The Brooklyn Rail

Barkley L. Hendricks’s portraits have taken over one wall and two full rooms on the upper floor of Frick Madison, and they form the show of the year. Hendricks’s calculatedly cool, compositionally and chromatically bold, and fiercely character-driven visions from the 1960s–80s make this the Frick’s most daring contemporary art intervention to date, and its most effective. It is accompanied by an indispensable catalogue by co-curators Aimee Ng and Antwaun Sargent that also features reflections on Hendricks by nine artists, curators, and writers including Thelma Golden, Mickalene Thomas, Hilton Als, Rashid Johnson, and Kehinde Wiley, and deftly situates him within the Western portrait tradition while unpacking his importance for a generation of Black artists.

The display opens with a showstopper: Hendricks’s beatific Lawdy Mama (1969) from the Studio Museum in Harlem placed between two of Jean-Antoine Houdon’s white marble busts. The latter two wealthy, ancien régime French sitters were made at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade and the former is an arched top, modern icon complete with gold leaf background of the artist’s second cousin Kathy Williams, painted in the immediate wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Hendricks, who was born in Philadelphia in 1945 and taught for decades at Connecticut College in New London, made Black identity, individuality, and elevation the core of his project. He went to Europe in 1966 to imbibe the very artists collected by the Frick, and sought to invigorate portraiture in his time through a concentration on Black subjects, collaborating with them to convey their distinctiveness through pose, fashion, and accoutrements.

Take the starkly sanguine Blood (Donald Formey) (1975), a portrait of one of Hendricks’s students and the product of a studio photo session (the catalogue reproduces two black-and-white and two color photos from it). Hendricks melded these into a depiction of Formey in three-quarters length, wearing a soft cap and beautifully rendered flannel checked jacket and matching pants. He sports glasses, a bracelet on his right wrist, a curiously wordless blue button on his chest, and a tambourine in his left hand. The figure is painted in oils and varnished to a shine. The contrasting matte background is a suffusing blood red painted in acrylics for a quicker drying time. Formey’s face betrays no emotion: clothes and color modulations are the sources of expression. The musical instrument and diamond patterning of the pants recalls images of harlequins and reveals art historical connections: Picasso’s Rose or Circus period with the saturation turned way up, and the famed image of Pierrot (Gilles) by Watteau (ca. 1718–19)—artists equating themselves with struggling performers.

Hendricks avoided depicting sitters in poses derived from the history of art. He would ask people to model for his camera and they did, in their own way. Then, often using a projector, he floated them up to the top of the canvas to partially crop their heads, as in Sisters (Susan and Toni) (1977) and APB’s (Afro-Parisian Brothers) (1978), and he might simultaneously settle them down to the bottom edge and cut off their feet. He modified details and moved elements around. The fairly unreproducible, green-tinted background of Bahsir (Robert Gowens) (1975), pale lilac of APB’s, or salmon of that most swaggering of images, Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith) (1976), buck the Old Master tradition of backdrops featuring landscape or tenebrism and drapery or architectural elements. One likely influence is the work of James McNeill Whistler, and the view from the main Hendricks gallery of the masterpiece Miss T (1969), a portrait of a pensive Black sitter in black outfit on a white background, and a portrait of the artist’s wife Susan, Ma Petite Kumquat (1983), flanking the entrance to the next room is the show’s best sightline. Therein you can see Whistler’s peak-Aesthetic period female portraits: Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux (1881–82) and one of the most beautiful paintings of the period, Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland (1871–74). When Hendricks went to the Uffizi in 1966, he left fired up not by the usual Renaissance suspects, but a full-length portrait by the still-somewhat-obscure Mannerist master of an often startlingly naturalistic vision, Giovanni Battista Moroni. The open-minded Hendricks may have been more than a little drawn to Whistler’s Aestheticist period work in England, whose figures reveal personality and status not through facial expressions but via clothing and the artist’s inventive palette and modulated backgrounds. Hendricks was also in London in 1966, during both a burgeoning revival of interest in Pre-Raphaelite art and the Aesthetic movement and the rise of Mod culture. His portraits bear less evidence of the impact of Rembrandt and van Eyck than the strident coloration and realism of the Victorians, as well as the poster aesthetic of the twentieth century and a desire to paint discordant symphonies in a very different flesh color.

The second room of the show is hung with five portraits of Black sitters in white outfits on white backgrounds, including the great self-portrait, Slick (1977). They all sing. Omarr (1981) has a lozenge-shaped frame that recalls Mondrian’s geometric abstractions, and especially that Dutch painter’s monochromes, works that resonate with the utopian spirit of the advancement of humanity in the early-twentieth-century De Stijl movement. Omarr is seen from behind, cropped at the bottom, wearing a marvelously puffy white full-length down parka; he has two sets of sunglasses on his head (one slightly off-center) and a gold earring back in his left ear. He appears to be floating up and away from the viewer, into a cottony void of possibility.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art was my nursery as I was emerging as an art historian in the 1980s. Hendricks’s Miss T was one of two works that most fired my teenage imagination. The other was Rubens’s Prometheus Bound (ca. 1611–12/1618). But while the latter was ensconced in the heroic narrative of triumphant European painting in the privileged second floor galleries, Hendricks’s picture was in a ground floor corridor, by the bathrooms on the way to the museum store and cafeteria. This marginalization, however, meant that many people saw it, were stopped in their tracks by it, and perhaps paused to wonder why it was not a floor above, in Contemporary Art. The thrill of now seeing Miss T in the most concentrated collection of Western painting in America—the Frick Madison—with sightlines to Whistler and Fragonard and Reynolds, is considerable. Miss T, and the stunning vision of Barkley L. Hendricks, are finally, deservedly, and explosively in the pantheon.