In 1813, Joseph Bonaparte abandoned a carriage of loot by the battlefield in Vitoria, northern Spain, following defeat by the British. Packed among papers and love letters were more than 200 paintings pilfered from the Spanish Royal Collection, many of them ripped from their stretchers and rolled. The artworks were filled with portrayals of man’s ambition and folly. There was a Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X, his face wrinkled in judgment, Romano’s “The Virgin and Child” and Titian’s voluptuous nude “Danaë”, one of the most erotic works of the Renaissance.
A princess lies on a bed, legs parted, as she is impregnated by Zeus, who appears not as a man, but a golden shower of coins. The work is one of Titian’s “Poesie” paintings depicting classical stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Norms melt in the land of myth. People are transformed, plans upturned, and sex and the nude become a conduit for dramatic power shifts. Lucian Freud called the series “simply the most beautiful pictures in the world”.
Bonaparte had been named King of Spain by his war-waging brother Napoleon in 1808 as part of France’s occupation of the Iberian peninsula. After Bonaparte was chased out, the Anglo-Irish Duke of Wellington, as victor of the conflict, claimed the works of art. He transported them to England and installed them at his neoclassical mansion, Apsley House in Hyde Park, where they hang to this day on damask wallpapers. The current Duke of Wellington maintains an apartment upstairs, but members of the public can tour the lower rooms, viewing pictures that recall the whims of the world’s great egos, and the way the history of art — what it features, where it ends up — is entwined with their campaigns and conflicts.
On a bright Thursday in July, the artist Somaya Critchlow, 31, stood in the drawing room and regarded Titian’s “Danaë”. She leaned her head towards the glorious, almost-translucent flesh and thought about two things: paint and art’s relationship to power. “The use of light, the way everything reflects everything else — he made what’s very complicated to do almost look easy,” she said.
Critchlow’s own nudes, rich-hued paintings of Black women, have both delighted and confounded the art world for the way they seem simultaneously to engage with the sexualised tropes that litter visual culture while somehow transcending them. She is “obsessed” with Titian, she explained, peering at the painting. She was particularly taken by the unsubtle spray of gold coins, an amusingly overt way of depicting the sexually explicit without actually showing intercourse.
A few weeks before, she’d taken me on a tour of the National Gallery, where she likes to sit and sketch whenever she can. While looking at a later Titian, “The Death of Actaeon”, she’d brought up the metaphorical ejaculation in “Danaë”. The coins made her think of the drill rapper Digga D, who, following an arrest for violence, was given a criminal behaviour order banning him from referencing London postcodes or real-life people or incidents in his music. His lyrics only became more imaginative, more beautiful, when forced into allegory. He had to approve each new song with the Metropolitan Police, Critchlow read, pulling up an article on her phone: a bit like Titian negotiating content with his patron, Philip of Spain.
The limitations on an artist, when art is at the whim of political agenda, is something Critchlow thinks about often. Artists’ willingness to bow to prevalent trends can shape their fortunes, she observed. And the more successful an artist becomes, the more they are perceived as a political actor in their own right. This agitates her. There is “no agenda or message” in her works, she insisted, the first time we met. “I haven’t got any answers,” she told me, more than once.
The crowd at Apsley House was as one would expect on a weekday lunchtime at an English Heritage property. Retirees in purple anoraks milled around us. “I’ve read that he worked up his paintings with a yellow and red and black foundation,” Critchlow said, regarding the Titian. “There is so much chemical magic to painting.”
In person, Critchlow is unfailingly polite. If you introduced her to a grandparent, they would likely describe her as “well-spoken”. She has a habit of using “one” rather than “I” when explaining her motivations. Her politeness could read as meekness, but over the months we spent together, I came to see it more as a form of self-control, a commitment to comportment that relates to her desire to avoid error or foolishness. To take herself seriously — and be taken seriously — as an artist. Any stiffness arises from the constant struggle between upholding the civility she sees as becoming of a great painter, and rejecting the expectations or stereotypes, refusing to give people what they want.
Her manner can feel at odds with a surface read of her works, which are deliciously, often kitschily, erotic. Her figures have bulging breasts and bottoms, and bouncing, vaguely-retro wigs. Critics often refer to them as being in “boudoirs” rather than bedrooms. In a text for Critchlow’s 2023 show at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, the critic Hilton Als described the “pleasure-verging-on-embarrassment” he felt viewing the works.
