Print friendly. Use browser's print function to print this page.

Robert Barnes. Essay by Michael Rooks. Glen Ellyn Gahlberg Gallery, College of DuPage, 1997.

The “Daemon” in Robert Barnes In the work of the American figurative painter Robert Barnes, the ancients’ themes of strife, love, transformation and mystery become webs of subjects and themes which underscore his identification with the figure of the “outcast.”

Most of Barnes’s protagonists are outside the mainstream and are often influenced by or connected with creative processes and transformation. Among them are the Italian Renaissance condottiere Sigismundo Malatesta, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley and their companion the adventurer Edward Trelawny, the proto-Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan, and the American artist H. C. Westermann. Although the complex associations among Barnes’s protagonists cannot be fully discussed here, the exhibition at the College of DuPage’s Gahlberg Gallery provides the opportunity to examine a member of Barnes’s cast of outsider heroes, the daemon.

Barnes’s daemon is an inspiring guardian spirit – his own muse and the mythopoetic guardian of his protagonists. He (or she) is often lurking in the shadows or is a shadow himself, stealing into Barnes’s paintings like the pawky satyr in Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570--76), who obligingly offers a gut-bucket to the flayer. The daemon is an emblem of spiritus for Barnes, presiding over actions and events that are set into motion by spontaneous creative energy. Barnes’s male daemons often have erections like the Greek god Priapus who participates in Dionysian orgies, signifying the generative impulse and suggesting the unpredictability of inspiration.

Locarno (1983) is from a large group of work’s based on an accident that Barnes saw in a restaurant opposite the Locarno hotel in Rome: a waiter slipped, splattering everyone with pasta, but remarkably retained in his fall something of the gracefulness characteristic of Italian camerieri. Concern for his safety turned to laughter at the situation, and wine was provided everyone by the management. As if by enchantment, apparent disaster became festivity. For Barnes, “fallingness” represents the simultaneous and contradictory agencies of design and chance in life and, by extension, in the process of painting.

In Locarno a daemon transanimates the falling waiter, who has not yet lost control of the serving tray that he holds overhead. Steam from his tray becomes a sort of volatile magic gas that impregnates the atmosphere with ecstatic potentiality; a table, chairs, and the patrons in them are upset, igniting a topsy-turvy chain reaction that affects even the restaurant walls.
The waiter’s unexpected acrobatics reminded Barnes of his late friend, the artist H. C. Westermann, who had recently died. Westermann was a Marine veteran and had been the topman in a U.S.O. hand-balancing act. Westermania: Westerhaven (1983) is from a cycle of paintings—variations on the “falling waiter” theme—that Barnes made in Westermann’s posthumous honor.

Mania in the title suggests a Dionysian possession that is both ecstatic and violently purgative. Westermann’s shadow is the daemon, bounding like a stag with trays balanced in either hand, his silhouette profile is set off by a shimmering gold halo. As ringmaster, he directs a frenetic spectacle in the restaurant/Big Top, which is barely held up by two rubbery center-poles. Westermann’s wife, the artist Joanna Beall Westermann—who had performed as an acrobat herself—is in the background in a ballerina’s attitude croisée derrière. Acrobatic mastery of balance metaphorically demonstrates the balance of chance and decision in artistic activity. Westermannia: Westerhaven shows the harmonious outcome of a collision involving metaphysical forces, nature and the daemonic spirit.

This spirit is the sea in Secrets Revealed by the North Sea (1984) and North Sea at Scrabster (1985). The North Sea lies between the British Isles and Northern Europe. Its waters connect the channel between Norway and Denmark with that between France and the United Kingdom. Barnes has family in Scotland near the coastal village of Scrabster, his favorite for watching the sea. He observes that “there’s something about [the North Sea] that beckons you lovingly, and then you know it’ll kill you.” For Barnes, this balance of opposite forces is paralleled in the process of painting: “If you can get the oppositions in exact proportion so that their forces act the same, they would become the same – totally fused.”
Secrets Revealed by the North Sea and North Sea at Scrabster refer to mythological and literary traditions of heroic voyages to the underworld. Barnes was familiar with a parallel Surrealist notion of plumbing the unconscious, another dark realm. In their insistence on this metaphor, the Surrealists made a cult hero of the mid-nineteenth-century Symbolist writer Gérard de Nerval, who walked a lobster on a leash—preferring it to a dog or cat because a lobster knows the “secrets of the deep.”
In both of Barnes’s North Sea paintings, colossal swells open the sea, revealing on its floor a submarine kingdom littered with wrecks. The bridge in North Sea at Scrabster links the world of the living and the Celtic world of the dead. Candlesticks representing the two realms flank an estuary, one candle snuffed, the other still burning. This bridge also appears in Secrets Revealed by the North Sea, above rowboats that convey shades to the netherworld, their womblike shape suggesting the power of the sea to both give and take life. At the end of a pier are two allegorical figures, “The Source” and the “Hanging Man.” The latter, in tarot, is descended from the god of the underworld. Among other things, he represents those who are helplessly obsessed by a passion – the artist controlled by his shadowy daemon.

