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dUILIO bARNABé (1914 - 1961)
I. Bologna, Cultural Background : 1914-1946
Duilio Barnabč was born in Bologna in 1914 and at a young age began drawing and
painting. His mature artistic achievements date from about 1946 until his early
and dramatic death in the French Alps in 1961. This fifteen year period of
creativity began just after the end of Futurismo, a movement initiated in Italy
by the writer Marinetti in1909 and developed through the early 1940s by artists
such as Balla, Boccioni, Carrŕ and Severini. On the other hand, Barnabč’s
productive years immediately preceded another influential Italian art movement,
Arte Povera, which included artists such as Boetti, Kounellis, Merz and
Pistoletto and lasted from about 1962 through the mid-1970s. Over the years,
Barnabč has been accorded considerable recognition with exhibitions of his works
in Bologna, Milan, Triest, Rome, Prague, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Athens, Lisbon,
Lausanne, Geneva, London, Paris, New York and Chicago. Barnabč also was selected
to present a major exhibition at the 1951 Venice Biennale.
* * *
Bologna, the city of Barnabč’s birth, is the capital of the
Emilia-Romagna region and lies in the rich plains at the foot of the Apennines.
The center of Bologna still preserves a medieval atmosphere and, in addition to
its numerous ancient churches, piazze and palazzi, the imposing arcades that
line the streets give the city a particular elegance. Bologna is known for its
university which, already in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was one of
the most famous and oldest in Europe. In the center of the city is the large,
open square formed by the Piazza Maggiore and the Piazza Nettuno. Around this
ensemble are the Palazzo d’Accursio, from the thirteenth-century, and the
basilica di San Petronio. San Petronio, begun in 1390, dedicated to Bologna’s
fifth-century patron-saint and decorated with relief sculptures of Jacopo della
Quercia, is one of Italy’s most impressive religious edifices. As a youth,
Barnabč was intimately familiar with this historic center of Bologna, as well as
with the neighborhood in the “Saffi” district where his family lived and
attended mass at their parish church of Santa Maria della Grada.
Even before his art studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna, Barnabč
already had received a stringent religious upbringing. As he matured, however,
his intense and questioning nature led him to have doubts about the Catholic
religion. At first an ardent believer, he developed an equally strong distrust
in his own beliefs. Torn between belief and ironic skepticism, yet remaining
sentimentally very attached to the church of his youth, Barnabč’s spiritual
ambiguities gradually coalesced into a rejection of his early religious
upbringing. In many ways, his mental state corresponded to Sřren Kierkegaard’s
religious category of “pure irony”. 1 Kierkegaard, whose early
nineteenth-century writings were rediscovered by twentieth-century
Existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel and Sartre, described
“pure irony” as a final and necessary religious stage before a God-fearing
individual could have the possibility of finding true belief within himself. To
become a true believer, from Kierkegaard’s point of view, the spell cast in
one’s youth by Christian dogmatic concepts first had to be completely broken.
Only then would it be possible to find an unfettered path to “pure faith”.
Whether in the form of “pure irony” or “pure faith”, religion,
and more precisely the Roman Catholcism with which he was raised, became a great
personal problem for Barnabč. Although brought up under the shadow of Bolognese
churches in which images of the Madonna and Child and Christ on the Cross could
be found in abundance, significantly he never painted these traditional
religious subjects. On the other hand, Barnabč’s paintings abound in depictions
of figures that were familiar to him as both the physical embodiment and the
earthly symbols of religion, namely the cardinals, bishops, nuns, choir boys and
others who worked in the service of the Church.
* * *
Cultural life in Bologna from the 1920s through the early 1940s was influenced by a regionalist movement called Strapaese (super-country).2 Strapaese opposed what were perceived as the “contaminating” effects of modernization and rejected almost all contemporary cultural tendencies (including the then current Cubist approach to the visual arts) that were based on northern European and particularly Parisian ideas about art and literature. With its origins in the idealized, revolutionary days of 1919 before Mussolini came to power in 1922, the proponents of Strapaese demanded a return to what were seen as the glories of the Italian past. They defended the “purity” of regional traditions and incited Italians to seek a simpler and healthier provincial life-style. At the time, these objectives were strikingly similar to those of a number of contemporary American artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood. In both of these regionalist movements, the nineteenth century was set in contrast to the twentieth-century, the country to the city, and nature to the machine. Strapaese, however, also eventually reflected undertones of the politics of Nationalism and even Fascism.The Bolognese version of Strapaese was supported by two local publications: Il Selvaggio (The Wild One), edited by Mino Maccari, a close friend of Barnabč’s fellow artist, Giorgio Morandi; and L’Italiano, published by the writer Leo Longanesi. Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carrŕ, who already at the time of World War I had rejected Cubism and urged a return to classicizing values and to “the grand Italian traditions”, were the most prominent Bolognese critics defending various aspects of this movement.
