Art: Cool, indeed, and in tune with his times

Barkley L. Hendricks has achieved something relatively rare among artists: He has created paintings that capture the essence of an American cultural transformation.

He did this in the late 1960s and '70s with striking portraits of African American men and women that remain as powerfully forthright today as when the pigments were still fresh.

After studying for four years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the North Philadelphia native quickly established himself as a mature and innovative talent, which he refined during two years at Yale University in the early 1970s.

In his striking portraits, Hendricks caught and defined the crest of two surges, the increasing prominence of black cultural pride instigated in large part by the civil rights movement and a resurgence of interest in realist, and particularly figurative, painting.

These two currents inform a good portion of a handsome and exciting exhibition devoted to Hendricks at the academy through Jan. 3.

The show of 56 paintings, 43 of them portraits of one kind or another, is subtitled "Birth of the Cool," which precisely expresses its spirit. Whomever his subjects might be, the attitude they project is the "coolness" one associates with jazz musicians such as Miles Davis.

Organized at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, this traveling show is described as a retrospective, but even the artist acknowledges that it's something less than a full career survey. Two-thirds of the paintings date from the 1960s and '70s, while another bloc of 13 small landscapes covers this decade.

The gap between the two is quite obvious; in the catalog, the 64-year-old Hendricks describes the years from 1984 to 2002 as "a dry spell for figures." The reasons for this hiatus apparently include his increasing involvement with photography - he studied with Walker Evans at Yale - and perhaps some health problems.

Ultimately it doesn't matter because the portraits of the '60s and '70s are the ones that established his reputation and that will secure it for posterity. They're the pictures that make an impact because they haven't lost a scintilla of the daring, freshness and cultural assertiveness that they injected into contemporary American painting.

(To complement the traveling show, the academy has assembled at its entrance a display of 10 portraits and six landscapes from Philadelphia collections. These amplify the main attraction without extending it aesthetically.

(The academy show is further amplified by related Hendricks exhibitions at Sande Webster Gallery and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Webster is featuring 20 recent landscapes, like the academy examples all painted in Jamaica, while the African American Museum is showing 20 photographs from the 1970s.)

The landscapes are so different in every way from the portraits that they seem like the work of another artist. They're therapeutic meditations, not public manifestos, intimate responses to natural beauty rather than public proclamations of racial and cultural pride.

Yet the two sets of paintings share a reference to Old Master tradition. The impressionistic (but not impressionist) landscapes, all painted outdoors, are either ovals, circles or lunettes, and all are presented in wide gold-toned frames. They're throwbacks to a more romantic period.

The portraits, typically full-length, recall especially the Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino, a master at projecting aristocratic presence, the 16th-century version of "coolness."

Hendricks' early portraits achieve a comparable effect in contemporary language. His subjects, typically dressed fashionably and flaunting self-esteem (but not arrogance or hauteur), embody a sense of regal sophistication that Bronzino would have appreciated.

Hendricks includes himself in this panoply of friends and street characters. Perhaps the most startling image in the show is a full-length self-portrait in which the frontally nude artist, wearing a floppy white "apple" cap and chewing on a toothpick, assumes the disinterested pose of a model for life-drawing students.

Brilliantly Endowed, as the painting is titled (the artist took the phrase from a review of a New York gallery show), proclaims that Hendricks wasn't intimidated by artistic taboos and conventions. He did introduce a few of his own to the genre, however.

One of the more obvious is the influence of photography, not always direct, perhaps, but unmistakable in the way the figures are posed - with a calculated sense of making the strongest possible impression. In that, they connect to fashion photography.

Hendricks often cropped the figures top and bottom, taking a slice or two off the hair and the feet, which pushes them almost into the viewer's space. Occasionally he doubled or even tripled the image, as in the portraits called Twins (in the lobby) and Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris.

Hendricks' other innovation was to decontextualize his sitters - consequently forcing us to confront them intensely - by painting them against solid-color backgrounds. This tactic produces intense visual drama when the grounds are hot pink or fire-engine red.

The most elegant compositions are those in which figures dressed in white disport against a subtly contrasting white background.

The blank, seamless backdrop is intrinsic to fashion photography, but in Hendricks' paintings it becomes an active player by amplifying the visual dynamism of the subject. Occasionally, the background color almost overpowers the figure.

This effect takes hold in part because some of Hendricks' figures seem, in photographic terms, to be backlit. His pictorial light is uniform and omnidirectional, yet some faces are lightly shadowed. Whether intentionally or not, this effect enhances the presence of the figures.

Hendricks hasn't lived here for years; he has been teaching at Connecticut College in New London since 1972. He has had numerous shows in New York and elsewhere over the last four decades, including at Mangel Gallery here.

It seems odd, then, that his most important exhibition in his hometown should have been organized in North Carolina; sadly, such a situation has not been uncommon for Philadelphia artists.

At least Philadelphians now have a splendid opportunity to appreciate the puissance and elan of his earlier painting and to recognize his role in shifting the work of talented black artists into the mainstream of American art.

"Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool" continues at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry Streets, through Jan. 3. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 to 5 Sundays. Admission: $15 general, $12 for seniors and students with ID, $8 for visitors 5 to 18. Free Sundays through Jan. 3. Information 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org.

Landscapes by Barkley L. Hendricks continue at Sande Webster Gallery, 2006 Walnut St., through Nov. 30. Hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and 11 to 4 Saturdays. Information: 215-636-9003 or www.sandewebstergallery.com.

"Narrative Photography of Barkley L. Hendricks" opens at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, 701 Arch St., Thursday and continues to Jan. 3. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and noon to 5 Sundays. Admission: $10 general, $8 for seniors, students with ID and visitors 4 to 12. Information 215-574-0380 or www.aampmuseum.org.

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