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Birth of the Cool

Barkley Hendricks' Nasher exhibit gives a classical look to street life

"Sweet Thang" by Barkley Hendricks

Barkley L. Hendricks has an idea why it has taken 40 years for the first career retrospective of his paintings. 

 

He says his subject matter people of color, often discovered by Hendricks on city streets can be difficult for viewers. Hendricks chooses his subjects for their beauty, he says: sense of fashion, a certain something he sees in their eyes. Hendricks then paints them in the style of the old European masters. The result can seem incongruous: Luscious, life-sized oil paintings on canvas of contemporary African Americans.

Hendricks stood out among artists in the '60s, '70s and '80s in that he depicted a truthful beauty in his work, not a romanticized, idealized beauty, he says. He portrayed real people with the peculiarities and little flaws that made them more real -- a bent collar, crooked glasses, a long fingernail, a gold tooth. He captured African-American culture in his work, as evidenced through the models and their clothing.

 

"I looked around me, there was basketball, there was fashion," Hendricks says. "It was a matter of recognizing the culture for what it did or didn't do."

 

Visitors to the exhibition "Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool," on view from Feb. 7 through July 16 at Duke's Nasher Museum of Art, will see right away what the artist means. The show includes 57 paintings from 1964 to the present portrait after portrait of translucent skin, textures that dazzle, colors that pop. Hendricks' goal is to be "lucky enough to put on the outside something to make you think about what's on the inside."

 

"When you look at my work," he says, "I want you to remember it."

 

Meet the Artist

Bhendricks

Barkley Hendricks will speak at an exhibit opening at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, in the Nasher Museum. The event is free with admission to the museum.

Hendricks was classically trained as a painter, initially at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He was the academy's first black student to be awarded two consecutive travel scholarships, which took him to Europe in 1966 and North Africa in 1968. He visited major art museums across Europe and noticed how seldom black people were represented, even by famous artists he respected and loved such as Paul Gauguin with his South Seas villagers and Édouard Manet with his famous servant in "Olympia."

 

"Rarely did they have images of black people with any level of authority or distinction that didn't refer to the servitude situation," he says.

 

Hendricks was also fascinated by the elaborate portraits of wealthy individuals that were so common in museums, by such artists as Rembrandt, van Dyck, Caravaggio and van Eyck. He went home and began painting life-sized representations of people of color.

 

Hendricks went on to study at Yale University, where he earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts. He was one of only two figurative painters there when most artists were working with abstraction and minimalism.

 

In 1971, Hendricks took part in his first major museum exhibition, "Contemporary Black Artists in America," at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. When he graduated from Yale in 1972, Hendricks accepted a teaching position at Connecticut College in New London, where he has been teaching ever since. By the mid-1970s Hendricks began to garner serious attention for his work, but he didn't achieve mainstream commercial success.

 

Recognition for Hendricks has been growing. In 2005, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote, "Why aren't people clamoring to see more of this wonderful artist's work?" Last month, Vogue magazine listed Hendricks' exhibition at the Nasher as one of the cultural highlights of 2008.

 

In recent years, Hendricks has been rediscovered by a younger generation of artists, says Trevor Schoonmaker, the Nasher Museum's curator of contemporary art, who organized the exhibition. Hendricks has had a profound impact on many of them, including two of the leading young African-American figurative painters, Kehinde Wiley and Jeff Sonhouse.

 

"Barkley has little concern for what is popular or accepted and he has always followed his own path," Schoonmaker says. "His portraits are of their time, and yet they are timeless."

 

The exhibition of Hendricks' portraits and landscapes will travel from the Nasher Museum to the Studio Museum in Harlem in fall 2008; Santa Monica Museum of Art in spring 2009; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in fall 2009; and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in early 2010.