Home  Catalogue Conclusion
|
Conclusion |
|
|
Over seven decades of active work Barry's art never became static or stale. His style evolved constantly, from the early narrative oils through the energetic Vorticist works, from the elegant etchings to the vibrant Pointillist canvasses, from the chromatic landscapes to the elemental simplicity of his final works. Despite his later reticence about promoting his own work Sir Claude Francis Barry is represented in private collections in Europe and America. He features in several British museums and French art galleries and throughout his life he exhibited at the finest shows in Britain and France.
Barry's exuberant fireworks paintings are among the most colourful of all his works. He adored colour, declaring that colour was to painting 'what love is in a man's life'. His pointillist technique is used to great advantage in these shimmering skyscapes, with their extraordinary luminosity and delicate depiction of form.
Though he painted several Moscow skylines, there is no evidence that Barry visited the city; it is likely that he worked from photographs. His friend Misomé Piele recalled: 'When the great Moscow Fireworks was finished, all the pent-up fury and determination had somehow been controlled by the delicate balance of true artistic genius, the fireworks seemed to blast the studio asunder...'
Barry delighted in all kinds of dance, from Diaghelev's fashionable Ballets Russes, to the scandalous Argentinian tango. In his later years Barry also patronised the music hall; his friend Jack Skinner reported that Barry was particularly keen on the tarantella and used to pay a girl half a crown to dance with him until four in the morning.
In 1954 Barry was commissioned to paint a portrait of the ballerina Margot Fonteyn (cat 844) performing her lead role in Swan Lake. The pointillist sky creates a theatrical backdrop to the naturalistic dancer, while the glittering stars suggest Fonteyn's status: a star at the height of her career. For some reason the painting was never delivered to Fonteyn's father, a fellow Jersey resident, who commissioned it. Nonetheless Barry exhibited the work at the 1965 Royal Society of British Artists exhibition. It remained among his possessions and featured in the Barreau Art Gallery's 1974 retrospective of his work.
Barry believed a portrait should convey the sitter's personality rather than attempt to create an exact likeness. He explained: 'the artist should try and use only the colours that express character, and even the strokes of his brush, gentle or angry touches, can express character... character is what you need to express, not the superficial likeness... In one hundred years time, who knows or cares if the portrait is like the sitter or not. All that matters is if it is well painted.'
Though Barry claimed he was 'not a good drawer', according to his friend Jack Skinner, in the 1950's he suffered skin complaints on his hands as a result of using raw turpentime instead of white spirit. This meant that for several months until his hands healed, Barry could not use oil paints. During this time he did a series of pencil portraits, of which many of Doreen survive.
Given his attraction to the female muse, there are understandably few portraits of men. While many of his sitters are not identified by name, Doreen Durrell, his mistress in the 1950's, figures prominently.
Barry deplored British prudery, declaring: 'the English... think the nude is indecent, whereas there is nothing indecent about it whatever; the only thing that is indecent is the dirty minds of the people who see the picture...' There is a directness about Barry's depiction of the female body. While unashamedly erotic, his nudes are neither coy nor lascivious; they are strong, self-possessed women often gazing directly out of the canvas inviting the spectator to enjoy them. This challenging pose can be traced back through Manet's daring 'Olympia' to the sensuous reclining Venuses of such Renaissance masters as Titian and Velasquez.
As with his paintings of Moscow, there is no evidence that Barry visited India; his etchings of the Taj Mahal were probably done from photographs. Barry defended the use of photography, claiming that a photograph of a complicated building could be useful to the artist: 'draw in the design as you want it ... then use the photo to put in details.' Though he adds the caveat: 'just as when painting directly from nature you use and do not copy nature, so you must be careful to use and not copy the photograph...'
Though Barry was more inclined to Celtic superstition than orthodox religious observance, in his etchings and oils alike he was drawn to the grandeur of great religious buildings. Barry's daughter speculated that he may have lived in Paris before settling in Bordighera in the 1920's; certainly the city figures prominently in his work – particularly that of his later years. His annual pilgrimage to the Salon in Paris may have inspired him to create the simple, flat, almost abstract paintings of Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur, and of the great Gothic cathedral at Chartres, which dominate his later works.
As the son of an engineer Francis Barry was intrigued by the mechanics of the ICI factory. The cubist squares of the exterior and mechanistic depiction of the interior recall Barry's earlier Vorticist style. In ICI Factory Summer Night Barry includes two characters, a man and a woman, huddling in a shaft of light while a single male figure approaches them through the dark. Given Barry's penchant for placing himself and his wife in his works, it is perhaps not too fanciful to imagine this painting portrays the rapprochement between Barry and his estranged son Rupert. As an employee of ICI it was probably Rupert who secured permission for Barry to paint the factory.
Bordighera, a Mediterranean resort on Italy's Ligurian coast was popular with English expatriates between the two World Wars. Barry lived here for a time; the old town with its alleys, colonnades and garden squares features in many of his etchings.
Barry was drawn to the view of the French Riviera from Bordighera, particularly at night when the lights along the waterfront echoed the stars above. In Barry's etchings of Bordighera, as in many of his other works, elements such as a single star, a waxing moon or a passing storm take on a mysterious almost symbolic significance beyond their compositional or narrative function.