Strapaese essentially incorporated two very disparate types of
ruralism: one based on solid, traditional Catholic values, the other
embodied by “the wild man of the forests” (il selvaggio) and characterized
by a resistance to all outside influences and controls, from those of the
immediate family to those of the Church and the state. Maturing within such
criss-crossing and often conflicting beliefs and ideologies, Barnabč’s unusually
sensitive and receptive personality became marked from early on by a sense of
the unresolved and by an inner turmoil that were not particularly apparent,
given the artist’s relatively tranquil demeanor.These various influences and
psychological complexities are reflected in Barnabč’s art, for example in
the two-sided, divided faces depicted in many of his figural compositions
and in the underlying tensions belying the calm surface appearance of many of
his still-lifes.
* * *
In attempting to relate the art of Barnabč to “the grand Italian traditions” , the artist’s cultural roots actually could be traced all the way back to the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, a city not far from Bologna and even closer to Faenza where the Barnabč family originated before emigrating to Bologna in the mid- eighteen hundreds. In spite of the intervening centuries, the works of the Byzantine masters and those of Barnabč are closely linked by their choice of forms and by related aesthetic sensibilities. In terms of content, however, they are very different. In the art of the Byzantines, stability and universality of form are equated with stability of content. In contrast, within even the most finished works of Barnabč and despite their exterior appearances of total tranquility, subtle elements of instability are always present.
The golden backgrounds of Byzantine mosaics also find parallels
in the art of Barnabč, although, unlike the Byzantine masters, his use of a
timeless background is consciously chosen. Similar to his Byzantine
predecessors, Barnabč’s self-imposed, formal restrictions and his purity of line
allow his art to reveal underlying, transcendent realities. In seeking such
transcendent realities, both the Byzantine masters and many modern artists
separate the subjects of their works from the physical reality of the
surrounding world, thus leading towards one form or another of abstraction.
Barnabč’s simplest, most balanced and one could say most “Byzantine” works in
fact are his most abstract ones. These works, however, are not “abstract” in the
sense of having unrecognizable subjects, but only in their universalized rather
than individualized figures and forms. Such abstract and often austere works
appear to be the truest expression of Barnabč’s artistic strivings and approach
closest to his particular sense of reality.3
* * *
There are a number of formal and thematic links between Barnabč and his well-known contemporary Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). The two artists were both born in Bologna, though Morandi, who was twenty-four years older, eventually outlived the younger Barnabč. It is notable that the typically delicate colors of Bologna (known as the Cittŕ Rossa or “Red City”) are present in almost every work by Morandi or Barnabč. Both artists found a lifetime of inspiration from the muted roses, faded ochres and dusty yellows that are so prevalent in the coloration of their hometown’s streets, buildings and surrounding countryside, as well as in the slate-like blues and grays of the Emilian skies above. Interestingly, the Bolognese scholar and novelist, Umberto Eco, has stated that Bologna’s artists can be truly appreciated only after one has “traversed the streets and the arcades of this city and understood that an apparently uniform reddish color can differ from house to house and from street to street.” Eco feels there is a “simultaneous quality of homogeneity and diversity” unique to the colors of Bologna.
Aside from coming from Bologna with its inherent characteristics, the personas of Barnabč and Morandi had little in common. The sheltered, regular life-style of Morandi,who remained a lifetime in Bologna, was very different from that of Barnabč. Barnabč’s most productive period consisted of many “unsheltered” years in Paris, where he was subject to artistic influences coming from all over the world. In the case of Morandi, there were no apparent signs of a driven artist, no unsurmontable artistic dead-end streets to overcome, no affairs of intense loves or hatreds, in summa none of the mental anguish often associated with the modern artist. As a person and as an artist, Barnabč, on the contrary, was tempetuous, passionate, unpredictable and in a state of constant mental agitation bordering on total dispair.
