ART - Manet and Degas, Ruth Asawa, Ed Ruscha

“Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” (opening on Sept. 21) marks a homecoming of sorts for Hendricks, who died in 2017, at the age of seventy two.

- Jennifer Krasinski

The exhibition places fourteen of his paintings, made between the late nineteen-sixties and the early eighties, under the same roof as the Old Masters to which Hendricks, their dedicated student, returned throughout his life. Like all the greatest portraitists, Hendricks rendered glimmers of his subjects’ interior lives via the particularities of their personal style, the poses they strike, and the precise wattage of their skin’s radiance, remaining steadfastly devoted to, in his words, “the beauty and variety of complexion colors that we call Black.”

A fateful first meeting of Édouard Manet (1832-83) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917) at the Louvre, in the early eighteen-sixties, led to a two-decade conversation—at times friendly, at other times charged by a less than collegial frisson—as each pursued his own audacious, masterly hand.