National Portrait Gallery

At some point in the past, this show might have been a shock, it might have caused uproar.  But this isn’t the past, this is 2024, so seeing room after room of paintings of Black figures by Black artists in the National Portrait Gallery isn’t shocking: instead, it’s just totally normal. The artists here depict the Black figure in endless ways and contexts. As straight portraits by Amy Sherald, as forgotten figures from art history by Barbara Walker, as characters of memetic mythology by Michael Armitage. The Black figure, like Blackness itself, isn't one thing, it’s complex, indefinable. The exhibition is filled with personal narratives. Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s huge, semi-collaged vision of a mother and child is beautiful and deeply intimate, Henry Taylor’s portrait of the artist Noah Davis (who died in 2015) is achingly tender and joyful, Jennifer Packer’s images of those closest to her feel too private to even look at.  History rears its ugly head over and over too. It’s in Noah Davis’s vicious depiction of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, it’s in Michael Armitage’s beautiful but frenzied scenes of social upheaval in the media age, it’s in Godfried Donkor’s gleaming image of Black heavyweight champ Bill Richmond, born into slavery but punching his way to freedom.  Skin tone plays a central role in the show. Henry Taylor uses thick slabs of brown and ochre, but Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kerry James Marshall go for a deep, tenebrous onyx, and Amy Sherald paints her sitters in was

Two artists, separated by a century and an ocean, laid out a framework for how the camera could construct feminine identity. In 1800s England, Julia Margaret Cameron took pictures of garlanded Victorian beauties dressed as mythological figures, lying wantonly and forlornly on divans. In 1970s America, Francesca Woodman created a world of blurry nude art students thrashing about in warehouses. Despite the vast chasms of time, aesthetics and subject matter that separated the two, the National Portrait Gallery argues that they shared so much as to be almost inseparable. It’s not hugely convincing.  Cameron’s sepia portraiture is heavily symbolic. Cherubs embrace, saints pray, prophetesses wander about in their cloaks. She creates a private, almost secret world populated only by women, she dips into the classical past to present modern images where the gaze is female, and directed inwards. It shares plenty with the Pre-Raphaelites, but with a more quiet, introspective presence. Some of it is beautiful and ethereal, lots of it (those cherubs, yikes) isn’t.  Woodman died at just 22, but not before creating a frenetic body of tormented black and white photography. She had a knack for the stark and minimal, the blurred and the vulnerable. Bodies writhe in crumbling rooms, paint peels, faces hide in shadow. Lots of the images are striking, gorgeous, experimental, clever. But plenty of others are also – understandably – very studenty.  Some of it is beautiful and ethereal, lots of it