In their drawings and paintings, Barnabč and Morandi both reveal how under-statement and simplicity can be used as a means to achieve visual complexity. Their understatement and simplicity, however, are derived from different sources. In this respect, though Barnabč spent most of his productive life in France, in many ways he remained more Italian in his art than Morandi. Morandi did not even visit Paris until 1956, but he seems nevertheless to belong more to the French tradition of pure painting, with its love of sensuous brush-strokes and of the vivid materiality of pigments. Contemporary Italian critics did not seem to understand the influence of earlier French masters on Morandi. For example, in 1928, Mino Maccari, the editor of the Strapaese-oriented journal Il Selvaggio, described the art of Morandi as italianissima, with deep roots in Italian tradition. He wrote: “If Italian characteristics are balance and synthesis... purified to simplicity of expression, all are present in Morandi...” 5 This appears, however, to be more a description of the essence of French art, from Poussin and Chardin to Corot and Cézanne, and is very different from the art of either of Barnabč’s preferred masters: Mantegna and Picasso. Morandi confirms his views in an autobiographical essay of 1928 in which he stated that: “Among the moderns, in my view, Corot, Courbet, Fattori and Cézanne are the most legitimate of the Italian tradition”. 6
The tightly composed, small-formated subjects of Morandi’s art
differ greatly from the grand compositional formations found in Barnabč,
whose painting is rooted in a truly italianissima tradition stretching back to
the Renaissance and even to the Byzantine era. It also should be noted that,
with only an occasional landscape, Morandi’s art was limited almost entirely to
still-life painting. Barnabč, aside from a few landscapes, accorded equal
attention to figure and still-life. In addition, of these two artists, Barnabč
showed the most profound respect for Italy’s long artistic tradition of
monumentality. Seen already in Byzantine mosaics and then in the massive
Madonnas of Giotto in the fourteenth century and again in the imposing figures
of Andrea Mantegna and Piero della Francesca in the fifteenth century, this
sense of monumentality remains a vital element in many later periods of Italian
art. In the twentieth century, this tradition is exemplified by the imaginary,
high-walled palazzi and isolated gigantic figures dominating grandiose
spaces of uninhabited and abandoned piazze in the works made from 1914
onwards by the surrealist painter Giorgio De Chirico. The tradition is
reaffirmed in the monumentally conceived compositions of Barnabč.
With De Chirico, Barnabč also shared an attachment to an art based on “silence”.
A great deal of what was important to De Chirico, and then later to Barnabč, is
not openly stated in their art, but rather remains intangible, transcendent and
often mysterious. Silence, when what is not being said takes precedence over
what is said, is a key element in Barnabč’s paintings. His figures seem
incapable of speaking, his landscapes appear to be far away and soundless, and
his still-lifes stand suspended in a dream-like quietness. During Barnabč’s most
productive period in the 1950s and in the following decade, this sense of
painterly silence, not particularly prevalent in contemporary French art, does
have interesting parallels in contemporary French literature. This is seen, for
instance, in the frequent lack of dialogue in the writings of Jean Genet
and Albert Camus as well as in the plays of Paris-based Samuel Beckett. At the
end of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (first presented in 1953 at the Théatre de
Babylone, not too far from Barnabč’s Paris studio at the time), the characters
Vladimir and Estragon are eternally “waiting for Godot”, whoever he was and
however he might have been able to help them out of their apparently hopeless
situation. As they wait without end, the lives of these two hungry and miserably
clothed itinerants appear to be trapped in a “nothingness” with no visible
future in sight. In the play, Vladimir’s last words are: “Shall we go?” and
Estragon replies: “Yes, let’s go!”. Beckett’s final stage instructions are
that neither of them should move, that they should continue “waiting”, but
should remain silent.
* * *
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Fascism reigned in Italy. In terms of controlling cultural activities, however, it took some time for that political movement to exercise total authority. Unlike in Germany, the government initially voiced little objection to styles as diverse as Academicism, Expressionism and Pure Abstraction. There also was a relatively peaceful coexistence between the provincial artistic worlds and the ruling power base in Rome. Mussolini’s anti-Semitic and other radical declarations and acts from 1938 on, as well as the pact with Germany in 1939, gradually brought an end to this situation. Whatever hopes for the future, held by more liberal Italians in the early days of Mussolini, were destroyed as the Fascist party grew increasingly powerful, reactionary and nationalistic.