Critchlow was born in London in 1993. Her mother, who is white, was 20 at the time. They moved around a fair amount as her mother attempted to finish her studies in art and literature, and they oscillated between closeness and clashes. “We are just too close in age. It’s not like a parental relationship,” Critchlow said. Her grandparents’ house in Vauxhall, south London, with its door arched with yellow roses, became a sanctuary (she has a photo of it on her studio wall).
Her grandfather, the artist and academic Keith Critchlow, would take her to the British Museum, the V&A, the National Gallery. He lectured in sacred geometry and instilled in his granddaughter a taste for the otherworldly and the historical, for using painting as a means of time-travel and escape. She became fascinated by sketching and copying, a pillar of historical art. Even now, she goes through phases of drawing a Goya every day.
Yet as much as her mother’s family provided stability and inspiration, their presence also enforced a sense of separation. Critchlow was frequently the only person of colour in the room. This often led to a feeling of alienation, a gulf between the way the people she was closest to described their experiences and the way she saw or experienced things. She struggled to relate to her mother’s visions of feminism or femininity. She told me that sometimes she felt detached entirely from what was presented to her as “womanhood”, like she was somehow observing the female experience from the outside. There was, she acknowledged, “a confusion of identity”.
The sense of dissonance rolled on. She was troubled, as a fine art painting student at the University of Brighton, to hear her professor announce that “Painting is dead.” She wanted to depict women, but felt it was uncool, laden. Later, during her postgraduate studies at the Royal Drawing School, having drawn what felt like thousands of landscapes and white life models, she drew herself, nude. Her tutor was uninterested in the work, but deep down Critchlow realised that his view didn’t matter, that it wasn’t for him. It was a breakthrough of sorts, and she included the sketch in her final show. It went on to inspire many of her paintings.
Critchlow can easily feel “overwhelmed by life,” she told me. She worries a lot about wasting time on “people-pleasing” or frivolity. “I’m just a really selfish person who wants to paint,” she said at our first meeting, for breakfast at the Wolseley in London, during which she ordered and then ignored a fruit salad, such was her preoccupation with the topic at hand. She is prone to periods of depression and has learnt that structure is the answer, rising early, painting even when she doesn’t feel like it. Part of being a good artist is just practice, she said. I asked her if she hoped to be happy. “I’m just not sure it’s something I’m allowed,” she said.
Over the course of our interviews, as she began preparing for two new exhibitions, I witnessed a retreat of sorts. “I’ve managed to lose a lot of friends by just totally going into my own hole,” she said. But then, “one can’t be looking at Titian and then saying, ‘Right, I only work for four hours a day and then I’m going to the pub.’”
Critchlow works predominantly in oils. Recently, she has been experimenting with Old Masters’ techniques, investigating paint’s translucency and opacity. Her paintings usually begin with Red Umber, a deep reddish brown that provides richness. She’ll then work for weeks, layering pigments to create a surface where the tones blend, where nothing feels disjointed. She hates when colours look like they are simply sat next to each other on the canvas, she explained. She has also been engaging in a dialogue of sorts with artists she loves, by devouring biographies: Titian, da Vinci, Hogarth, as well as more contemporary figures such as Frank Auerbach, Paula Rego, Philip Guston.
Her gallerist, Maximillian William, who accompanied us to Apsley House in the summer, joined us in front of “Danaë”. He and Critchlow were planning a solo show of her drawings at his gallery, curated by Hilton Als, which opened this month. Critchlow tends to begin each painting with sketches, either from life or photos of herself, or things she finds in art history, or online: soft porn from the 1960s, or visuals from TV shows such as Love & Hip Hop, which she was briefly obsessed with.
In February 2025, another exhibition will open at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, close to where she grew up. This is a big moment, her first UK institutional presentation. “This has been one of the most stressful years I’ve had in ages,” she told me. It has come to feel like a judgment of sorts, a simultaneous start and end point. “In doing this show, I almost took myself on, I decided to be like, ‘Who are you? What are you doing? Are you doing what you want to be doing?’”
“How come so much reading about Titian?” William asked, surveying the nude. “I just like the way he paints, and I’m trying to figure out about painting,” Critchlow replied.
On first impression, William is an unlikely fit for her. Growing up, he never visited museums. He pivoted to art from a planned career in commercial property, having had a eureka moment when the elevator doors in a New York skyscraper opened to reveal a Tracey Emin neon that read, “People like you need to fuck people like me.” He became fixated on researching successful partnerships between artists and dealers — Ivan Karp and Warhol or Lichtenstein; Jay Jopling and Damien Hirst — and obsessively read a biography of Leo Castelli, widely viewed as the mastermind of the contemporary gallery system.
