Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of Cool
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA
Barkley L. Hendricks, Sweet Thang (Lynn Jenkins) (1975)
Barkley L. Hendricks has emerged as a key influence on a generation of emerging artists, such as Rashid Johnson and Kehinde Wiley, whose recent show at Deitch Projects ran concurrently with Hendricks’ current retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Perhaps for this reason, a fresh eye is being cast over his body of work, with particular focus on his paintings.
While ‘Birth of Cool’ (which is touring from the Nasher Museum at Duke University) includes some recent, small-scale landscapes, produced between 2000 and 2007, the bulk of the exhibition concentrates on Hendricks’ signature portraits from the 1960s and ‘70s. The earlier paintings, many of which were included in his 1980 exhibition at the Studio Museum, propose a clearly defined cultural and theoretical task: recontextualizing classical painting techniques within the context of Black American culture in the wake of the civil rights movement. Figures and fabrics are painted in styles reminiscent of Renaissance painting, but are bristling with contemporary attitude and dropped into a monochromatic background of decidedly Pop flatness. Lawdy Mama (1969), for example, combines references to Nina Simone with Byzantine religious imagery.
Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris (1972)
That conceptual structure is the frame within which Hendricks’ extraordinary skills in painting and portraiture are presented to the viewer. Hendricks has a strong feel for the posture and physique of his subjects, who are often depicted with an almost sculptural awareness - a sensation most apparent in works such as Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris (1972), which features a young man in a dramatic red coat, replicated in triplicate.
What’s Going On (1974)
Hendricks is also a brilliant colourist, and his bold use of colour adds to the graphic juxtaposition of figure and ground. The exhibition opens with What’s Going On (1974), a group portrait that might variously be reduced to a minimalist white-on-white composition, a painterly reference to Whistler, a political statement, or a nod to Marvin Gaye’s eponymous 1971 album. Blood (Donald Formey) (1975) is an equally graphic image of a man clothed in red, against a crimson backdrop.
Perhaps most striking is Hendricks’ skill in depicting textiles, which directly invokes Renaissance painters such as Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Each painting can be conceived of as a study in social and personal character through the portal of fashion, and actively posits style as central to social identity; what makes the portraits pop is Hendricks’ ability to make the clothes as fascinating as the people wearing them. Looking at these paintings at this particular juncture has something of an added charge, if only because they represent so acutely the act of self-definition that was critical in the post civil rights era. Hendricks concentrates on the public act of self-imagining; it’s his skill as a painter that allows for what might be described as the painterly equivalent of Roland Barthes’ photographic punctum - an inexplicable charge that makes the public front presented by each subject not only more persuasive, but also more personally moving.
Katie Kitamura
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