Ludlow Silkie (1987) is about male and female creatures of the underworld in Scottish lore who are also obsessed by their passions. Silkies live in the North Sea as seals and have the power to become human. Their longings to satisfy their sexual desires compel them to shed their skins and live upon land. Ludlow Silkie refers to a Scottish ballad about a female silkie who falls in love with a human. She eventually yearns for the sea, but the human hides the skin to prevent her from returning. Barnes’s silkie is another daemonic transformation: emerging from her skin on a rocky shore, returning to her skin in the middle distance, and finally becoming a seal once again in the background. The shedding of skin represents rebirth and a casting-off of the outer layers of consciousness to reach the psyche, and the silkie’s return to the sea stands for the elusive nature of inspiration and the inevitability of its flight.
Themes involving transformation and the netherworld run through three smaller paintings in the exhibition. In The Bath of Aphrodite (1986), the goddess’ son, Priapus, presides over the scene with an imposing erection, a symbol of creative power, the origin of life, and, for Barnes, the source of inexplicable inspiration. Aphrodite/Venus is sometimes called the “Goddess of Death-in-Life,” a reference to her importance in lovemaking; an orgasm is euphemistically called a “little death.” She wears a crown of vines, and the bowl in her hand is meant for spirits, not bath water. With a sleeping figure, Barnes “quotes” the kneeling chambermaid in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538).

The Pharoah’s Daughter (1985) is set in a desecrated tomb. Daggers have been used to slice open a mummy’s wrappings, and its contents—a skull, bones, charms, and ritual objects—have been scattered. Like a genie, Barnes’s daemon materializes in dark vapor emitted by an open amphora. Near his bust is an ankh, an emblem of life and here the symbol for reconciliation of opposites, the ankh represents both worlds of the living and the dead. This painting springs from Barnes’s interest in nineteenth-century explorers such as Sir Austen Henry Layard who traveled to the East, and especially artists and writers who sought inspiration in the exotic.
The Exotic Orient (1985) is inspired by Orientalist painters such as Eugene Delacroix and Théodore Chasseriau, and by such fanciful accounts of the Orient as Nerval’s Journey to the Orient, or Edward Trelawny’s memoir Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron. A corpse, perhaps a Bedouin or Legionnaire, lies at the bottom of the composition and a bloody head impaled on a pole stands over. This is a priapic effigy, for the sap of ivy consumed in Dionysian orgies was used to make a red lake pigment that colored the faces of male fertility images as well as that of “the Sacred King.”

The Golden Bough is the source of Nemi II (1992), the second in a series of paintings about Lake Nemi in Central Italy. The book explains the ritual death of the Sacred King as an enactment of renewal and regeneration. As a mock castration, a bough is broken by the king’s challenger from the sacred oak guarded by the king. The new king uses the branch as a weapon to kill the old. Emerging from a symbolic opening, after passing through “the world of the dead,” the king may begin to reign anew. In Nemi II, Barnes’s painting the doomed king stares apprehensively at the assassin’s weapon on the shore of Lake Nemi, which is red with the blood of previous kings. Spiritus, in the form of a satyr, hides in the shadows, a symbol of the transformative potential in life.

The Cutting of the Elm (1992) is another variation on the Sacred King myth. It refers to an incident that supposedly occurred at Gisors, France in 1188 on a field called the Champ Sacré, the site of negotiations a setting for negotiations between Philipe II of France and Henry II of England. Henry and his army took advantage of the only shade on the field, provided by a huge elm tree. After three days, exposure to the heat of the sun made Philipe’s men weary and frustrated. Eventually, a battle broke out for possession of the tree; the French forces attempted to destroy it, prompting the English to reinforce its trunk with bands of steel. Philipe’s men finally prevailed and cut down the tree to assuage their earlier frustration.

