Portrait artist Barkley L. Hendricks, who died in 2017, considered the Frick Collection one of his favorite museums. Now Hendricks’ celebratory, large-scale paintings of black Americans will hang in that institution, long the home of Rembrandt, Bronzino and Van Dyck, as the first colored artist to have a solo exhibition with 87-year-old Frick.
In the fall of 2023, the museum will place a dozen portraits of Hendricks among its own collections in an exhibition at its temporary home, Frick Madison. Hendricks created life-size portraits of black friends, relatives, and strangers he encountered on the street — paintings that had only recently become widely recognized by museums and the art market, but helped set an assertive tone for figuration and opened the field for many younger artists.
“He painted in the old master tradition – the quality is great, their visual impact is there,” said Aimee Ng, curator at the Frick. “We wanted to bring his paintings to the fore as we would treat any historical artist.”
Ng hosts the show with Antwaun Sargent, a director at Gagosian, who will serve as a curatorial advisor and initially proposed the idea.
“You have a painter who is very much in the tradition of the old masters and who was largely unrevered in his day,” Sargent said. “He was thinking about contemporary culture, but he was also thinking deeply about our history, about artists like Whistler.”
Hendricks’ portraits of black men and women hang throughout the museum. A canvas of his cousin in an Afro, “Lawdy Mama” (1969), for example, uses the gold leaf technique used in religious images, and is illustrated by a group of early Italian Renaissance panels in Frick’s collection.
The curators pointed to his limited palette painting “Steve” (1976), noting that it is reminiscent of Northern Renaissance artists such as Jan van Eyck, whose “The Virgin with Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth and Jan Vos” located in Frick Madison’s Northern European galleries.
“We don’t corner him — we put the work in the collection and say it’s just as important as anything else on any other wall in the museum,” Sargent said. “I’m interested in what the reaction will be and what connection one of our visitors will make between Barkley’s work and the work of these European old masters.”
A catalog exploring the impact of Hendricks will feature contributions from artists such as Derrick Adams, Nick Cave and Toyin Ojih Odutola, recognizing Hendricks’ widespread influence.
“For the generation of portrait painters that came after him — Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, even Rashid Johnson — he was an important predecessor,” Sargent said. “I would even argue that without Barkley’s work you wouldn’t get this moment in figuration that you see today.”
Hendricks’s interest in black figuration in the 1960s and 1970s placed him outside the mainstream of black artists at the time, many of whom were largely concerned with civil rights and the Black Power movement.
His work went largely unrecognized until recently, when the art world began to correct the cannon and black portraiture became popular.
While it appears to be time for the Frick to focus on a contemporary black artist, the museum – whose mandate is to collect and present European art from the 14th to 19th centuries – recognizes that there will inevitably be some backlash. of purists.
De Frick has been experimenting with more progressive programming for the time being. The current project, ‘Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters’, features the work of four artists – Doron Langberg, Salman Toor, Jenna Gribbon and Toyin Ojih Odutola – who explore issues of gender and queer identity typically excluded from narratives. of early modern European art.
“There are traditionalists who think there’s no place for artists of color because that’s not what the Frick traditionally does, and there are people who really die for this sort of thing,” Ng said. “Our group of young fellows is bigger than ever. That tells me we’re going in the right direction. I don’t want to alienate people who have been with the Frick for 40, 50, 60 years. I do want to build a bridge between the historical collection and other art.”