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Who Owns Blackness?
John Haberin New York City
Bob Thompson and Barkley L. Hendricks
As a painter, Bob Thompson inhabited a mythic universe, of simple pleasures and heartfelt prayers. In life, he inhabited a far grittier one.
In both worlds, the rest of us might feel lucky just to survive. For all his promise, his career spanned just eight years, up to his death at twenty-eight. In that short time, he spun out bacchanals and allegories, even as the characters became flatter and more faceless, their colors more acrid and more sinister. He avoided overt politics, although The Execution shows a lynching. And he thrived alongside painters, poets, and musicians—and, in his mind and in his art, the Old Masters. A two-gallery survey moves easily among those worlds. 
Who owns European painting, and who owns blackness? Thompson 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.
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 myth of blackness
Born in 1937, Bob Thompson made ambitious choices, abandoning each in turn in search of something more. He left Kentucky for medical school in Boston, and then he left medicine to study painting. It led him from Louisville to Provincetown and finally New York, where he found a studio on the Lower East Side. He had only a short walk to Fluxus happenings, jazz at the Five Spot, and the Beats. It also placed an African American amid a biracial avant garde, beside such poets as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). This was the downtown of "New York: 1962–1964," at the Jewish Museum not long ago, not the more dated scene of the Harlem Renaissance, and it came alive most fully at night.
Sketches in blue felt-tip pen show him in a hurry to take it all in. They also show him far from the hard edges and seeming primitivism of his paintings, with color fields so flat that they might have been around a long time—and for him they had. He felt drawn to Renaissance and later artists who nurtured stasis, like Piero della Francesca and Nicolas Poussin. For Piero, he wrote in a short, quirky essay, "color becomes his character," and did Thompson ever have color and character. He also adapted his compositions from older painting, although you may not recognize them. If you do, you can only puzzle out their narratives and marvel at what has changed.
You might first encounter The Miraculous Draft of Fishes, after full-scale "cartoons" for the Vatican tapestries by Raphael. Look hard enough, and you may identify the fishermen at right, bending over to show off their classical proportions and to reel in the fish—and never mind that an actual boat might tip over. You may also recognize the outstretched arms of a bright orange figure standing at center to approach Jesus. Yet the miracle has become something darker, like the sea. So has a Madonna, backed by female attendants less like wise men or shepherds than a funeral procession. And yet the child in Mary's lap has become a golden-haired teen.
Thompson's shifting emotions cut both ways. A scene from The Golden Ass, by Ovid in ancient Rome, has nudes, horses, and a devil, but the green hills embrace them like an angel's wings. Another title announces a monster, and a black beast storms in at left. Yet women continue to play, with a ball (as in a painting by Henri Matisse) and with each other, and a ball of brighter color shines behind them in the trees. "The monsters," he wrote, "are present now on my canvas as in my dreams." And who is to say which are his bad dreams?
If there is answer, it has to lie in what a past show (which included him) called "Painting Color." Soothing greens and warm flesh comport with psychedelic yellows and reds close to orange. Thompson studied with refugees from German Expressionism and learned still more from conversations with another, Jan Müller—a source for his deep but claustrophobic landscapes as well. Yet the flat outlines and eerie mix of dark and light may suggest an African American model as well, in the collage of Romare Bearden or in Jacob Lawrence. Lawrence's miniatures have blown up to poster size, and his narratives in series have become myth. The Great Migration north has become a migration to a different kind of freedom.
Thompson never gave up on his dreams, even when they contained monsters. He married a white and spent more and more time in Europe, sick and tired of racism in America. Besides, it brought him closer to the Old Masters. Yet a gall-bladder operation left him vulnerable, and he died from an overdose. He became a romantic hero, and one gallery calls its selection "Agony and Ecstasy," after a novel by Irving Stone based on an artist's life. Life, though, had caught up with myth.
Who owns European painting?
The Frick is my favorite as well, and Barkley L. 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. 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.
Bob Thompson ran at Michael Rosenfeld through July 7, 2023, and David Zwirner in Tribeca through July 8, Barkley L. Hendricks at The Frick Madison through January 7, 2024. A related review looks back to Hendricks at the Studio Museum in Harlem.