Barnabč was an apolitical individual. However, even in Bologna’s
relatively calm political situation during the early years of World War
II, he was profoundly affected by the increasingly restrictive and
threatening atmosphere as well as by the limitations of living in a city which,
in spite of its great historical past and cultural institutions, remained
provincial and isolated from the world at large. This sense of isolation
ended temporarily when Bologna was occupied by the German army in 1943. In 1945,
even before the arrival of the liberating allied armies, the city rebelled and
expelled the occupying forces at a cost of over two thousand citizens’ lives. In
1946, after the dramatic liberation of Bologna, the then thirty-one-year-old
Barnabč, together with his young wife, the talented sculptor Angiola Cassanello,
decided to leave for Paris. It was there that he spent the remaining and
most productive years of his artistic life.
II. Paris, Years of Creation : 1946-1961
Compared to the provinciality of Bologna, the atmosphere of post-war Paris, and
in particular the Latin Quarter where the Barnabčs lived, was very exciting. For
the Barnabčs and many other artists and writers, this period proved to be an
intellectual and emotional turning point when the ravages of the war years
somehow had to be relegated to the past and each individual had to face up to
the day-to-day exigencies and often total confusion of life in precarious times
with an unpredictable future. For these reasons, public lectures and debates
involving the most prominent philosophers in Paris were well attended and
the arguments proposed were widely discussed. As Jean-Paul Sartre stated at the
time:
Until recently philosophers were attacked by other philosophers.
The public understood nothing of it and
cared less. Now, however, they have made philosophy come right down into the
market place.7
For the Barnabčs, in addition to the intellectual stimulations of post-war
Paris, there also were the pleasures of living in the Latin Quarter with the
Sorbonne, St. Germain-des-Prčs, boulevard St. Michel, Montparnasse, the endless
bookshops, art galleries, antiquaires, cafés and remarkable performing
personalities such as the novelist and jazz musician Boris Vian and the young,
melancholy singer Juliette Gréco. There also was the bristling colony of writers
and artists from all over the world. In addition, contemporary art was very
accessible for a wide public through three annual art salons: the Salon des
Réalités Nouvelles (the Salon of New Realities), the Salon de Mai (the May
Salon) and the Salon des Peintres Témoins de leur Temps (the Salon of
Painters as Witnesses of their Times).
In spite of the seemingly endless distractions and diversions of Paris’s intellectual and artistic worlds, for Barnabč the tolling church bells of San Petronio in distant Bologna never seemed that far away. In his nature and in the nature of his art, Barnabč remained bound to his Italian roots. In this respect, he was similar to other Italian ex-patriot artists such as De Chirico, Savinio and Sironi whose art, in spite of their long Parisian séjours, remained for the most part within the confines of Italy’s classical traditions. Barnabč nevertheless was well aware of other artists then living and working in France. His earliest paintings in Paris clearly were influenced by Picasso’s Cubist works of 1909-10. Like Picasso, Barnabč, in his painterliness and compositional angularity, in turn also was inspired by Cézanne’s still earlier analysis of form. These “cubist” affinities are evident in Barnabč’s less conceptual works of 1946-1951, such as his Ritratto (Portrait) and La portinaia (The Concierge), both of 1948, and his Figura of 1950 (plate nos. 2, 4 and 8). 8
In the later 1940s and the 1950s, the artistic ambience of
post-war Paris was one of a continuity which saw the resurgence of pre-war
masters including Braque, Léger, Matisse and Picasso. The intelligentsia
of Paris did not show much concern for the défense of new, contemporary artistic
and literary movements. Under the crushing necessities of daily life, the
younger artists and writers at the time were completely preoccupied with
themselves as isolated and often hungry creators. Their sentiments and
immediate, pressing problems were expressed and examined by a number of French
philosophers including Gabriel Marcel (Ętre et avoir was published in
1935), Jean-Paul Sartre (La Nausée was published in 1938 and L’Ętre et le Néant
in 1943) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phénoménologie de la perception was
published in 1945). After the horrors of the war and during the uncertainties of
the immediate post-war period, these and other European intellectuals felt
alienated and alone in what they saw, already in the last years before the war,
as an increasingly unstable and threatening world. Echoing the writings of
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, in 1945 the artist Bram van Velde wrote: “Only men who
are sick can be artists. It’s their suffering which pushes them to do things
which put sense back in the world. The sensitive man or the artist can only be
sick in our civilized life full of lies....Painting is man’s confronting
catastrophe...I paint my misery.” 9 Seven years earlier,
Sartre’s novel La Nausée (Nausea) presented the imagined diary of a writer who
is disturbed by the sickening, chaotic quality of the external world and seeks a
universe that is certain and predictable. In creating imaginary worlds which
have the formal perfection that the real world lacks, Sartre’s writer searches
from within his own creativity for solutions to life’s problems. Perhaps more
than ever before, writers and thinkers based in post-war Paris faced intense,
existential dilemmas which forced them to question the very reasons and purposes
of their individual creative existences. Barnabč and other visual artists
working in this atmosphere similarly strove to find personal meanings,
even salvation through their own art.
