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A Survey of Style, an Essay by Denis Adrian: Excerpts from the Introduction for the 1956-1984 Barnes Retrospective Catalog.

Barnes' reputation has grown steadily among artists in New York and Chicago, the two cities where his work has been seen most frequently. In 1959 the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired the large early painting Judith and Holofernes, 1958. Two other large paintings, Variation on Joseph Wright of Derby's "Experiment with an Air Pump," 1961-63, and Memorial, 1961, as new works entered the collection of Richard Brown Baker in New York where they have been widely seen.

In these and other ways Barnes' presence has been maintained on the American art scene, but the bulk of his major works is still to be found in private collections, as yet, large, major paintings are not common in the collections of museums.

The heart of the matter here is surely Barnes' work itself: what kind of an artist is he, and in which areas do his artistic achievements lie? A first glimpse of any one of Barnes' paintings provides one of the keys to his work; it is a special , unusual, and complex blend of artistic concerns, formal means, and associative meanings. To evaluate the nature of this complexity it is necessary to point out that Barnes' mind is one of allusive and kaleidoscopically shifting intricacy. The themes and concerns of poetry, literature, and music, and the biographies of artists, writers poets, and eccentrics, are intermingled and realized within a rich vein of formal invention and painterly facture. His sumptuous paint handling can be seen as an extension of the Grand Manner painterliness of Rembrandt and Reubens, Goys and Mane, although it is brought off with a looseness and freedom exceptional before the twentieth century. It is his extremely exciting and virtuosic handling which perhaps provides for many the principle means of access to Barnes' work today, now that such issues are the concern of contemporary artists once again. In fact, two profound early influences upon Barnes in the 1950s were Franz Kline and Matta, both unsurpassed masters of the free and juicy brush.

Barnes' work grows out of a personal engagement with art and literature, as well as his own biography and psychology; these concerns are formed and reformed within his own poetic temperament to emerge upon the canvas in a special way. Barnes' paintings are rarely designed in the sense that the artist lays out his ideas beforehand, either in his mind or in a series of preparatory sketches and anticipations. Instead, during the time a subject or group of literary and artistic themes holds his interest, he will begin by marking the canvas with loose, straggly charcoal lines that do not construct or even begin to articulate an image-at this point the canvas may look rather like an enlarged version of some of Philip Guston's loose and crumbly abstract drawings of the 1950s and 60s.

This spontaneous underdrawing is then strengthened with thin washes in various colors, becoming an irregular crazy quilt of transparent hues which undertakes the definition of the structure of the painting as a formal construct, with the specifics of image and other content as yet undefined. By this time the theme (imaginary portrait, incident of biography or literary history, etc.) becomes more settled in the artist's mind. Completion of the painting is a task of maintaining both the harmony and tension of painterly structure emotional tone, and subjective incident, all of which are important elements of the all-over "artistic subject."

The critical factor in developing this complex of theme, feeling, and pictorial structure is Barnes' extraordinary ability to invent with the brush. This essential inventive faculty operates throughout and right up to the completion of any one of Barnes' works, and its spontaneity and freshness carry other considerations before them. The bizarreness and tantalizing peculiarity of Barnes' presentations of his subjects, as well as the specifics of their painterly realization, are the product of this flooding forth of invention. Indeed, from time to time the artist is troubled by the continuousness of this outpouring, which, once released, is not easily curbed. As a result, occasionally the artist may keep working on a particular painting, or group of paintings, for quite a long time, as ever new aspects of formal adjustment and rectification are carried out. At its most extreme, this is the plight of the painter in Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu, whose masterpiece, after countless years of reworking, is at his death incomprehensible to anyone else. With Barnes the involved invention of form is not a matter of refining and perfecting the image in a conventional sense, but rather the careful and painstaking externalization of each aspect of feeling and vision which has arisen in intricate relationship with his theme. These multiple aspects must, for Barnes, exist in a living dynamic of feeling, idea, and form. Barnes does not represent his fantasies and inventions; rather he summons them forth before us as shimmering and compelling visions which are at once strange and familiar.

