Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool

Barkley L. Hendricks at the exhibition opening of "Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool."

This portrait of Hendricks’s cousin Kathy Williams, entitled "Lawdy Mama" (on left), was inspired by the gold leaf used in medieval Byzantine religious icons. It was on loan from The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Beginning in the early 1980’s, Hendricks began to explore other aesthetic interests, such as photography and assemblage sculpture. His passion for landscape painting began after his honeymoon in Jamaica in 1983. He returned annually for many years to paint outdoors and capture mountain vistas, quarries, rivers and seascapes.

Hendricks painted his landscapes on site, challenging himself to produce each work in a period of several hours, confronted by the unpredictable elements of natural light, wind, and rain. Even though the landscapes depict specific locations, the canvases act as portals that invite reflection and escapism as they transport the viewer to another time and place.

Here are examples of Hendricks’s white on white “limited palette” series. In the glasses of “Steve” (far right), Hendricks painted the reflection of the windows of his studio in New London, Connecticut.

In 2000, Trevor Schoonmaker was working at a gallery in New York City when he cold-called Barkley L. Hendricks at his home in New London, Connecticut. Barkley’s paintings had been on Trevor mind since graduate school in the mid ’90s, when he first came across them in books by Rick Powell and Thelma Golden.

“I was unsure what to expect, calling him out of the blue,” said Schoonmaker, now Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director at the Nasher Museum. “Maybe he wouldn’t even take my call or maybe I’d get a couple of minutes to make my case. What I found on the other end of the line was a warm, generous, funny and inquisitive person with whom I shared more common interests and experiences than I could have realized. We spoke for over two hours—about his work, about music, about our experiences in Nigeria, about Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti.”

At the end of the conversation, Hendricks invited Schoonmaker to visit him and his wife Susan at their home. Hendricks contributed two large portrait paintings to Schoonmaker’s exhibitions "The Magic City" – "Noir" (1978) and "Latin from Manhattan…the Bronx Actually" (1980).

“It was a magical experience for a young, aspiring curator,” Schoonmaker said. “It was our first collaboration and unbeknownst to us, thankfully only the beginning.”

The exhibition catalogue, “Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool,” published by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University on the occasion of the artist’s 2008 painting retrospective. This richly illustrated book was edited by curator Trevor Schoonmaker, who wrote the introductory essay, and includes contributions from Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Franklin Sirmans, Director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

If Barkley had flown slightly under the radar before "Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool," the unprecedented exhibition helped tell the whole world about his masterful life-size portraits of people of color.

"Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool," the first career retrospective of his paintings, opened at the Nasher in 2008 and traveled to the Studio Museum in Harlem (2008), the Santa Monica Museum of Art (2009), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (2009), and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2010). With each venue, the galleries came alive with Barkley’s larger than life figures on bright-colored rectangular backgrounds, figures that seemed to create a party with the most sought-after invitation.

“The work of Barkley Hendricks is a wonderful discovery,” then-director Kimerly Rorschach said at the time, “often elegant and sometimes confrontational, but always stunning.”

The accolades poured in. Vogue magazine highlighted "Birth of the Cool" in its “The Vogue 25” cultural highlights of 2008. The New York Times called his portraits “coolness personified.”

The cool mirrored sunglasses of "Steve," one of Barkley’s portraits, glinted from the April 2009 cover of Artforum magazine.

Art in America gushed about "Birth of the Cool" for six full pages.

After "Birth of the Cool," news of Barkley L. Hendricks made one good story after another: the Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2016), the College Art Association’s Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2010), the President’s Award from the Amistad Center for Art and Culture (2010), Visiting Artist in Residence, Duke University (2009), United States Ford Fellow (2008), and Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2008).

Hendricks's painting "Down Home Taste" (left) was part of "Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art," on view from September 1, 2016, through January 8, 2017.

Several Nasher exhibitions have included Hendricks's work, most recently "Cosmic Rhythm Vibrations," on view September 28, 2019, through March 1, 2020.

Through gifts and purchases, the Nasher Museum is proud to own eight works by the artist—three paintings, three photographs and two works on paper.

Hendricks worked consistently as a photographer beginning in the mid 1960s, and while at Yale University from 1970-1972 he studied with the acclaimed photographer Walker Evans. “Wonder Woman” was shot in Durham, NC in 1978 while Hendricks was in town for the American Dance Festival.

“Soul Man” was taken in Hendricks's home town of Philadelphia.

This photograph embodies many of the central traits of Hendricks's work. Formal balance, unique cropping and attention to light and reflection are characteristics found in both his paintings and photographs. It also demonstrates his broader interest in American realism, portraiture, landscape, social engagement and humor.

“Untitled” belongs to a body of works on paper that reveals another dimension of Barkley L. Hendricks. Largely unknown until recently, these works on paper (watercolors, collages and drawings) were made at the same time he was painting his bold, life-sized portraits for which he is widely recognized. They were concurrent practices that balanced one another, demonstrating his artistic range and love of experimentation.

Hendricks’s works on paper show the same attention to composition and detail as his paintings, but by combining text, drawing, and found materials, they further exhibit his improvisational flair and conceptual interests. Reflecting the current events and popular culture of the era, references range from the 1950s television police drama Dragnet to the 1970 album Them Changes by R&B composer Buddy Miles. The results are at once witty, irreverent, contemplative and intimate.

Barkley and his wife of 34 years, Susan Hendricks, visited Durham together for the next nine years after "Birth of the Cool," celebrating many milestones in person.

Barkley L. Hendricks passed away in New Haven, Connecticut, in April of 2017, at the age of 72.

“Barkley Hendricks was a great painter and an amazing human being,” said then-director Sarah Schroth at the time. “He and his wife Susan visited the Nasher Museum of Art so often, they became part of the Nasher family. We will miss Barkley tremendously; there is a hole in our hearts right now.”