Thank God for black women artists. In the past two decades they have injected vim, lip and vigour into contemporary art. From Njideka Akunyili Crosby to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Amy Sherald to Kara Walker, they have rubbed our noses in issues that need to be tackled, made the political personal and the intimate entertaining. The BWAs have given 21st-century art something new to say.
Two openings in London prove all this and add the pleasing ingredient of allowing us to differentiate between the approaches of American and British artists. Mickalene Thomas, whose work has arrived at the Hayward Gallery, is from New Jersey. Somaya Critchlow, who has a selection of new paintings at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, is a London girl. In subject matter and direction they share a lot. In feel, texture and mood they could hardly be more different.
The bigger show is, of course, Thomas’s. She’s a noisier presence and significantly older (she’s 54; Critchlow is 32). The Hayward Gallery is not only a particularly prestigious venue — it is also particularly lofty and looming. It takes a lot of art to fill it. Thomas has attempted it with a grand retrospective that looks back on a career that keeps branching out into new avenues.
She’s principally famous for producing portraits of provocative black women encrusted with sparkling rhinestones (her USP). But she also builds installations, makes videos, takes photographs and sculpts. The show has potent examples of all the variants, but the underlying subject matter — love, beauty, being black — remains constant. And every display of happiness is accompanied by a tug of sorrow.
Her Americanness is obvious. From the moment you step into the rhinestone-encrusted Dolly Parton wardrobe that is her art, you know you are in the presence of aesthetics that are brash, confident, pushy and loud. A ring of black women stares at you. They come in different sizes and adopt different poses, but all of them make deliberate eye contact and pull you into their world.
A huge, lounging woman, particularly dark, in a picture entitled A Little Taste Outside of Love, from 2007, is instantly familiar. Where have you seen her before? Ah, of course — in the Louvre. She’s a black version of La Grande Odalisque by Ingres.
Nearby, the beautiful Portrait of Marie, from 2015, strikes a more personal mood. A topless Marie, created out of acrylic outlines edged with jingly rhinestones, includes fragments from a black-and-white photograph — her breast, her eye. The fragments of reality seem to lurk among the rhinestones and the colour, like a hidden truth.
The women in Thomas’s sparkling art — her lesbian lovers, friends, beautiful faces found in porn mags, the occasional celebrity, her mother — are involved in a fight to push blackness to the front of art’s queue, claiming a place that has been denied them. And while they’re there, they’re yanking desire out of the hands of men and placing it lovingly in the hands of women.
The portraits usually feature another of her skills: textile design. Her women are surrounded by fabulous arrays of cloth — a legacy, we learn, of Thomas’s grandmother, who sewed, embroidered and collected and in whose memory the artist has created a lifesize installation of a 1980s living room. Next door, another lifesize installation recreates the showy, mirrored home of her mother.
The installations are warm and pleasing but they lack the urgency and fizz of the portraits. As the show moves up the Hayward, it starts to sprawl and the moments of punchiness become less frequent. A huge display of potted plants feels like a space filler. Thomas’s aim of making things so big they are a match for the big white art of the past leads to an increase in size and a loss in intensity.
Unexpectedly, it is her video work that restores the balance here between celebration and lament. Me As Muse features a nude Thomas stretched out on a settee while the haunting words of Eartha Kitt, the singer and actress, tell the story of her loss of love. Another poignant highlight, Angelitos Negros, features Thomas and a choir of black women miming to Kitt’s signature lament: “I only see pictures of white angels. Why?”
At the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Somaya Critchlow makes her impact in the British manner — quietly, delicately, privately — with a handful of paintings inspired and guided by the old masters in the Dulwich collection. When I say quietly and delicately, I mean in comparison with the rhinestone rodeos of Mickalene Thomas. Compared with most British art, Critchlow’s full-frontal black nudity and brazenly displaying women would send Constable’s offspring reaching for beta blockers.
The show starts with a tiny painting by Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou in which a young girl playing a clavichord awaits a male visitor whose desires are outed by the things that surround her — a bottle of chilling wine, a plumped-up pillow, an erect viola da gamba that is played between the legs. We are being invited into the young girl’s presence. And in the touching responses to Dou that follow, a harem of Critchlow’s black women mess with our minds as they, too, invite us into their chamber.
In The Chamber I a busty black nude in front of a mirror holds up her breasts in a fashion Critchlow has borrowed from Rubens’s Venus, Mars and Cupid. In The Chamber II a sad black sex worker offers herself for inspection in the flickering candlelight of what feels like a posh brothel.
Poignant, introspective, touching, it is, again, art about black female identity. But this time it feels tear-stained and fully personal. No rhinestones. Just oil paints. Naked art for naked subjects.
Mickalene Thomas, Hayward Gallery, London, to May 5; Somaya Critchlow, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, to Jul 20