The Nasher Museum's new exhibition entitled Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool certainly lives up to its name. If the paintings do not speak for themselves, the impressive media coverage certainly does. The exhibit, the first ever career retrospective of Hendricks' paintings, was featured in January Vogue's "25 Most Talked About" list-designating the work as immediately culturally important.
When questioned as to why his art, much of which was painted in the '70s, is currently gaining such attention, Hendricks said, "I have no idea. I would hope that people are getting hip to what I've been doing for a while. It's better late than never. I could be dead, and people would get the point, but I'm still alive now, so as I said-better late than never."
Trevor Schoonmaker, the Nasher Museum's curator of contemporary art, gives the artist significantly more credit. He attributes the current societal recognition of Hendricks' art to his tremendous influence on popular contemporary African-American artists.
"What's happening now is you see a rise of a prominent generation of African American artists who deal with black portraiture, and they're gaining a lot of attention," Schoonmaker said. "A lot of these artists are indebted to Barkley. And so it's a way of stepping back."
Much of Hendricks' work, which consists primarily of large-scale portraits of African Americans in everyday attire, was prevented from initially gaining appropriate recognition because of the subject matter's social implications.
"A lot of the general public missed out, because at the heart of his career those images were threatening. Today they seem almost playful, but then it was a very socially and politically tense time, much more tense along racial lines," Schoonmaker said. "And so to acknowledge Barkley's paintings, you would have to acknowledge the social inequity in the United States at the time."
The majority of Hendricks' paintings in the exhibition date from 1964 to the present and feature realistic portraits of African Americans and Latinos. Part of Hendricks' skill lies in his ability to easily convey the tangible personalities and unique individual styles of his subjects. This effect results in part from meticulous attention to details-from the precisely-cocked hip and loosely-held cigarette of the woman pictured in "Tequila" to the tense translucence of the bubble gum that the woman is blowing in "Sweet Thang (Lynne Jenkins)." The artist's focus on the personas of his subjects serves to situate the paintings within conceptualism as well as realism.
"The people that he depicts are not celebrities, they're not famous-they're ordinary folks whose claim to fame resides only on their attitudes," said Richard Powell, a professor of art history at Duke who specializes in African American art. "So in other words, these are pieces whose raison d'être is more conceptual, more attitudinal than anything that you can grab a hold of in a kind of social, cultural context. It is the attitude of his figures that kind of rule the day over any of the other kinds of things that we hold on to when we think about grand portraiture."
The intellectual appeal of Hendricks' portraits is further emphasized by his decision to situate the majority of his figures within arrestingly monochromatic backgrounds-a technical device that he engages with in a variety of ways. In his self-portrait "Slick," the artist depicts himself in an all-white suit emerging out of a flat white background. Similarly, in the piece "Icon for Fifi," a solid plane of metallic gold envelops the central female figure.
"[Hendricks] captured a cultural moment, and putting [his figures] in the flat color field makes them sort of float-they become timeless," Schoonmaker said. "They're not anchored by a certain setting that they're in, and it also pushes them out of the canvas."
Birth of the Cool showcases not only Hendricks' portraits, but also a group of early paintings consisting of geometric, abstracted basketball imagery and Hendricks' recent depictions of Jamaican landscape. The overall result is a comprehensive survey of Hendricks' painted work that allows the viewer to chart his artistic development. Indeed, while his recent movement away from portraiture and into landscape may appear to be a complete deviation from his earlier work, many of the elements of his portraits can still be seen in the landscapes.
"[Hendricks' landscapes show] interest in reflection, light, gold and ornamentation, like the way that his figures have an incredible sense of style. He brings that style into... these really ornamental gold frames," Schoonmaker said. "But he doesn't really do that for the portraits. It's usually the individual who has the style, and here he kind of flipped the two."
The exhibition opens tonight at 7 p.m. with a discussion featuring Hendricks and Powell. When asked what he wanted students to consider when viewing his work, the artist replied with characteristic nonchalance, saying, "Well, I want them to see a damn good painter, and I want them to have a good time when they come through the show, enjoy themselves, bask in the radiance of my work. What else is there?" Though spoken in mild jest, Hendricks' words ring true, serving as an apt description of a showcase that lives up to its promised cultural relevance.
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