CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/10/2022

‘Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton’ is a Pride Month Staff Pick

Featured drawing, titled “Portrait of Russ Zerbe” (1962), is reproduced from Writing a Chrysanthemum, the first book ever published on the drawings of Bay Area Beat artist Rick Barton. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, on view now through September 11, 2022, and authored by the show’s curator, Rachel Federman, the book also contains an excerpt of a beautiful 1998 essay by painter Etel Adnan, who writes: “In the very early days of [the] sixties I was introduced to a person who was spending his life sitting in two or three eating places in San Francisco and drawing ceaselessly the faces of the people around, their hands most often. … Rick Barton should have been a San Francisco legend. But he lived in a kind of anonymity, I should say clandestinity, because he was a thorough opium smoker and lonelier than a sailor.”