Dolce Aqua is one of the towns near Bordighera where Barry may have lived during his time on the Continent. This medieval hill town was a popular spot for artists, with the ruins of the fifteenth century Doria castle looming over its old bridge and picturesque streets. Although they share the same composition, his pencil drawings, etchings and paintings of the castle were done over the course of many years. As he got older and less mobile Barry often used earlier etchings as the inspiration for his works.
Although there is no evidence that he actually lived there, Barry found a rich source of subject matter in the skyscraping towers of San Gimignano. He also depicted the town from afar, rising out of the landscape with a farmer's hay stack or a peasant woman in the foreground to anchor the composition. Barry declared: 'You cannot take too much trouble in perfecting your composition...' He advised aspiring artists to divide the top, the bottom and both sides of their canvas in half, to draw an oval through these points and to 'put nothing of any interest outside the oval'. Although he himself did not hold slavishly to this advice, many of his best works reveal the framing oval.
Venice was a source of enduring inspiration for Francis Barry. As early as 1899 when he was merely 16 years old he wrote to his father extolling the virtues of the city. He returned there to live for a time during his European sojourn. Some of his most elegant etchings were inspired by the city's architecture, lagoons and canals. Prints of his Venetian nocturne, Piazza San Marco, Venezia at Night, were reputedly bought by both Mussolini and Neville Chamberlain. In later years Barry returned to Venice as a subject for his oil paintings, reducing his palette to create such serene and harmonious studies as the blue/grey Morning Venice '64 (cat 108) and the Silver and Grey Venice (cat 788) of 1963.
From the range of towns and villages represented in Barry's work it is clear that he was a perennial traveller. His family believed he made a good living selling his depictions of popular tourist sites in Italy, Germany and France. Such works as Champs Elysees '58 (cat 38), Red Roofs (cat 634) and Le Puy (cat 118) demonstrate the expressionistic exuberance of his middle years; their loosely modelled forms and naive outlines suggest his first steps towards abstraction. Many of the works from this period recall the Symbolist style of Paul Gauguin – a painter Barry much admired for his 'beautiful colour' and his 'never-failing sense of decorative design'. Barry's early preoccupation with 'decorative design' anticipates the simple, rhythmic style of his later years.His etchings of the Old Nuremberg Market (cat 611) reveal an extraordinary draughtsmanlike precision, while the haunting Giotto's Tower, Florence (cat 370) with its wraiths drifting across the floodlit foreground demonstrate the subtlety and atmosphere that Barry brought to this often static medium.
Barry proclaimed 'trees are the glory of landscape'. From his earliest available painting, A Glade In Windsor Park (cat. 848), to such late oils as Decoration in Green and Yellow (cat. 558) he returned repeatedly to the subject. In his treatise on painting Barry counselled: 'if you are going to paint trees it is necessary that first you must learn as much as you can about them: about their anatomy, their roots in the ground, what they do if growing crowded together in a forest or singly by themselves, what they do in a wind or if growing on the side of a hill...' He went on to point out: 'you have been told, no doubt, that trees are green?... look at them and see what colour they really are, for they are very seldom green, very often blue, and can be crimson, orange-yellow, grey or black; anyhow almost anything except green.'
In the sun-speckled trees of his youth, Barry was influenced by the prevailing taste for realism. In works from his middle age, such as The Pond, Rozel (cat. 431) Barry's trees take on a sinewy form, deliberately evoking the curves of the female body. His late works, such as Tree Decoration (cat. 643) from the final decade of his life show a move towards abstraction.
Barry's studies of bridges, particularly the Roman Bridge at Andorra which he depicted many times, allowed him to experiment with huge skies. The last version, Andorra Bridge (cat. 640), painted in 1963 from an etching done several decades earlier, shows Barry beginning to use his characteristic Ôsausage clouds' – long, thin tubes of white which gradually replaced the billowing forms of his earlier cloudscapes. In Carcasonne (cat. 23) painted four years later, the sky has been reduced to a single flat plane.
The paintings from Barry's years in Jersey are notable for their graceful shapes and exquisite colour. Rendered increasingly immobile by age and infirmity, he concentrated on subjects near at hand: the castles, forts and chateaux of the island around him. His art had been moving towards abstraction and these final works distil his theories on colour and form. Barry advised aspiring artists: 'turn your picture upside down on the easel, for it then becomes not a landscape or portrait or still-life, but just an arrangement of shapes, colours and tones on the rectangle of your canvas: an abstract. This is what a picture should be for: it should not tell a story – words are the medium for story telling.'
In many later works Barry employed dark outlines to emphasize his rhythmic forms. Though this technique was first taught to him by the Newlyn artist Frank Brangwyn, he attributed the theory to Henri Matisse. Matisse was Barry's idol: a master of colour, line and form. Barry claimed that Matisse wished to exclude from his pictures 'anything ugly and unpleasant and include only things that were beautiful, to bring calm contentment and happiness to everyone who saw them.' Certainly in his final works Barry himself achieved this extraordinary feat, creating works of profound simplicity and elegance.
|
|
|