Every intermittent sighting of Barkley L. Hendricks’s work over the past few decades has been a revelation. Paintings previously seen (and about which I claimed some critical expertise) were invariably a surprise and an art historical conundrum to behold again and again. The particular modes of dress to which Hendricks’s subjects subscribed were not only a lens onto a prior history of fashion and style, but a close-up view of the multiplicity of personas that Hendricks and his subjects adopted, outwardly crying out it seemed for post-portrait examinations. The few recognizable subjects in paintings whom I later met and had a chance to compare to their artistic portrayals always elicited a barrage of questions in my mind (re: What were the circumstances of the picture? How does the subject feel about his/her portrayal? Who is really calling the shots here?). Much of this work has been in existence since the 1960s and, yet, its pictorial weight and eternal allure is a mystery in today’s guileless world of visual excess and hyper-visibility.
“Barkley L. Hendricks, Anew,” Barkley L. Hendricks/Birth of the Cool, ed. Trevor Schoonmaker (Durham: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2008), 38-57.
