Oct 08, 2009 - Sale 2189

Sale 2189 - Lot 78

Price Realized: $ 144,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
BARKLEY L. HENDRICKS (1945 - )
Bid' Em In/Slave (Angie).

Oil and acrylic on canvas, 1973. 1680x1270 mm; 72x50 inches. Signed and dated in oil, upper right.

Provenance: the artist; Searles/Spicer collection, Philadelphia, PA. The artist Charles Searles obtained the painting from Hendricks when the two friends exchanged works in mid-1970s.

Exhibited: Millenium, Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 8 - October 14, 1973; Barkley Hendricks: Paintings, Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, February 11- March 28, 1976; Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC. February 7 - July 13, 2008, with the labels on the painting back.

Illustrated: Trevor Schoonmaker. Barkeley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool. Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2008, p. 48, cat. 18.

This iconic, life-size painting by Barkley Hendricks is his first important work to come to auction. Born in Philadelphia, Barkley Hendricks studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Yale University. Since the late 1960s, Hendricks has painted life-sized representations of young, hip models and friends. He pushed the contemporary figure to new heights--realist portraiture on both a human and grand scale, empowering his subjects with a keen sense of style steeped in the skill of academic European portraiture. In Bid' Em In/Slave (Angie), Hendricks cultivates the formal, sexual and cultural tension of his model with her pose against a pink background. Hendricks makes Bid' Em In/Slave (Angie) both a powerful, arresting female figure and an outstanding painting.

Barkley Hendricks has taught painting at Connecticut College in New London, CT since 1972. He has had many solo exhibitions since 1970--including shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Delaware Art Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts and ACA Galleries, New York. His paintings are found in numerous museum collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Chrysler Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.