From November 2022 to January 2024 the artist Henry Taylor’s best-known works were on show at his major American career retrospective, entitled Henry Taylor: B Side.
The exhibition, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles before traveling to the Whitney in New York, took its title from the lesser known, more experimental songs which once appeared on the flipside of 45rpm vinyl singles. It’s a neat reference, and very apt for an artist so at home within pop culture and, as the Whitney pointed out in its notes on the exhibition, it suits Taylor’s swift, improvisational approach to artmaking.
Yet B Side was perhaps a slightly misleading title for the exhibition, since it didn't comprise overlooked appendages overshadowed by greater work but was a bona fide, huge hit in itself. ‘Henry Taylor's 'B Side' Is Full of Grade-A Paintings’, ran the The New York Times’ headline. The Los Angeles Times characterized the show as a ‘Vital retrospective filled with unforgettable art' and The New Yorker wrote that 'The painter’s strengths emerge not from empathy but from a strange, almost compulsive insight.'
Henry Taylor – i'm yours, 2015 © Henry Taylor Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone’s review referenced how, ‘Taylor superimposes the past onto the present, overlaying the world we know now with the history of being Black in America’, while also noting that Kendrick Lamar had used Taylor’s paintings as a backdrop on the rapper’s recent tour.
It’s high praise for an artist who was once a little more used to life in the gutter than staring down at the stars. Henry Taylor’s studio is in downtown LA, close to Skid Row. Occasionally, the painter would ask homeless people to pose for his pictures. He even has a 2014 painting entitled You Really Gone Pay Me to Sit?' However, on one occasion it wasn’t the sitting or the payment that bothered one of his subjects; it was the request for identification.
Henry Taylor – THE TIMES THAY AINT A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! 2017 © Henry Taylor Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
“I asked the last brother that came up to my studio, ‘What’s your name?’ He said, ‘No, no, don’t put my name!” Taylor recalled in a recent interview. “I told him it’s about respect, because I respect all these people. It’s a two-dimensional surface, but they are really three-dimensional beings.”
That loving attention Taylor pays to his subjects – some of whom are also friends and acquaintances, others public figures, others drawn from photographs, books, and from history – all builds up into something that surpasses the limits of a portrait’s frame.
Indeed, while Taylor’s work could be classed as portraiture, the painter himself resists the term. In the past Taylor (who also makes assemblage-style sculptures) has even questioned whether he’s a figurative painter at all. Perhaps this is because his art captures not only faces, but also expresses some of the wider social forces at work within his subjects’ lives.
Henry Taylor – Was King, When I Met The Queen - Syllable X's Rhythm Equals Mumbo Jumbo, 2013 © Henry Taylor Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
A native Californian, Taylor was born in 1958 in Ventura, and raised in Oxnard, just up the coast from Los Angeles. His father worked as a commercial painter, mainly for the Government, while his mother was a maid. Taylor recalls how the paintings in the houses of his mother’s clients provided him with an early exposure to fine art.
The youngest of eight children (Taylor refers to himself as ‘Henry the Eighth’) the artist studied journalism, anthropology, and set design at Oxnard College, where he befriended the acclaimed southern Californian painter, James Jarvaise. Jarvaise was head of Oxnard’s Department of Fine and Performing Arts and instilled a sense of vocation in the younger artist.
After college, Taylor took a job at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where he worked as a psychiatric technician. “I was like a mediator between the client, the patient, and the doctor,” he explained to Artspace in 2016. “Normally I administered medication, gave shots, did treatments, charted all the patients.” Sometimes, he painted a few of them too.
Henry Taylor – The 4th, 2012 © Henry Taylor Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Obtaining his BFA from the California Institute for the Arts in 1995, Taylor soon gained a reputation for producing fast, expressive works, often executed in acrylics, and sometimes painted onto whatever came to hand.
“Early on, I didn’t have any money and I’d look at a box, a cereal box or some kind of little box, a cracker box, a cigarette pack, and I’d say, ‘Hey, hell, that’s a good enough canvas,' he later recalled. “Let me slap some gesso on that!”
Success within the gallery system means Taylor no longer has to gesso up his own cereal boxes. The artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe, Hauser & Wirth, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoMA PS1. Meanwhile, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and Whitney Museum of American Art all have Taylor works in their permanent collections.
Henry Taylor – That Was Then, 2013 © Henry Taylor Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
In May last year (2023), his 2007 work, From Congo to the Capital, and black again, a critical reworking of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, sold at Sotheby’s in New York for just under $2.5m, almost doubling its high estimate.
That record may not remain in place for long. Works such as his 2017 painting, Cicely and Miles Visit the Obamas (a fanciful depiction of Miles Davis and his wife Cicely Tyson visiting the Obama-era White House); his 2015-17 canvas, Ancestors of Genghis Khan with Black Man on horse (which alludes to the killing of Taylor’s grandfather, a horse trainer and draftsman, in Texas in 1933); and THE TIMES THAY AIN’T A CHANGING, FAST ENOUGH! also from 2017 (showing the killing of police-shooting victim Philando Castile the year before) are widely regarded as 21st century American masterpieces.
The works have led many to liken Taylor’s output not only to that of contemporaries such as Kerry James Marshall, and Alex Katz, but also to works by Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, and Alice Neel.
Henry Taylor – Watch your back, 2013 © Henry Taylor Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
In a way, you could describe Taylor as a history painter, as he often depicts the course of social relations in America. Consider his 'Jockeys' and 'Caddies' series, which the artist began in 2018. Based on archival imagery, they show Black jockeys, caddies, and professional golfers.
“I remember when there were a lot of Black caddies,” Taylor explains. “My mom cleaned houses for a living and now the maids are Hispanic. Different people disappear. Jockeys disappeared. The caddies disappeared. That was enough reason for me to paint them.”
Henry Taylor – Resting, 2011 © Henry Taylor Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
The works went on show at a 2021 exhibition called Disappeared, but a tiger showed up, later. It’s a smart, funny title that gets to the heart of things, much like the artist does himself. As the English novelist and short-story writer Zadie Smith, who has also posed for Taylor, once put it, “Taylor depicts Black history the way many Black people actually experience it: as simultaneous change and stasis, revolution and stagnation, one step forward, two steps back.”
Go here to be among the first to hear about a forthcoming exclusive Artspace edition from Henry Taylor, and forthcoming editions from Tracey Emin (DBE), Jim Hodges, Hank Willis Thomas, and Anna Park.
