CAMH exhibit gives Barkley L. Hendricks his due
Artist Barkley L. Hendricks' first paintings retrospective has been a long time coming. Although his life-size portraits captured an important slice of late-1960s and 1970s American culture and fused realism with other art movements, he hasn't enjoyed the name recognition or commercial success of contemporaries like Chuck Close.
But younger artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Jeff Sonhouse owe a debt to his precedent-setting portraits of ordinary black and Latino Americans. Talk of his influence has spread since the traveling Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, which opens Friday night at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, made the first stop on its five-city tour in 2008.
“I have to be very honest,” says Hendricks, 64. “My first response to that was that I didn't know who the hell was being influenced by my work, given that I was up in what I call the boondocks” — New London, Conn., where Hendricks has taught at Connecticut College since 1972. “When I got info about those who I influenced, I had to say, ‘Hmm. Interesting.' ”
Geography aside, Hendricks' frank, sometimes provocative approach to his subject matter has often predated audiences' readiness to accept it, writes exhibition organizer Trevor Schoonmaker, curator of contemporary art at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art, in the catalog.
“To recognize the validity of many of Hendricks's portraits, one would have to also acknowledge the racial, cultural, and economic divides between the upper- and under-classes of the time,” Schoonmaker writes. “To further complicate matters, Hendricks depicted the human nude not as the passive white female most commonly portrayed and sanctioned by art history but as a self-aware and self-assured black male.”
Indeed, when the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina gave Hendricks a solo show in 1975, he was told he would not be allowed to show any nudes, only to discover later it had white nudes in its collection. Birth of the Cool has some of Hendricks' nudes, including Brilliantly Endowed (Self-Portrait) from 1977 — a tongue-in-cheek reference to a New York critic's choice of words in describing his gifts as a painter.
Hendricks' paintings of clad figures, meanwhile, leave no doubt about his eye for style. He says many of his friends considered themselves fashion plates and notes that portrait painters such as John Singer Sargent, Rembrandt and Caravaggio have always exploited the painterly possibilities of rendering clothes.
Though his subjects, which include former girlfriends, family members and friends, often take on an iconic aura, “it wasn't a focus of mine to try to make them celebrities,” he says. “I was, in essence, inspired by what I saw, and there's also the area of experimentation with paint. A lot of what has been written about me focuses on cultural influence, which isn't completely off-base, but I was also learning how to handle the medium I was using.”
Birth of the Cool also includes Hendricks' lesser-known landscapes, many of which are set in Jamaica, where he's been a frequent visitor for more than 25 years.
In the past six or seven years, he's been especially drawn to marl quarries, which he says present perspectives reminiscent of those found in the drawings of Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher.
The quarries appeal to him “from the standpoint of not knowing where the horizon lines are — and also how man has carved up nature and leaves various configurations that I find fascinating in terms of composition,” he says.
A former student of legendary photographer Walker Evans, Hendricks rarely leaves home without his camera, which he calls his “mechanical sketchbook.”
Unlike audiences at other stops on the Birth of the Cool tour, CAMH visitors will also get to see a series of works from Walkin' With Walker: Narrative Photography of Barkley L. Hendricks, which Hendricks co-curated with Richard J. Watson at Philadelphia's African American Museum.