12.1.23 — Who Owns European Painting?
Who owns European painting, and who owns blackness? Bob Thompson this fall was not the only one asking.
Barkley L. Hendricks returned from Italy in 1969 to recover his roots in Philadelphia and his practice as an artist. For the rest of his life, he could not leave any of those legacies behind. His portraits at the Frick Madison make clear how much he owed to them all. 
It accords him a space to himself, but he has no trouble claiming more—and I bring this together with an earlier report on Thompson as a longer review and my latest upload.
In a time of diversity in art and a heightened political awareness, one could easily dismiss European tradition as exclusive and exclusionary. Not this African American. Born in 1945, he studied at a bastion of conservatism, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, and then at Yale. He taught elsewhere in Connecticut until a few years before his death in 2017. He did not lack for sophisticated understanding or technique. No wonder he liked to call the Frick Collection his favorite museum.
The Frick is my favorite as well, and Hendricks brings home why. A selection of fourteen works from little more than a decade seems larger than that, with nearly full-length portraits taking up a full two rooms through January 7. Out front, its earliest painting reminds me of so much more. Lawdy Mama has a tall frame with a rounded top, the same as a standing saint from Early Renaissance Italy by Piero della Francesca a floor below. Its gold background echoes still older Byzantine art on that floor as well. Hendricks spoke of the fragility and difficulty of gold leaf, and he embraced the challenge.
The title, though, quotes something else entirely, a song by Nina Simone. It pictures a relative of Hendricks, but he was always at home with family, friends, and the streets. He would ask strangers if he could photograph them, with no need to fall back on sketches or formulas. He painted a dancer in quite a step, “African brothers” in Paris, and hotel workers in Lagos, in Nigeria, where he attended a dance festival. They display not empty pride, but command all the same. That opening portrait sets the tone with one arm crossing her chest.
Yet they lean on much more. A triple portrait becomes the Three Graces out of art and myth. The curators, Aimee Ng and Antwaun Sargen, see other parallels in still more work in the Frick by Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt, Agnolo Bronzino, and Giovanni Battista Moroni, whom Hendricks had encountered at the Uffizi in Florence. His show hangs next door to standing portraits by James McNeill Whistler. And indeed the Frick has begun pairing its collection with work by contemporary artists—most recently with Rosalba Carriera at the center of an installation by Nicolas Party. I have my doubts about this use of its resources, but it helps that Hendricks has so wide a range.
Are the parallels empty flattery, of his own art and his sitters? Younger black artists like Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald have indulged, too, in casual portraits with elevated claims to greatness—Wiley with a direct steal from Jacques-Louis David at that. Still, Hendricks earned that flattery the hard way, with his ingenuity and technique. The rounded top of Lawdy Mama may suggest a saint’s halo, and so does her Afro. It gets along just fine, too, with psychological insight and the immediacy of the present. As for technique, gold gives way to monochrome in a stunning variety of juxtapositions.
A triple portrait’s black hat and blue coats have a paler background, while others set against yellow or white against white. A student in Connecticut adapts his street clothes to a jester’s party colors. Either the figure or the background may be flat or nuanced. At least one is seen from the back, neither hiding nor revealing what is at stake. The artist’s wife, Susan, stands in front of wallpaper, blue wainscoting, and a white floor as signs of home. It was not easy, she recalled, to pose in high heels with her eyes closed.
Hendricks, who died in 2017, appeared at the Whitney Museum nearly twenty years ago in a still-controversial show of “The Black Male.” Its curator, Thelma Goldin, gave him a 2009 retrospective as well at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she serves as director to this day. (She contributes the foreword to the Frick’s catalogue.) I leave a fuller account of the artist to my review then, so by all means check it out. It leaves me all the more surprised at how well he gets along with art history and the Frick. Not just those heavy coats and their backgrounds claim both black and white.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.