* * *
Barnabč’s existential concerns, as expressed through his
paintings, are echoed in the works of other post-war artists such as Jean
Dubuffet and Nicolas de Staël. Similar to these two artists, Barnabč early on
attempted to disentangle himself artistically from his Impressionist, Cubist,
Futurist, Expressionist and Surrealist predecessors, thereby trying to break
away from the generally backward-looking, art-world “establishment” of this
period. In their art, Barnabč and Dubuffet in particular shared an
obsession with relating the trivial to the general, each expressing this
obsession in a distinctly different way. Dubuffet, referring to his Corps de
Dame series, described his painting at the time as one which “brutally
juxtaposed the extremely general and the extremely particular, the metaphysical
and the grotesquely trivial ...the one... considerably reinforced by the
presence of the other.” 10 Barnabč, in contrast,
concentrated on suppressing the trivial and the particular. For him, what made a
person human was not that which made him seem different, but rather that
which he had in common with all other human beings. For Barnabč, these were the
characteristics which elevated and dignified each individual and gave each
individual his or her degree of universality.
In his painting, Barnabč sought conceptual and spiritual values. For him, the
deployment of “pure forms” seemed to offer the means to express what he felt to
be the essential nature of humanity. For example, the fact that a person’s eyes
are one color rather than another is less essential for Barnabč than the fact
that a person’s head is round, since all human heads are round. Barnabč thus
eliminated all traces of eye-color in his paintings, but insistently painted
heads merely as round forms since this roundness is something he saw as
essential to all human beings. It also is essential for human beings to be
“doing things”. Barnabč thus emphasized the depiction of hands in his figure
paintings. Barnabč saw the overall aspect of a figure as more important than
single details. He perceived his figures as large, generalized masses whose
garments form a single entity with their corporal volumes.Very different from
the “synthesis” sought by de Staël or the “amorphic masses” of Dubuffet, the
“masses” of Barnabč, whether in the form of figures, still-lifes or landscapes,
are controlled, monumental and usually schematically conceived. They often echo
mathematical principles explored from 1912 onwards by the Section d’Or (Golden
Section) Cubists, including Gleizes, Gris, Metzinger and Villon,11
and used in different ways by a number of earlier Italian artists,
including Severini and Morandi. 12
Whatever the underlying subjects of his paintings, Barnabč consistently employed
similar artistic methods. First, he eliminated what he felt to be nonessential,
superficial details and then crystallized what he considered to be the
irreducible elements of any given subject. In his search for purity of
expression, Barnabč attempted to drive all individual characteristics out of his
paintings in order to create abstract, universal emblems. Barnabč’s figures,
like those of his Parisian contemporary, Alberto Giacometti, are isolated,
situated outside of time and devoid of fellow human presence. As in Sartre’s
“nothingness” or Dubuffet’s Non-lieux (No-Place) paintings,the monochromatic,
cool backgrounds of Barnabč’s compositions likewise give no clue about time and
place and allow no distinction between past and present.