Since some of Barnes' paintings take specific historical, literary, or artistic themes as their subject, whereas others are "portraits" of a kind, it would seem that Barnes might be thought of as some sort of idiosyncratic realist painter. But to think this would be a gross and serious misconception. For one thing, Barnes never seems to work from the motif, as do artists such as Phillip Pearlstein, Jack Beal or Paul Georges. To some degree each of these artists is deeply involved with facets of what can be seen, and relatively constant visual contact with an actuality before them is a necessary part of their working methods. If one may so put it, Barnes seems more concerned with creating a convincing actually that has a sense of presence and truth, but which is not perceived as always connected with what can be seen by ordinary vision. It is the sense of another reality that Barnes' work shows us, revealed within and around ordinary vision, and pervaded by seemingly irrational elements of memory and invention.

In these regards, there is probably some connection between Barnes' work and Surrealism-most likely through the work of Matta. If so, the strongest strand of this connection is the quality, as in Matta, of the work presenting a convincing reality different from ordinary experience, but which at the same time is an analogue and exfoliation of it, created in order to show the full extent of a reality understood as connecting the outer world with our inner experience. In agreement with this idea, Barnes' paintings frequently present an inextricably mixed experience of abstract forms, pure painterly passages, elements utilizing a wide variety of representational conventions, and sections which appear to be recollections if very specific observations of actual things. These latter objects can be items of furniture, clothing, animals, utilitarian objects, or still life elements of various kinds. In addition, there are invariably present in Barnes' paintings elements which, whether they are considered abstract or variations on the forms of actual objects, have a unique kind of existence which is difficult to characterize. Frequently they appear in parts if an image which can be read generally as concerned with still life.

The complex, shifting, and many-layered sense of a larger reality has important correspondences in Barnes's various literary and artistic enthusiasms. Among the most significant of these is his love and regard for the writing of James Joyce. In fact, Barnes' method and effects are like the continuous unreeling present in Joyce's Ulysses, where the events of Leopold Bloom's day are experienced by both him and the reader as shifting and overlapping elements of feeling, observation, memory, fantasy, imagination, conflation of past and present, and many other things, all of which are rooted in the structure, incidents, and characters of Homer's Odyssey. In both Joyce and Barnes, the"subject" so to speak, is created and even invented freshly for us, but it also contains, through parallels of structure, allusion, or direct reference, a connection with other realms of experience, "actual," artistic, or both. In this way Joyce's descriptions of parts of Dublin and things he saw there punctuate and accent his larger structure, lending vividness and conviction to the internal awareness of his invented characters. The elements in Barnes' paintings which feel like the record or recollection of some specific actuality help to create a forceful presence for his abstract inventions and the curious forms which we seem to recognize but cannot identify, that is, the things which we know about perceptually but cannot name.

The themes and subjects of Barnes' works are a study unto themselves. They are often recondite, and his treatment of them, in which he introduces elements of private concerns, pet sets of "secret" images, hermetic meanings, and intricately transformed references to a wide variety of other works of art, ensures that interpretative and iconological questions about his work will tease and perplex students of his work for a long time. This sort of complication of meaning and imagistic structure is not an arbitrary whim of the artist or deliberately introduced convolution designed to make his works seem like mere "puzzle pictures". While his paintings can to some degree be regarded as intriguing ciphers to unravel, the function of his elaborate structures of image and meaning is to establish in the viewer's mind layers and shifts of significance which are the actual texture of artistic experience, and which, by extension, form dynamic analogue to the structure of reality. If Barnes' work is understood in this way each of his pictures can operate as both a metaphysical image of, and device for, the apprehension of truth concerning the nature of things and our experience of them. Along with their often colorful eccentricity, Barnes' themes and subjects all are chosen to carry out this metaphysical function. In this way, Barnes' ideas of artistic function are closely related to those of Duchamp with whom Barnes was well acquainted when he lived in New York.

