“Everyone who works in the art world has an artist that unlocked art and made them fall in love with it in an almost spiritual sense,” says writer and curator Antwaun Sargent. For Sargent, that artist is the late Barkley L. Hendricks, born in 1945 and known for his vivacious, life-size portraits primarily of Black figures. “I’m someone that fits in both the art and fashion worlds, and Barkley is a prolific representation of the seriousness of both.”
Two years ago, when Frick Collection curator Aimee Ng approached Sargent to identify an unexpected contemporary artist connected to the history of Old Master painting, Hendricks was the obvious answer. Not only did the Philadelphia-born artist’s paintings reference works by Rembrandt and Van Dyck, but the Frick also happened to be one of Hendricks’s favorite museums. Open through January 7, 2024, “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” is the splendid result of Ng’s collaboration with Sargent, who served as consulting curator for the show.
On view at Frick Madison (the institution’s temporary outpost in the famed Breuer Building that once housed the Whitney Museum of American Art), the exhibition represents a homecoming for Hendricks. “This is where Barkley got his first big break,” says Sargent, referencing Hendricks’s inclusion in curator Thelma Golden’s seminal 1994 Whitney show, “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” The Frick exhibition’s indisputable shining star, Lawdy Mama (1969), has been loaned from the Studio Museum in Harlem, where Golden is director and chief curator.
It’s this entrancing work, which evokes gold-ground medieval paintings, that greets visitors and sets the scene for 13 additional canvases from the late 1960s through 1970s, Hendricks’s most prolific portrait-making period. Deliberate sight lines to Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler portraits in the Frick’s collection nod to Hendricks’s admiration for centuries-old works.
The artist’s revelatory exposure to European art traces back to a three-month trip he took as a student in 1966. Miss T (1969), for example, was directly inspired by a figure in a skintight black outfit painted by Giovanni Battista Moroni at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, while October’s Gone…Goodnight (1973) alludes to the Three Graces, a theme depicted by Botticelli and Rubens, among many other artists. Despite these historical references, however, Hendricks intended for his art to be extremely approachable. “Everybody—including the people that he chose to paint and the viewers—could come as they were,” Ng, a specialist in Italian Renaissance art, tells Vogue. “You don’t have to know anything about Byzantine Christian icons. You can simply like this painting because it’s beautiful and shiny.”
Hendricks also employed aspects of Pop art and minimalism, the dominant art movements of his time, by placing his subjects on flat backgrounds, typically in stark white or vibrant hues. “It was very important to Barkley that his paintings be experienced materially,” says Ng. “Most of them feature oil-painted figures on matte acrylic backgrounds so that the figure shimmers, which is never something a photograph could convey.”
Photographs, however, are instrumental in understanding Hendricks’s process and genius. While teaching at Connecticut College from 1972 to 2010, he would often source sitters from the streets. Calling his camera his “mechanical sketchbook,” Hendricks painted from the images he snapped rather than preparatory drawings. “No matter where he went, he had cameras around his neck,” says Ng. “He would always get into trouble when he came to the Frick because we have a no-camera policy.”
Working closely with Hendricks’s wife, Susan, and Jack Shainman Gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, the Frick procured some of these photographs, several of which have never been seen or published, for the exhibition catalog. The likenesses to the finished portraits are uncanny, yet Hendricks decidedly altered certain sartorial elements. Sargent likens him to a fashion editor or stylist: “He’s accessorizing these figures in particular ways to call out different histories and symbols of power.” In Blood (Donald Formey) (1975), for example, Hendricks changed the sitter’s jeans to plaid pants that matched his jacket and added a tambourine because he thought the sitter looked musical, as Formey notes in the show’s audio recording.
“When Barkley painted Lawdie Mama and Miss T, Kehinde Wiley wasn’t even born yet,” notes Ng. “It’s hard to wrap your head around that distance of time because Barkley’s paintings look so modern.” Still, Sargent says Hendricks’s works cannot be divorced from the time in which they were created: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. “This break happens in African American style where we’re experimenting and dressing in ways that confer a new kind of independence, freedom, and self-possession,” says Sargent, who highlights Hendricks’s limited-palette works where the subjects’ white clothing nearly disappears into the background and their deep complexions come to the fore. “Monochromatic dressing has played a significant role in the Black community—think churches, weddings, and white parties.”
Hendricks’s portraits were also radical because they were not overtly political but rather an exercise in expressing the sitter’s individuality and complexity. “Often when we see Black or queer people in art, we make it about politics. I think Barkley wanted to fight against that because he was trying to establish a deep humanity for his sitters, who sometimes come secondary to the cause,” says Sargent. “It’s not that they weren’t political. It’s that they weren’t only political.”
It was Hendricks’s nuanced approach to portraiture and unique amalgamation of artistic references that render his paintings as profound today as they were 50 years ago. “My hope is that those who come to the Frick because they’re interested in Old Masters end up encountering Barkley and vice versa,” says Ng, reflecting on the museum’s ongoing initiatives to connect its historic collection to the present. “When it was not popular to do so, Barkley was bridging worlds that seemed so far apart. I hope visitors come away with that kind of empathetic view.”
“Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” is on view through January 7, 2024, at Frick Madison.