In Barnes’s painting an array of weapons is set upon the tree and its last English defender. Another lies dead in the foreground, and a placard above them gives the date, 1188, in roman numerals. The composition is divided into two realms when the painting is turned upside down [figure 12] (Barnes’s studio arrangements permit him to paint on canvases upside-down or on their sides, regardless of their final orientations.) The tree’s foliage becomes the realm of the dead lorded over by the now familiar daemon.
The Cutting of the Elm represents “physical power” in a cycle of paintings titled The Sources of Power. Others included “wisdom,” “beauty,” “sexuality,” and “wealth.” The latter is taken up in Gold and Mercury (1992): a woman rushes toward an open grave with a fat purse hanging from her wrist. Pearls falling from a broken strand around her neck allude to the version of Tintoretto’s Tarquin and Lucretia (c. 1585) in the Art Institute of Chicago. Barnes implies that power is fragile and transitory, and that death cannot be averted by means of great wealth. Above the figure’s head, a scale weighs gold coins in one pan, yet its arm remains level even in the absence of an opposite pan. It is related to traditional vanitas imagery which reveals the emptiness of worldly possessions by suggesting the inevitable triumph of death.

In his series, Blood and Perfume, Barnes likens alchemical and artistic transformation to the manufacture of perfume. Like perfume, which is produced with animal fats, waxes, and other pungent ingredients, the essence of painting for Barnes is the transformation of common or abject materials into something extraordinary, rare, and elusive. The series was inspired by the legend of Saint Ursula and her attendant eleven thousand virgins, all of whom were supposedly buried on the site of the Cologne cathedral. An awful stench filled the air when the mass grave was uncovered, caused by the presence of a horse’s jawbone among the remains. But, once extracted, the stench vanished and was replaced by a beautiful fragrance, the essence of divine truth. The jawbone represents the physical component of the martyrs – blood – which sinks into the earth while vaporous perfume represents the spiritual.
In Ursula, Cologne (1996), a man has become entangled in a rope with which he sounds the depths of a well symbolic of the mass grave Saint Ursula and her eleven thousand martyrs. One end of the rope is in the form of a ladder. The well represents a passage between two worlds, and the rope ladder is a means of transport between them. But the tangled rope implies that the man’s attempts to measure the extent of the nether depths will be confounded. The daemonic shadow behind him, independent of his own, is about to shove him in.
Another work in this series, Belle Haleine (1996), pays homage to Marcel Duchamp whom Barnes had known from the late 1950s until Duchamp’s death in 1968. The title Belle Haleine is borrowed from that of Duchamp’s assisted ready-made, Belle Haleine, Eau de Violette (1921), a pun on “eau de toilette” fragrances. Barnes quotes Duchamp in the image of “Rrose Sélavy,” Duchamp’s female complement, as well as the “ectoplasmic thought cloud” from Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915--23). Other “Duchamps” in the painting erupt from a starry space, like the amphora in The Pharoah’s Daughter, that echoes the “Bachelor’s” fruitless ejaculations in the Large Glass; its mechanical harmony between the “Bride’s” upper realm and the “Bachelor’s” lower realm epitomizes a balance of opposite forces.

In Art Daemons (1996) [figure 16], Barnes depicts himself playing chess with Duchamp, who enjoyed Barnes’s competition because he would play without a gambit, leaving everything to chance. Their game symbolizes the creative process for both artists – the meeting of chance and intention on an ever changing field. Duchamp was perhaps the embodiment of daemonic genius for Barnes. In a 1965 Whitney Museum catalogue, Barnes was quoted: “If I had a master (and I don’t), I suppose it would be Duchamp. ” Barnes has also noted that the Frenchman most influenced him through discussions of literature. Even so, the affect on Barnes of both Duchamp’s art and his ideas about the role of art and artists deserves close examination.

The daemon in Barnes’s paintings invokes and celebrates the various modulations of a constantly transforming creative spirit that was awakened and strengthened in Barnes through his friendship with Duchamp and others in his New York intellectual confrérie of the 1950s. Commemorating the most influential artist of this century at its close, Barnes revisits a vast field of artistic, historical, and literary ideas; his paintings depict comic/tragic scenes that are both highly personal and universal. The balance between artistic intention and fortuitous accident is the outcome of Barnes’s grappling with the capricious muses personified by the varying mischievous shadows of the daemon.

Michael Rooks

(Originally published as “Some Reflections on the “Daemon” in the Recent Work of Robert Barnes” in an exhibition catalogue for the College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Gahlberg Gallery, 1997.)