William tends to describe Critchlow’s work in florid pronouncements. Her paintings are “an amazing dish of many different tastes, all in one meal. It’s a Cardi B reference next to a Velázquez reference, something from TV, David Lynch. It’s all there,” he said, lifting his hand like a chef praising something delicious. “It’s an amuse-bouche.”
He and Critchlow bonded, he told me, over shared experiences growing up with single parents. Their mothers, he said, are both great “manifestors… I always say about my mother, put her in the jungle naked and she’d come out with a chinchilla jacket.” William sees himself more as an agent than a traditional gallerist. “I never wanted to do something that was in the best interest of the gallery but not the artist,” he told me.
This sounds like typical art-world waffle, but was proved by an anecdote he and Critchlow shared from their early years. It was 2018 and another gallerist approached William to collaborate on a show of Critchlow’s work in Chicago, her first proper exhibition. Young, and with no proper space of his own, William thought it an ideal opportunity. He delivered six of Critchlow’s paintings, priced at just under $2,000 each, a fraction of what they go for now. All sold. The opening was packed. William was on a high, and didn’t think twice about picking up the tab at the opening dinner when the dealer had a problem with his credit card. Only when he got back to London did the fear set in. Weeks passed and the dealer still hadn’t paid for the sold paintings. William emailed again and again. He needed the money badly. Critchlow needed the money badly, he implored. Silence. “I should have realised that it was suspect, I paid for her opening dinner when it wasn’t even my show,” he said.
It was a valuable education in the Wild West of the art world, but it was a reality check William knew Critchlow wasn’t ready for at the time. She was green, nervous and still working a temp job at an estate agent. “Something like that would be hard to come back from,” he said. So he said nothing about the non-payment. He transferred her his own money, congratulated her on her sales and told her to keep painting. Critchlow only found out the truth recently. To her, it proved William’s loyalty and sensitivity.
Later, at Frieze Art Fair in October, I would hear talk of multiple blue-chip galleries keen to sign Critchlow (she is currently already represented by Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich and Milan). But, to me, she expressed no desire to make the moves that many artists obsess over. “Don’t lose your chips at the table,” William tells his artists. “Keep control, stay in the studio.”
At Apsley House, a guide, seemingly buoyed by the presence of a diverse trio of younger people taking their time in front of a Titian, hurried over to see if we needed any context. Critchlow did not — she’d just finished Mark Hudson’s Titian, The Last Days — but she listened attentively as he explained what she already knew. At points, she went to proffer an opinion, but the guide cut her off. If the lecture bothered her, she didn’t show it. Only when he motioned to Velázquez’s famed “A Spanish Gentleman” did she speak up. “When I was reading about the life of Velázquez and Titian, it didn’t seem that Velázquez’s life was that wonderful, once he got indoctrinated into high society. It seems a bit like he was stuck there. Whereas Titian refused to just go where he was told, he kept an autonomy,” she said, her eyes on the work.
Critchlow’s most recent exhibition in London, Afternoon’s Darkness, opened at William’s gallery in October 2022. It had been in the works for a while, a follow up to her 2020 debut, Underneath a Bebop Moon, but the climate had shifted in the run up. The Black Lives Matter protests, which had been growing in number as her 2020 show was installed, had started to have a knock-on effect on the art world. Among certain gatekeepers, a desire to enact — or at least perform — change had occurred. There was a rush of interest in Black artists, a feverish, shamed desire to spotlight work that had previously been overlooked. Figurative painters were particularly heralded, in part for the way they could be used by institutions to make the message overt, by filling their spaces not simply with work by Black artists, but with Black bodies and faces on the walls. Issues of representation became central. There was much tallying, as museums were encouraged to account for the absence of marginalised communities in their collections and exhibition programmes. Artists once seen as greats were suddenly out of fashion. And there was a feeling that art should serve as corrective, a moral guide, even.
Critchlow began to be discussed as part of a movement — or could it be a “moment”, she wondered at the time. She was cited in articles lauding Black creatives, which often grouped together artists with distinct styles and biographies (“10 Black Figurative Painters You Should Know”). The New York Times reported this summer that some young Black artists heralded as rising stars in 2021 and 2022 have suffered a sharp downturn in sales as interest moves on, with works dropping in value at auction by as much as 90 per cent.
For a while, William was fielding almost daily invitations for Critchlow to take part in group shows. “It was like being in a video game, or in Takeshi’s Castle, and trying to jump obstacles,” Critchlow said. She recalled a request for a show of Black female artists titled Don’t Touch My Hair. “Absolutely not,” she said, grimacing at the memory. “You question yourself, because you’re like, ‘fuck, is this what I amount to?’” She watched as critics attached slogans to her painting — body positivity, sexual liberation, reclamation of the Black body — and she felt a mixture of exasperation and self-consciousness as she started to doubt whether her own beliefs were in step with how her work was being read.
