Fresh From the Old School
“I don’t think in those terms,” he says. “Wherever your studio is, that’s where you’re an artist. You take yourself with you–I am where I am. What is this business that you have to be in a certain place, especially in the late 20th century?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Even so, Barnes didn’t make the cut in the MCA’s recent exhibit “Art in Chicago: 1945-1995,” an omission that puzzled both Schulze and critic Dennis Adrian, another early booster of the “Chicago Style.” Schulze called it “scandalous” and a “miscarriage of justice”–he even fired off a letter of protest to curator Lynne Warren. For his part, Barnes took his rejection in stride. While he was surprised to be excluded, calling it “weird,” he didn’t lose any sleep–his work has been shown here for 45 years. “I found the whole thing amusing,” he says now. “The idea of the show was people who worked in Chicago, and I only worked here as a student. I was a presence, but I wasn’t here.”
Yet Barnes’s enigmatic, highly theatrical imagery–based on literary, historical, and artistic sources, as well as on personal symbolism and memory–would have fit squarely into the MCA’s stab at defining the local canon. He may be a man of the world–a painter dealing with universal themes–but for decades he’s followed the imagists’ adventurous urge to create singular, original, sensuous objects. “I don’t think of theory,” says the wiry, white-bearded Barnes. “To me, the most important things in a painting are touch and mystery. If you know what something is, it’s not going to live. Every time I see my work, I see something I didn’t know I knew–I don’t know how that happens….I want a painting to seduce me.”
Barnes says he was more influenced by Chicago’s literary legacy than by its artistic traditions, and that’s why narrative and the figure became important elements in his work. He drew both inspiration and subject matter from his friendships with writers and literary people, including Jessica Nelson North, then the editor of Poetry and a onetime member of the old Dil Pickle circle, and poet Paul Carroll, a freewheeling figure in Chicago’s art scene of the 1950s and ’60s who experimented with surrealist verse.
Barnes currently has 20 new pastels on view at Sonia Zaks–a body of work that took him 18 months to complete. The pastels tell stories that often take place on stage sets, “like toy theaters,” he says. They reference subjects as varied as Titian, dancer Paul Swan, Antonin Artaud, Edith Piaf, Macbeth, a Mexican folk dance, Kenneth Starr, and exotic perfume (“a mystery of the senses that I see as a metaphor for painting”); several depict scenes from near his second home, a cottage in Umbria.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo of Robert Barnes by Larry Rainey.
