When Barkley L. Hendricks began to paint portraits in Philadelphia around 1969, one would have been hard-pressed to find many black faces over the prior five centuries of Western art. "Lawdy Mama," the first work encountered in Hendricks' survey exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art acknowledges as much.
A three-quarter-length young woman wearing a high-collared, short-sleeved, horizontally striped black dress is shown frontally, her left arm crossing her waist so that a hand can clasp her right arm at the elbow. The pose is casual, but it is also slightly defensive -- a protective gesture.
Tenuous unease, perhaps from being scrutinized as an artist's subject, flickers across her face. Finally it's overcome by the straightforward stare -- lips pursed, eyes set -- all beneath the soft brown cloud of an enormous Afro hairdo.
The curve of the Afro is echoed in the arched top of the canvas -- a lunette, common for religious paintings before the modern era. This reference is further enhanced by the gold-leaf background with which Hendricks sanctifies his otherwise realistically painted "lawdy" mama.
That gesture is a bit clumsy for being so old-fashioned, but it does serve a savvy purpose. Historically, gold-ground paintings are Byzantine -- which means the reference dates to before the Renaissance, before the modern history of Western painting. Hendricks' ambitious picture is taking a wide and pointed historical detour, starting before America's colonization.
Hendricks wasn't yet 25 when he painted it. He had recently returned from trips to Europe and North Africa, between graduation from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the beginning of art study at Yale University. "Lawdy Mama" is a youthful and somewhat scattered effort, but the artist accomplished two important things with it.
First, the 1969 portrait demonstrates an acute social awareness of the black experience during a period of challenge and upheaval. Second, it shows an emerging understanding of the relationships between that awareness and the long history of painting. Hendricks' portraiture over the next 15 years explores that complex intersection, often in remarkable ways.
An artist long below the radar, Hendricks was the primary revelation in "Black Male," the controversial 1995 traveling show from the Whitney Museum of American Art about representations of black masculinity.