“So much of me wants to reject the idea that it’s not OK to paint nude women, or the idea that the western canon needs to be rejected,” Critchlow told me. The first time we met, I asked her what she imagined other Black artists felt about her work and she paused for a very long time, as if confounded by the premise. “I’m not sure. I’m not really close to any other artists,” she said finally.
Her work has sometimes been viewed by critics as a retort, even a “revenge” of sorts. “What if all the submissive, exploited women in art and cinema history… turned the tables, reversed the gaze and took control?,” asked one. He described how the “paintings throb with threat and menace”, calling them “nasty, and absolutely terrifying””.
The artist Alvaro Barrington, a fan of Critchlow’s, was frustrated by misreadings of her work. The tendency to group her with other Black painters was “extremely intellectually lazy”, he told me. It’s as if people can’t think about “too many women at once… There is a lot of oxygen for a thousand white men to talk about the same thing or many things, and then it comes to a certain gender or race, there is only room in their minds to make them all into one, and then they have to be representative of half the population.”
Another comparison that quickly emerged, in reviews of Critchlow’s work, was with the white American painter Lisa Yuskavage, who came to prominence in the 1990s for sexually explicit figurative work. Barrington joked that people made the association simply because of Yuskavage’s and Critchlow’s mutual taste for spherical breasts. But Yuskavage’s art is about a deliberate degradation, about “taking the male gaze and confronting it, by being punk about it and making fun of it,” as Barrington put it. Critchlow was not doing that. Her radicalism was the “sincere gaze”, a lack of cynicism, he said. Her focus is on really “seeing these people”, he said of her nude women, not confronting or explaining someone else’s vision of them.
What is the Black woman in art? Critchlow asks herself constantly. And how does one liberate one’s mind from all expectations, including those that come veiled as progress? What is the Black woman, both in the picture and in front of the canvas, brush in hand? What is she supposed to paint?
When she says there is no agenda to her works, she is referring to the way they eschew ripostes or a tallying up of the past. She is searching for the human experiences lost within grand social narratives. Her women — many of them a version of herself — have no interest in explaining themselves to certain contemporary audiences who arrive at a Black portraiture heavy with liberal baggage, keen to empathise. Her figures have a self-confidence that differs from dignity, a term often applied patronisingly to Black women, and which has worthier, and therefore less interesting or complex connotations. And they are fun. Not so much ironic as playful. Her figures have become more naked over the years, she has noted. “I have really disengaged from what people think and want,” she told me.
Hilton Als’ show of Critchlow’s work at Maximillian William features more than 40 drawings, most full-frontal nudes. “A lot of [artists] make work that is a lesson in what’s been left out in art history, but she is doing something more complex than that,” he told me. “Any artist who is worth their salt is in conversation with the [artists] that they love, and assuming the right to be in that conversation.” For such an artist, being immersed in the work of others helps them feel understood. “Those Old Masters gave her confidence, a vocabulary,” Als added. “I think she feels comforted by them. I don’t think she feels that she has to attack or criticise their presence, I think she feels in league with them.” To him, that is both “bold and beautiful”.
There are three drawings by Critchlow in the collection of the British Museum. In September, the curator Isabel Seligman laid them out for me in a grand study, placing Critchlow’s work next to a print of Manet’s “Olympia”, which caused a scandal when first exhibited due to the confrontational gaze of the nude subject and the fact she was styled as a prostitute. In the background, a Black maid extends a bouquet of flowers.
To Seligman, the power of Critchlow’s work is in the “self-possession of the characters, the authority, the commanding presence”, something which also relates to the Manet. She clarified that she was speaking equally of the two figures, the Black maid and the nude courtesan. “She’s been overlooked until recently”, she said of the maid, “which tells you what you need to know about the power relationships not only between men and women, but also between women of different ethnicities.” Responses to Manet’s work, like Critchlow’s, depend on where the viewer lands their eye and finds their association: nude, or maid; the subjects of the picture, or the person regarding them.
Of the three Critchlow drawings in the collection, one riffs on Nicki Minaj’s “Good Form” video, showing a central female seated on two other women, who kneel on all fours. Another shows a nude artist, paintbrush in hand. It reveals Critchlow’s ambition, in the way it tackles two tropes, both areas of great symbolism in art: the nude and the studio self-portrait. The latter is the playground of the greats: Velázquez, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Bacon. In Critchlow the two actors, nude and artist, are combined. It’s an enlivening vision of who or what an artist can be.
