A 1971 portrait of the artist Stanley Whitney painted by Barkley Hendricks is poised to break a record for the artists when it is offered at auction in May.
The painting, titled “Stanley,” picture its titular subject in street clothes standing against a gold background and smoking a cigarette. It will be offered during a single owner sale at Christie’s where it’s expected to fetch $5 million. If it reaches its low estimate, the painting’s sale will be a record price for a work by Hendricks, who died in 2017 at the age of 72.
The two Philadelphia-born artists met while studying at Yale University in the 1970s. Hendricks would eventually become known for his paintings of fashion forward subjects —predominantly depicting people of color in his inner circles. He’s credited for influencing the current generation of Black figurative painters working today.
The last time a major Hendricks work came to auction was in December 2020. The 1972 canvas Mr. Johnson (Sammy from Miami), 1972, depicting one of the artist’s signature nonchalantly-posed models sold for $4 million during a Sotheby’s contemporary sale in New York—setting a new auction record for the artist. The result surpassed the previous high of $3.7 million paid for Hendricks’s Yocks (1975) at Sotheby’s in 2019.
Recognition surged for Hendricks following the Nasher Museum of Art’s lauded retrospective “Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool,” in 2008 at Duke University. Whitney, who is 77, has seen his own milestones recently. His abstract works garnered attention during a collateral exhibition staged at the last edition of the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Copyright
© Art News