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Strong and Cool: Portraits in retrospective at Duke depict beautiful, confident black Americans
Image Courtesy of Barkley L. Hendricks
Barkley L. Hendricks' Sweet Thang (Lynn Jenkins).
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Published: June 22, 2008
DURHAM -- Technical virtuosity has generally been de-emphasized in fine-art painting since the mid-20th century, but the ability to paint convincingly detailed renditions of reality remains a valuable asset for artists who have developed that skill. Indeed, numerous signs point to a revival of naturalistic representation among contemporary painters.
Barkley Hendricks is a forerunner of the latter development, as amply evidenced by his first-ever retrospective exhibition, on view through July 13 at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art. Appropriate to the influence of jazz on Hendricks' life and art, his show borrows its title, "Birth of the Cool," from a groundbreaking Miles Davis record album released in the late 1940s. Bringing together 60 of the mostly large-scale paintings Hendricks has made since the early 1960s, this is the second exhibit that the Nasher's contemporary-art curator, Trevor Schoonmaker, a Winston-Salem native, has organized since he joined the museum's staff two years ago.
One of Hendricks' portraits -- a life-size painting of a black man sharply dressed in a tailored pinstripe suit -- was on view last summer at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in a traveling group show thematically centered on the Black Panther Party ("Black Panther Rank & File"). Over the last 40 years Hendricks has become widely known for painting such full-figure portraits of hip-looking blacks, usually standing confidently against monochromatic backgrounds. The stances, hairstyles and clothing adopted by his subjects reflect his paintings' emphasis on black pride, which emerged as a prominent theme during the 1960s, when Hendricks was emerging as a young artistic talent to be reckoned with.
Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks grew up in that city and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before receiving bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts from Yale University. Since 1972, he has taught at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., where he is a professor of art.
The themes of racial identity, pride and dignity that conceptually highlight Hendricks' work are even evident in his early, imagination-derived painting of a Roman Catholic nun (My Black Nun) made in 1965. Its small scale and murky chiaroscuro background set it firmly apart from the show's other portraits. But the nun's racial identity, her unflinching gaze and jaunty posture -- with one hand on her hip -- render her otherwise typical of Hendricks' subjects.
Four years after he painted My Black Nun, Hendricks painted a substantially larger, 5-by-4-foot portrait of himself posed against a metallic silver background wearing dark glasses, an Afro hairstyle and a tight, blue T-shirt emblazoned with a red-and-gold Superman logo -- an image more typical of his later paintings. Its title Icon for My Man Superman carries a parenthetical quotation from Black Panther leader Bobby Seale indicating that the Caucasian Superman is a racist.
A comparison of the latter painting with a smaller self-portrait from 1966 -- showing Hendricks as a clean-cut young artist in a white sport shirt standing before an easel painting -- indicates something of the extent to which his self-concept and his creative ambitions had shifted in just a few years.
Aside from the previously mentioned painting of a nun, the show's earliest portrait of a woman is Lawdy Mama (1969), whose subject wears a big Afro and a stony facial expression as she poses with arms crossed in front of a striking gold-leaf background. Other particularly distinctive portraits of beautiful, young, confident-looking black women in the exhibition include Bid 'Em In/Slave (Angie), Vendetta and Sweet Thing (Lynn Jenkins), whose subject lounges nonchalantly on a sofa as she blows a big, pink bubble-gum bubble.
Among the show's most distinctive portraits of men other than Hendricks himself are Down Home Taste, Sir Charles Alias Willie Harris, George Jules Taylor and Blood (Donald Formey), as well as his 2002 painting of a Nigerian Afro-pop singer and cultural icon, Fela Kuti (Fela: Amen, men, Amen, Amen....), with a gold halo ringing his head and a flaming, thorn-encircled, red map of Africa over his heart.
Hendricks' retrospective is further distinguished by several paintings in which groups of white-clad or nude men and women are posed against white backgrounds, and by his small, porthole-like paintings of the Jamaican landscape. The exhibition is accompanied by a color-illustrated, 250-page catalog containing essays by Hendricks and Schoonmaker as well as a Duke art historian, Richard J. Powell; Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, N.Y.; and Franklin Sirmans, the curator of modern and contemporary art at Houston's Menil Collection.
■ "Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool" is on view through July 13 at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham. For more information, call 919-684-3314.
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