“Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton”

Three months before the Morgan Library opened its doors to the public, in 1928, Rick Barton—a remarkable draftsman who died in obscurity in 1992—was born a few blocks away. Now, thanks to the discerning eye and considerable detective work of the museum’s associate curator Rachel Federman, a selection of Barton’s deeply affecting ink-and-brush renderings of crowded cafés, lonely rooms, and majestic architecture (including an interior view of Mexico City’s Academia San Carlos, above) is on view for the first time, in “Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton” (through Sept. 11). An autodidact, Barton dropped out of high school to haunt the city’s museums; works in the show slip in references to Dürer, Hokusai, and Vermeer. A teen-aged stint in the Navy brought the artist to China, where he was introduced to the fine-brush form of pen-and-ink drawing that he quickly mastered. Discharged from the service (probably owing to mental illness), he settled in the Bay Area, like so many gay men of his generation. He worked there with near-graphomaniacal intensity during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, attracting a small circle of acolytes before vanishing from the scene. As the late artist Etel Adnan wrote in an essay from 1998, excerpted in the Morgan’s excellent catalogue, “Rick Barton should have been a San Francisco legend.” With this intimate, astonishing exhibition, he finally is. (Morgan Library & Museum; June 10-Sept. 11.)