Barkley Hendricks Still Life Paintings

Swann Galleries is very proud to have been the first auction house to sell the paintings of the great late Barkley Hendricks beginning in 2009. We were also the first auction house to sell his signature life-size portraits with Bid’ Em In/Slave (Angie), 1973. Swann was also thrilled to have the artist as a guest for an exciting gallery talk in June 2014. 

While he is rightly considered one of contemporary art’s leading figurative painters, Hendricks also painted various subjects beyond the figure. Offspring, 1970, and our most recent offering, Pluck, 1967, display the two distinct approaches Hendricks took to the still life genre—one representational and the other abstract and conceptual. By 1967, Hendricks used both approaches simultaneously as he explored more creative approaches.

Pluck

Pluck was painted by Hendricks in early 1967 during his last year of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the age of 21. His impressive painting skills infused a depiction of a still life with Renaissance-inspired realism. These bottles and netting are presented with not just painterly precision but with mood and substance. This still-life painting has not been exhibited since that year—at the beginning of Hendricks’s professional career in Philadelphia. While still a student at PAFA, Hendricks first began exhibiting in 1966 at the Kenmore Galleries. Pluck was part of a group exhibition in the early spring of 1967 at the Lee Cultural Center; Hendricks graduated later that spring from PAFA. While focused on portraiture, still-life painting was part of his studio practice. Another example from 1967 is Star Spangled Chitlins, which was included in the memorial exhibition Barkley Hendricks: Let’s Make Some History at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in 2017. 

Offspring

Offspring, 1970, shows Hendricks’s growing conceptual approach to painting in the early 1970s. In his love of basketball, Hendricks found inspiration in the formal qualities of the game, from the shape of backboards to the painted lines on the court, all without the figure. From 1967 to 1970, primarily between his undergraduate and graduate school years, Hendricks found this inspiration while working for Philadelphia’s recreation department. While still painting objects with attention to light and form, the artist created compositions centered on the geometry inherent in the elements of the game. The 2020 Jack Shainman Gallery exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks: In the Paint, celebrated this great period of experimentation and included several early examples of basketball compositions that date back to as early as 1966, including Two!, 1966-67, and Still Life #5, 1968.

Magnolia #2

Our appreciation for Barkley Hendricks’s range continues to grow with recent exhibitions and publications of his work in photography and watercolor. For example, Hendricks painted a series of beautiful watercolors of magnolia blossoms while staying in Durham, NC, for the summer of 1975. While he will always be celebrated for his stunning portraiture, his development of such a traditional genre as still life, at a time when the art world eschewed the figurative, demonstrates the creative spirit of this great artist.