When I visited her own studio in south London, a few weeks later, I encountered a corkboard covered in notes written in her neat hand. One described Titian’s use of colour. Another read “it is always best to use as refined a palette as possible”. Her space, in which she also lives, sits next to the Thames. When I arrived, runners were lapping the riverbank, unwinding from the working day. To reach Critchlow’s living room and bedroom, one must walk through the studio, past the art.
She shares the living quarters with her partner, Doug Neville, a cheerful neuroscientist who studies the effects of strokes on patients’ language abilities. She jokes that she and Neville are opposites. He is carefree, relentlessly sociable, easy to chat to and white.
Critchlow, who is an insomniac, often sketches him while he’s sleeping. He is becoming a figure in the work. She has been thinking about the dynamics of their relationship and how to unpack feelings that transcend reason or posturing. Feelings like desire and love. “There are topics that no one wants to broach, and if you don’t go near them, if they are too taboo, then how will you ever expand on them, if everyone is unwilling to engage with things that make them feel very uncomfortable?” she asked.
That morning, Critchlow’s sketches had been collected by a courier, ready for the show at Maximillian William. “It almost felt like someone reading my diary or something,” she said. “They contained a lot of immediate emotion.”
Now she was focusing on the Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition, which would give her a fresh chance to confer with the masters. She’d been visiting the gallery often to sketch and think, and had been most moved by works rich in narrative: Van Dyck’s “Samson and Delilah”; Rubens’ “Venus, Mars and Cupid”, which shows milk spurting from Venus’s breast; Peter Lely’s “Nymphs by a Fountain”; and “The Rape of Europa”, a scaled-down 17th-century copy of the Titian original.
She’d decided to call the show The Chamber, a nod to one of her constant inspirations, the writer Angela Carter, and also to the shape of the room where the show will be staged, a wood-panelled anti-chamber off the main gallery. “A chamber can be a public space, where meaningful or bureaucratic proceedings take place,” Dulwich’s curator Lucy West told me, “or a private space, where instinctive and intimate things happen.” It is also a space of transition, she said, an idea that reconnects Critchlow to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the work which inspired so many paintings she loves.
A handful of works were already nearly complete. One canvas was turned against the wall like a naughty child, and she demurred when I asked to see it. “I’ll keep that for myself just now,” she said. The others were luminous. A nude with an afro cupped her breasts while regarding herself in the mirror. A round canvas showed a couple, a Black woman and a pale-skinned man. He lent to kiss her on the head, his hand lingering on her throat, an unsettling gesture both tender and violent. Another work showed a kneeling woman, a bride, her back arched, nude save for a white veil spraying around her head. It could almost have been a halo. Critchlow explained that the image was born both from Carter’s text — the symbolism, across history, of the young girl married off — and from “my own worries about being over 30 and not really wanting to get married at the moment or have kids”.
The narrative focus of the works is a new aspect to Critchlow’s practice. Her striking single figures, previously suspended in their own private moments, are becoming entwined in fables and stories, swayed and challenged by the actions or demands of others.
“It’s interesting to make art,” Critchlow said, as we stood looking at the canvases. “I’m not that interested in anyone knowing me. And I’m actually very private.” All she wants to say “is in there, in the work,” she added. But even that is slippery, she caveated. “It’s always so impossible to work out what other people perceive. And also what you yourself really know. Do I mean that? How can I not mean that?”
Later, we took an Uber to a restaurant to meet Neville for dinner. We were very late, having got caught up talking about painting, but he smiled when we arrived, happy to wait with a cherry martini. I asked him how he felt about becoming a character in the works. He laughed. “It’s nice to be included,” he said, surveying the menu.
He’d had a busy day at work, he continued. Critchlow asked if I knew about the roots of his field, neuroscience, and encouraged him to tell me about Phineas P Gage, the man who started it all. He was a railway worker, Neville explained, who suffered a terrible accident. An explosion caused an iron rod to plough through his face, destroying much of his brain’s left frontal lobe. Miraculously, he survived, but he was “changed”, Neville said. “He used to be really God-fearing apparently, but then he became a bit of a pervert.” His case established the roots of what we know now, “the idea that the brain controls your personality”. His life proved that any haphazard event or accident can shift it all: language, personality, taste. It was a lesson in the intricate relationship between the body and external forces. The way who we are is always shifting, sometimes gradually, by constant pressure, other times unexpectedly, and all at once.
“Triple Threat” is at Maximillian William, London, until February 8; “The Chamber” is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, from February 4 to July 20
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