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拍品专文
Barkley L. Hendrick’s Triple Portrait: World Conqueror is a triumphal painting that celebrates the unique lens through which the artist viewed the world. Taking friends and acquaintances as his subjects, Hendricks elevates figures traditionally excluded from the genre of portraiture, and in the process revitalizes the historic genre itself. In the present work, combining oil paint with gold and aluminum leaf, the artist produces a canvas that is both sensual and tactile, yet his subject’s defiant stance exudes a powerful presence that eclipses its highly decorative surface. Though we are not party to her true identity, we do know that she is strong, confident, and in control of her own identity.
Discussing the present work in a 2013 interview, Hendricks revealed his interest in contemporary style, together with the enduring legacy of Marilyn Monroe, both sources of inspiration for Triple Portrait: World Conqueror. “You know that Marilyn Monroe quote right?” Hendricks says, “Give a woman the right pair of shoes and she can conquer the world” (B. Hendricks, quoted in T. Harris, “Barkley L. Hendricks Talks Latest Exhibit, ‘Hearts Hands Eyes Mind,’” WWD, March 1, 2013). Hendricks’s love of fashion is distilled into his subject’s chic and playful heels emblazoned with a version of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn paintings. Warhol himself, no stranger to the sexual power of women’s shoes from his early career as a fashion illustrator, had similar cross-disciplinary engagements with fashion. Interestingly, while Monroe’s white heels are a famed part of her aura, as represented by the iconic subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch (1955), they did not make their way into Warhol’s work as a result of his obsessive repetition of her face.
In Hendricks’s work, however, shoes often represent power and self-awareness through self-fashioning. There is always a gravity to footwear, not only because shoes literally support our weight and express our personalities, but also because they often call to mind labor, struggle, and class. For instance, an important photograph in Gordon Parks’s early photojournalism career is his Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1952 in which a row of men’s and women’s shoes line the street—both fashionable and uncanny. While Parks represents absence in his photograph, Hendricks shows us how the high heel cements the woman’s indomitable presence. Hendricks himself also made footwear a central theme of his photographic work, as in the fabulous heel and stockings in Untitled (1980), making Triple Portrait: World Conqueror the culmination of a career-long motif. Men’s footwear also appears throughout Hendricks’s paintings: partly obscured, humble loafers in Stanley (1971), groovy platforms in Northern Lights (1976), Christlike sandals in Triple Portrait from the Yard (2012), and pristine sneakers in Photo Bloke (2016).
The artist’s iconic canvas Lawdy Mama (1969), currently on view in the critically acclaimed retrospective of Hendrick’s portraits at the Frick Museum in New York, could be seen as a precursor to Triple Portrait: World Conqueror. Both women are powerful and unafraid to confront the viewer’s gaze with their Byzantine solidity. As The New Yorker writes, “In paintings like ‘Lawdy Mama’ (1969), showing a woman with a voluminous Afro against a gold-leaf, Byzantine-style background, Hendricks sought to redress this historical omission and make icons for a new era” (C. Wiley, “Fashion and Politics in Barkley L. Hendricks’s Pictures,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2023). Triple Portrait: World Conqueror is likewise a corrective effort that puts on unabashed display the power of women of color in Hendricks’s universe as he puts them on the same plane as saints.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1945, Hendricks was interested and encouraged in the arts from an early age. While receiving a certificate from the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he had the occasion to visit Europe and see vast swathes of art history in the 1960s. There, in the grand portraits of Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez, and the rest of the Western canon, he noticed a lack of depictions of black people and experiences to which he could directly connect. As the Black Power movement gained traction in the United States, Hendricks eschewed overtly political subjects and instead familiarized himself with the Old Masters, learning to finesse the rendering of light and detail in his portraits of African Americans and thus lend them the historical power they so deserved. Delectably detailed clothing, attention to light and air of liberation harks to the Rococo masters.
Just as Hendricks has come into his own, the same could be said of the woman in Triple Portrait: World Conqueror. His goal has always been to elevate his friends and strangers alike to the status of icons, so it is only right that he has become an icon as well. Triple Portrait: World Conqueror is an essential painting in a storied career that speaks to the humanity of us all.
Discussing the present work in a 2013 interview, Hendricks revealed his interest in contemporary style, together with the enduring legacy of Marilyn Monroe, both sources of inspiration for Triple Portrait: World Conqueror. “You know that Marilyn Monroe quote right?” Hendricks says, “Give a woman the right pair of shoes and she can conquer the world” (B. Hendricks, quoted in T. Harris, “Barkley L. Hendricks Talks Latest Exhibit, ‘Hearts Hands Eyes Mind,’” WWD, March 1, 2013). Hendricks’s love of fashion is distilled into his subject’s chic and playful heels emblazoned with a version of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn paintings. Warhol himself, no stranger to the sexual power of women’s shoes from his early career as a fashion illustrator, had similar cross-disciplinary engagements with fashion. Interestingly, while Monroe’s white heels are a famed part of her aura, as represented by the iconic subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch (1955), they did not make their way into Warhol’s work as a result of his obsessive repetition of her face.
In Hendricks’s work, however, shoes often represent power and self-awareness through self-fashioning. There is always a gravity to footwear, not only because shoes literally support our weight and express our personalities, but also because they often call to mind labor, struggle, and class. For instance, an important photograph in Gordon Parks’s early photojournalism career is his Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1952 in which a row of men’s and women’s shoes line the street—both fashionable and uncanny. While Parks represents absence in his photograph, Hendricks shows us how the high heel cements the woman’s indomitable presence. Hendricks himself also made footwear a central theme of his photographic work, as in the fabulous heel and stockings in Untitled (1980), making Triple Portrait: World Conqueror the culmination of a career-long motif. Men’s footwear also appears throughout Hendricks’s paintings: partly obscured, humble loafers in Stanley (1971), groovy platforms in Northern Lights (1976), Christlike sandals in Triple Portrait from the Yard (2012), and pristine sneakers in Photo Bloke (2016).
The artist’s iconic canvas Lawdy Mama (1969), currently on view in the critically acclaimed retrospective of Hendrick’s portraits at the Frick Museum in New York, could be seen as a precursor to Triple Portrait: World Conqueror. Both women are powerful and unafraid to confront the viewer’s gaze with their Byzantine solidity. As The New Yorker writes, “In paintings like ‘Lawdy Mama’ (1969), showing a woman with a voluminous Afro against a gold-leaf, Byzantine-style background, Hendricks sought to redress this historical omission and make icons for a new era” (C. Wiley, “Fashion and Politics in Barkley L. Hendricks’s Pictures,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2023). Triple Portrait: World Conqueror is likewise a corrective effort that puts on unabashed display the power of women of color in Hendricks’s universe as he puts them on the same plane as saints.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1945, Hendricks was interested and encouraged in the arts from an early age. While receiving a certificate from the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he had the occasion to visit Europe and see vast swathes of art history in the 1960s. There, in the grand portraits of Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez, and the rest of the Western canon, he noticed a lack of depictions of black people and experiences to which he could directly connect. As the Black Power movement gained traction in the United States, Hendricks eschewed overtly political subjects and instead familiarized himself with the Old Masters, learning to finesse the rendering of light and detail in his portraits of African Americans and thus lend them the historical power they so deserved. Delectably detailed clothing, attention to light and air of liberation harks to the Rococo masters.
Just as Hendricks has come into his own, the same could be said of the woman in Triple Portrait: World Conqueror. His goal has always been to elevate his friends and strangers alike to the status of icons, so it is only right that he has become an icon as well. Triple Portrait: World Conqueror is an essential painting in a storied career that speaks to the humanity of us all.