It is not simple to try to outline Barnes' principal theme, but among the most important are the metaphysical still lifes interiors, in which occasional fragments of landscape and even figural elements may appear; the imaginary portraits, almost invariably of artistic or literary figures, or if not, of personalities whose biography or personality has set off the artist's philosophical concerns; variations upon other works of art (these occasionally creep into other categories, as is perhaps inevitable); "narrative" subjects involving either historical incidents in the lives of poets, artists, eccentrics, and the like; figure compositions of unspecific individuals where the settings and appurtenances operate to create specific moods and states of feeling; scenes of figurative action in which whatever is happening remains enigmatic no matter how specifically rendered; and "commemorative" works wherein some principle of thought, action, or artistic attitude is elaborated in an intricate figure composition. Other themes the artist has addressed are landscapes (principally in watercolor); a series of scenes if the stages of London theaters (gouaches and small paintings); and several important unica, the biblical Judith and Holofernes, and the personal-literary-metaphysical Julian Jacob. In the case of an artist whose ideas are so involved as are Barnes', it is not surprising that these thematic groups frequently overlap and intermingle; it is an additional layer of complication in the totality of his oeuvre.

The specifics of Barnes' subjects reveal, of course, the type and range of human and artistic experience with which his personality is attuned: his subjects form, to a considerable degree, a chart of his sensibilities and the structure of his creative personality. He is deeply involved with the interaction of life and art in the personalities and work of various artists. Many are poets or writers with a strong visual quotient or special involvement with visual arts such as Tzara, Byron, Joyce, Pound, Duchamp or the dealer Julian Levy. Grand eccentrics whose lives can be viewed as peculiar artistic creations are also of great importance. in this group we find Beau Brummell; Byron again; Arthur Craven; the adventurer Trelawney, whose later history is so entangled with the bizarre and grotesque events surrounding the death of Shelly; and original thinkers such as Jeremey Bentham, whose embalmed body, preserved and on display at the University of London where Barnes studied at the Slade School.

The aestherticization of life and the contretemps that often result from it, such as Whistler's troubles with the Peacock Room and his trial with Ruskin, Beau Brummell's fall, the burning of Byron's memoirs, and others similar incidents and histories are clues to Barnes' attitudes about the function of art and the artist. Through the multiple facets of his temperament and awareness, Barnes apprehends that the texture of existence consists of simultaneous contradictory aspects, each having elements of the truth, and which occasionally produce exceptional conflicts of harmonies of perception and understanding. Barnes' examinations of art and artists, as well as the aesthetic and veristic aspects of life as it is portrayed in literature and other kind of art, especially poetry, account for the exceptional density of his work. This density, composed of compacted currents of meaning and intervention, makes for a kind of art which is not easily understood in it's entirety at first. It is not opaque so much as close and tight-grained : the concentrated elements of his work require application to follow, but they are as full of energetic life as the intricate ornamental pages of the Book of Kells, though of course they are more variable in form.

Barnes' painterly accomplishments alone offer numerous satisfactions to anyone interested in the rich complexity of the malerisch tradition, and perhaps the recent resurgence of interest in painterliness as an expressive mode will provide for many a greater accessibility to his art than has previously been the case . He offers an unusual sense of life and liveliness in the complexities of his handling and color. These are qualities which may be grasped at once, and which form the gateway through which we can enter into his enigmatic world of metaphysical and perceptual awareness. Heavy demands are made upon our attentive responses to grasp fully the significance of this kind of painting. To experience fully the images and ideas in any single work, a viewer must devote a considerable amount of time, and fully utilize his innate faculties for synthesis and interpretation. But, the satisfactions and rewards of these processes are of a very high order: they are the reverberating sensations of enlightenment and knowledge which distinguish the complex perception of great works of art.

Dennis Adrian