Tag Archives: pop art

Barkley L. Hendricks did not birth the cool — that was Miles Davis — but his suave portraits from the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s give him the right to use “Birth of the Cool” as the title of his five-decade retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Mixing realism, abstraction and Pop, Mr. Hendricks’s life-size paintings of beautiful black people in extravagantly fashionable outfits against flat, single-color backgrounds captured a period sensibility with uncanny acuity. They also made him famous: he was included in numerous museum exhibitions and featured in a Dewar’s Scotch magazine advertisement.

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