GLR March-April 2023

Read These Drawings Like a Book

I SPOTTED HIM in the city this sum mer, a naked young man sitting with his ankles crossed, hands clasped on the jacket thrown across his lap. This banner-sized reproduction of a drawing hung outside New York City’s Morgan Li brary & Museum to advertise a new show by an artist I had never heard of. Something about the affectionate rendering of the male form made me certain he was gay.

bulbs of bohemian squalor sometimes illu minating nude men), architecture (ornate gothic cathedrals), public spaces (eclectic coffee shops and bars), and plants (often thin and spindly-looking). Sometimes Bar ton includes his hands and feet in the draw ings; sometimes more than one set of each. He doesn’t do over; he just adds. Yet every thing feels as if it flows from one continu ous line.

M ICHAEL Q UINN

WRITING A CHRYSANTHEMUM The Drawings of Rick Barton Edited by Rachel Federman

DelMonico Books 144 pages, $49.95

That hunch was confirmed in both the show and the ac companying book Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton . Born and raised in hardscrabble circumstances, Barton (1928–1992) got his art education from visiting the city’s museums and the New York Public Library. He dropped out of high school, enlisted in the Navy, and was discharged, possibly for mental illness, settling in the BayArea in the 1950s like many gay men of his generation. A self-described paranoid psychotic, he self-medicated with alcohol, marijuana, and opium, and obsessively drew pictures. He attracted a group of

Barton’s multiple perspectives within a single drawing give his work a singularity and an intriguing complexity. The line drawings often have a fragmented perspective, like a kaleido scope, while the block prints practically vibrate with intricately carved detail. In one untitled drawing that Federman calls “Nudes,” we see mostly one man drawn over and over again, each time reduced to fewer of his body parts—a torso, a penis— yet Barton always includes the man’s feet, the scribbles of toes like little loopy flower petals. The disembodied pair of hairless testicles almost feels cartoonish, yet carries a pendulous weight.

acolytes who congregated in coffee shops and gay bars, including the Black Cat Café, and instructed them in drawing using Chinese and Japanese tools and traditions that he probably picked up while in the service. Drawing seems to have been a kind of meditative practice for Barton, not so much an act as a state of being. Rachel Federman, the show’s curator, presents more than sixty pen-and ink drawings, linoleum block prints, and sketch books by the heretofore unknown Beat-era artist, which forego color and shading to emphasize the primacy of the line. In

Rick Barton: Untitled sketchbook , 1962.

trigued by a sampling of Barton’s work that was gifted to the museum by another artist, Federman followed a string of clues like a bloodhound, sniffing out a treasure trove in an over looked archive at the University of California. The power of Barton’s work comes from his minimalist technique applied to capturing a maximum amount of detail. Federman organizes that work by theme: interiors (the bare Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brook lyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue and on his website, master michaelquinn.com. March–April 2023

In another untitled drawing labeled “Two figures,” a man lies in bed looking forlorn, while another sits with his back to us backward in a chair, feet stuffed into slippers, head in hand. In just a few lines, Barton conveys the broad expanse of the seated man’s back and the heft of his underwear-clad buttocks. The sensuous physicality suggests an intimate relationship, but the body language conveys emotional estrangement. A set of accordion-folded sketchbooks is mostly filled with men, probably drawn in cafés; some of the pages look spattered with drips of coffee. The sketchbooks feel like a game of Ex quisite Corpse, where a drawing is begun, the page folded over

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