Little is known about Rick Barton. In San Francisco around 1960, he excited the literati of the Beat Generation with his drawings, exhibiting in cafés and bookstores. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York is now dedicating its first museum exhibition to him, Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton, beginning June 10.
![Rick Barton (1928-1992). Untitled [Inmates reading], 1959](/images/magazine/exhibitions-and-auctions/2022/2022-06/morganmuseum-barton/barton_inmates_800x.jpg)
Rick Barton (1928-1992) produced hundreds of drawings of astonishing originality around 1960. His subjects range from a single chrysanthemum to gigantic cathedrals. Some 60 drawings and five prints will be on view at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York from June 10 to September 11 in the exhibition Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton. It is the first museum presentation of Barton's work, which was last shown in cafés and bookstores in the 1950s and '60s.
The Beat Generation shaped the cultural life of the United States after World War II. San Francisco was a center of the movement. Rick Barton, who says he trained himself to be an artist through visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, spent most of his life there. His drawings, which uniquely combined Chinese drawing traditions with Renaissance drawing styles and Cubism, quickly attracted a crowd of students. Barton was a well-known figure in the Beat subculture, but fell into obscurity from the late 1960s with the rise of hippie culture.
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