s role in pioneering the idea of Black consciousness and his fate, killed by South African security officers in 1977, haunt this cheery painting.

When We See Us comes from Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and is curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama, who champions “The Birthday Party” as “a reminder that even though our histories are riddled with pain, there also moments of joy, relaxation, excitement, contemplation”. What she calls “Black joy” is at the exhibition’s core: “We wanted to show how artists have been making work devoid of trauma, work that refused to centre colonialism . . . how narratives can shift when we tell them on our own terms.”

It’s a political gesture, of course, and one familiar from recent upbeat shows such as the Hayward Gallery’s In the Black Fantastic. Distinctive here are the focus on representational painting alone and the vast chronological and geographical span: a treasure trove of diverse, engaging characters from the overgrown child holding on desperately, yet with disappointment, to his model jet in “Boy with a Toy Plane” by Aaron Douglas, born in Kansas in 1899, to the bald couple lounging in skimpy leopard-print nightwear on a luxurious vintage sofa, eyeing us with hostile gazes, in “Two Reclining Women” by the precociously talented Zandile Tshabalala, born in Soweto in 1999.

There are many outstanding, formally ambitious compositions telling how, throughout the 20th century, Black artists painted interiority, community, lightness of being, everyday pleasures. Charles White’s exquisitely rendered and attired trio are compressed into a spotlit space, exclaiming at their cards, in “The Bridge Party” (1938), while Jacob Lawrence’s flamboyant cubist group sports outsize glistening rings and earrings, framed into haloed privacy by jagged white drapery in “The Card Game” (1953). George Pemba’s lovers are absorbed at the cinema in “The Audience” (1960) and Moké’s clubbers melt into the night in “Kin oyé” (1983).

Such paintings give the show its pulse, energy, surprise. Moké and Pemba are iconic African Modernist names but, even to Basel audiences familiar with the strength (and market pull) of contemporary Black figuration, the show’s historic aspect is revelatory. Most works are from private collections, notably that of Savannah surgeon Walter O Evans, who bought Black figurative paintings to counter their absence in the museums where he was taking his children.

How to place these works historically? It’s a triumph that, simply by its size, the show normalises pictures of Black everyday life. Yet as young Ivory Coast-born artist Roméo Mivekannin says, “Black is a very political colour” — and as work by Black artists becomes globally prominent, it also becomes more weighted, freighted. That evolution plays out in the opening moments, when you meet Ibrahim El-Salahi’s graceful “Portrait of a Sudanese Gentleman” (1951), a small masterpiece of expressive line and restrained colour, painted during his training under colonial rule in Sudan, juxtaposed with Chéri Samba, posing in a Pop self-portrait with tribal sculptures called “Hommage aux anciens créateurs” (2000). Fusing western and African influences becomes more self-conscious, complex, challenging by the decade.

In “Le modèle noir, après Félix Vallotton”, Mivekannin paints himself into a life-size version of Vallotton’s “La Blanche et la Noire”, a white odalisque surveyed by a Black woman which itself was a take on Manet’s “Olympia”. Mivekannin gives the cigarette-smoking Black woman his own features and stares out at us, proud, insouciant, commanding the space, reclaiming “the role of the dominated body”, he says, in “a game of perception and subversion”.

Mivekannin, working between Toulouse in France and Cotonou in Benin, insists that “Europe has . . . shaped my vision.” He belongs to a group of exceptional young Black painters whose ease about appropriating the canon, ambition and urgency to speak for the moment are giving figurative painting a new lease of life globally. A few here — Michael Armitage, Njideka Akunyili Crosby — are now well known; the show gives welcome prominence to many more.

Titian’s “Diana and Actaeon” is the model for the central figure, and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” for the background, in Haitian-American Olivier Souffrant’s fantastically allusive painting about looking and imagining, “Lucid Dreamin’”, built from layers of oil paint, graffiti scribbles, paintings-within-paintings, digital collage. Ghanaian Amoako Boafo, living in Vienna, paints striking self-assured figures such as “Teju”, whose faces and hands are depicted, with graphic brilliance, in swirling, textural, elongated finger marks, evocative of Egon Schiele’s raw fleshy distortions.

Fellow Ghanaian artists reasserting the male swagger portrait include Cornelius Annor, who transfers fabric on to canvas, giving his characters flamboyant sartorial elegance, as in “The Conversation”, and Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s monumental, dashing and radiant figures. In “View of Yoei Williams”, with a man in a turquoise suit holding a red flower, the exaggerated blackness of skin contrasts with scintillating pure pigments for costumes and accessories.

Quaicoe’s initial inspiration was stylised hand-painted cinema posters in Accra. His move to Portland, Oregon, won him an international market and also awareness of race: being Black “wasn’t on my mind, ever, until I got here. In my country, we’re all Black.”

It was, significantly, African-American artist Kerry James Marshall who in the 1980s began reinscribing blacker-than-black figures into a “counter-archive” of painting. Godfather to most younger painters here, he is inexplicably absent from the show except in Katlego Tlabela’s lovely interior “Upper East Side, New York”, where an affluent Black man reclines beneath his trophy painting, Marshall’s “Past Times” — Black figures relaxing, boating, picnicking. It was a canvas bought in 2018 for $21.1mn, a record for a painting by an African-American artist.

Omitting Marshall — and also the influential Jean-Michel Basquiat — from a survey of Black figuration is like presenting cubism without Picasso and Braque, and indeed the show’s weakness is that it is determinedly ahistorical. Neither by selection nor organisation — with trite overlapping themes (“Joy and Revelry”, “Sensuality”, “Spirituality”) — nor in the catalogue is any historical or intellectual guidance offered to these often pioneering works.

The show therefore feels like a scattergun taster, containing nuclei for future focused surveys — Tate’s Nigerian Modernism has just been announced for 2025 — but not doing the artists here the justice of giving context and meaning. It remains fascinating, fizzing with potential, enjoyable throughout, just not the landmark exhibition it could have been.

To October 27, kunstmuseumbasel.ch