Discovering Rick Barton
I’m not alone after I say that I had by no means heard of Rick Barton (1928–1992) earlier than his exhibition, Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton opened on the Morgan Library & Museum. Kudos to Rachel Federman for curating a present on an unknown artist and diving deep into his work and life. I quickly realized that Barton is both omitted from or talked about in passing in well-known histories of the Bay Space Beat Motion. And but, marginalized figures who are sometimes acknowledged by just a few others throughout their lifetimes are apt, as Walt Whitman declared of himself, to “include multitudes.” That is true of Barton, who attracted a small group of devoted followers, all dedicated to drawing as a day by day follow. Little is understood about Barton, who was a part of the heady confluence of artists, poets, musicians, visionaries, crackpots, hipsters, pacifists, anarchists, and petty criminals, a lot of whom had been queer, who gathered in San Francisco shortly after World Struggle II. Though he went to and labored on drawings on the Black Cat Café and Fosters, hangouts for Bay Space artists and poets, he existed on the periphery of that group.
Barton is understood in any respect due to three individuals who had been near him in San Francisco, the place he lived from the mid-Nineteen Fifties till the mid-Seventies. The primary is Henry Evans, who opened the Porpoise Bookshop and began Peregrine Press in San Francisco within the early Nineteen Fifties. Evans, who grew to become a preeminent botanical printmaker, was Barton’s greatest patron and writer of his botanical and architectural prints. In response to Federman, he had “greater than a dozen portfolios of linocuts and a cache of practically eight hundred drawings and 4 work in his possession,” which he donated to numerous libraries and collections in California.
The second particular person is David Archer, with whom Barton had shut relationship and traveled to Mexico. He wrote about Barton in an unpublished memoir (2002), and spoke with Federman on quite a lot of events; Archer provides essentially the most particulars about Barton’s life.
The third particular person is William Anthony, artist and longtime resident at Westbeth, which supplied inexpensive housing to artists in New York. It was Anthony who introduced Barton’s work to Federman’s consideration when he included some items in a present to the museum. Had been it not for these three folks, Barton’s work would possible stay preserved however unseen. The phrase, “the celebs aligned” appears an applicable description of this exhibition’s genesis.
The exhibition, which contains drawings completed between 1958 and 1962, is split into 4 themes: Intimate Interiors, Ritual and Structure, Social Areas, and Flora and Fauna. Barton drew in pen and ink, filling the web page with intricate linear particulars that usually replicate a number of views, notably in his Intimate Interiors and Social Areas, which embrace cafes and jails, the place he did time for drug possession. He was queer artist who cherished to attract males. His line is splendidly fluid and his drawings present no hesitation.
Barton is basically a diarist chronicling the highs and lows of his life, his love of classical music, his visits to Mexico and Barcelona, and his emotions of each need and isolation. Though he was notably considering church facades and interiors, he appeared to attract no matter was in entrance of him wherever he was; it was his manner of organizing the inside and exterior chaos of his life.
Within the “Untitled (seated determine within the Black Cat Café)” (September 27, 1960), a lady sitting alone and studying dominates the composition. Though Barton was not particularly expert at drawing faces, her lengthy face holds its personal amid the welter of particulars that compels viewers to maintain reorienting themselves, to pay attention to the shifting views till the drawing turns into obvious as an creative amalgamation of statement, reminiscence, and creativeness.
Is the seated lady, who occupies the drawing’s proper half, additionally floating? Is she seated subsequent to a jukebox? All the pieces within the drawing appears to be based mostly on an actual object, however I can’t say that I can learn all of them, nor does it matter ultimately. One merely surrenders to Barton’s assured line, which pulls us by way of and throughout the area he has conjured.
Barton’s reconfiguring of area is present in quite a lot of works, which regularly embrace his hand holding a brush and drawing. When he depicts himself drawing, he’s each inside and outside the work he’s making. In “Untitled (Inmates studying)” (1959), he depicts his proper hand rising up from the underside edge, holding an ink pen and, on an oblong floor, drawing a bare-chested man engrossed in a e-book. His left hand is seen, holding a cigarette; extending additional again are two naked toes. Evidently Barton is mendacity on his jail mattress, drawing his environment. The dimensions shifts from a person mendacity right down to a big face peering in by way of the bars, to a part of a torso glimpsed within the decrease proper nook. Regardless of his environment, what Barton conveys is the pleasure of drawing the world round him, which right here consists of a second of quiet leisure.
In his floating figures, kaleidoscopic views, and drawings inside drawings Barton evokes a world that defies gravity and feels as whether it is about to float aside. This tightrope between order and chaos — and the thrilling motion of a crowd — is fantastically evoked in his accordion-like sketchbooks, which he first obtained when he was in China, having sailed there as a service provider marine within the Forties. As the author and artist Etel Adnan recounts in an excerpt within the indispensable catalogue, Barton gave her a sketchbook he had partially stuffed. This completely sudden present impressed Adnan to create a physique of labor that exists alongside her work and books.
In her catalogue essay, “Rick Barton’s Infinite Room: An Opening,” Federman means that Barton could have seen Andy Warhol’s early line drawings in his self-sponsored exhibition, Fifteen Drawings Primarily based on the Writings of Truman Capote, on the Hugo Gallery (June-July 1952). Some of the fascinating works that Federman delves into is a pencil drawing, “Untitled (After Dürer and Hokusai)” (1962), wherein Barton has drawn an outdated man by Hokusai in a setting lifted from Dürer’s engraving “The Prodigal Son Amid the Swine” (1494-96). Derived from disparate sources, Barton depicts the outdated man gazing down at two piglets consuming from a spherical wood feeder. This element binds the Asian determine and the western setting, in addition to enhances Barton’s use of line. It’s in works like this that we glimpse Barton’s adventurous spirit and acute visible reminiscence, his explicit genius.
Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton continues on the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue, Murray Hill, Manhattan) by way of September 11. The exhibition was curated by Rachel Federman.