Unearthing Rick Barton, a Boho Bard of North Beach
In the late 1950s, as America welcomed Jack Kerouac’s 120 feet of spontaneous typescript, a different kind of scroll was underway on the West Coast.
This was the compulsive sketchbook practice of one Rick Barton (1928—1992), a quiet eccentric from San Francisco’s demimonde who, 30 years after his death in obscurity, has become the unlikely subject of a triumphant rediscovery at the Morgan Library & Museum.
On scrolls of Japanese paper each 19 feet in length, Barton documented the underbelly of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood before the hippies showed up.
Like accordions, these scrolls folded into portable sketchbooks, allowing Barton to tote them to a bistro table at the Black Cat Café and other gay haunts of the time, and to inscribe a procession of cafegoers in continuous thickets of craggy, neurotic, ruthlessly precise ink.