Barnabč’s abstract emblems provided an alternative to the polarized positions
associated with mid-twentieth century debates on realism versus
abstraction. His paintings demonstrated that those apparently diametrically
opposed positions were no longer adequate by themselves to handle many
modern concerns and issues. Instead, Barnabč’s art called for a revision of the
“heroic” view of modernism as devoid of ideological content and moving
inevitably and unstoppably toward total abstraction. In its time, the art
of Barnabč, and in various ways also that of de Staël, Dubuffet, Fautrier,
Giacometti and a number of other post-war European artists based in Paris,
called for nothing less than a general re-orientation of some of
modernism’s most basic artistic concerns and values.
* * *
During the 1950s, when many artists were seeking, in one way or another, to
destroy form itself, Barnabč’s paintings (except for one short period around
1953 when they veered towards the then common variety of abstraction) evolved
instead towards a simplification of forms. There are limits, however, as
to how far forms can be simplified. Barnabč’s search for abstract symbolism
reached a high-point around 1955-57. The next logical development could
have been in the direction of Minimalism. Like the painting of Frenhofer in
Balzac’s novel Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece),
Barnabč’s art could have evolved into a series of scribbled lines without any
apparent subject or meaning. By about 1958, however, Barnabč was producing
paintings that were becoming more descriptive and increasingly “agreeable” in
comparison with both the works of many contemporary abstract artists and his own
earlier works. Seeing where his painting was headed, Barnabč was most
dissatisfied. He sought to extricate himself from what he saw as an
ever-narrowing, artistic dead-end street whose facile character did not
correspond to the tough and determined nature of his own persona. Barnabč’s
situation was strangely parallel to that of his Parisian contemporary, Nicolas
de Staël. Towards the ends of their lives, both of these artists made
increasingly desperate attempts to reverse artistic directions and to
return, in one form or another, to more traditional principles similar to those
they had rejected earlier. In both cases, their artistic struggles became so
all-consuming, emotionally ovewhelming and seemingly hopeless to resolve that
each of them finally found suicide to be the only apparent solution to his
agonized life.
Barnabč, searching frantically to solve his artistic dilemmas towards the end of
his life, tried to return to the ideals of his works prior to 1955-1957.
He soon understood that for him such a return to an artistic past was
untenable. The increasingly complex and apparently irresolvable problems
concerning his art, together with the unrelenting intensity of his moral
and religious doubts and struggles, physically and mentally consumed
Barnabč in his last years. In the summer of 1960, he visited his mother in
Bologna. On October 7th, the night of his forty sixth birthday, high up in the
French Alps on the way back to Paris, Barnabč drove his automobile off the
side of a mountain. He miraculously escaped from this accident unharmed. For
those of us who knew Barnabč and understood his inclinations and the depths of
his despair and who also realized to what extent art was for him more important
than life itself, there was a question as to whether this accident really was
“accidental”. That question was answered one year later when, to the day, again
returning from visiting his mother in Bologna, Barnabč drove to a lonely death
at exactly the same time of night and at the same turn in the road. This sudden
and dramatic end had the same enigmatic quality, the same aura of mystery
which characterized Barnabč’s entire life and art.
* * *
Until recently, Barnabč has been seen as an isolated artist, a special case who
did not fit in with any specific movement or group of artists. Other European
artists of the period, including Artaud, de Staël, Dubuffet, Fautrier,
Giacometti and Richier, have also been viewed as similarly isolated figures. The
separation of these artists from one another and from the surrounding artistic
world was such that, in the 1940s and 1950s, they were rarely thought of as
related by contemporary critics nor brought together in group exhibitions.
13 They did not appear to correspond to a “school” in the same
sense as had the Impressionists, the Fauves, the Cubists, the Futurists,
the Dadaists, the Expressionists or the Surrealists, the members of each of
these groups often meeting to share mutual artistic, social and political ideas
and objectives. In the cases of Barnabč and a number of other talented,
isolated, mid-century artists, their common ground was precisely their lack of
shared ideals and objectives, as well as their alienation from one another and
from society in general. It was Fautrier who spoke of the “total expansion of
being in solitude” and who attempted to establish a fundamental relationship
between creativity and the degree of an artist’s isolation.14
There are many critical threads, however, which bring these various artists
together, threads which are found already in the writings of a number of the
Existentialist philosophers. Among these, Sartre and Marcel in particular
attempted to formulate, respectively, possible atheist and Catholic-based
solutions for many of the ideological and artistic problems of the post-war
generation. One of Barnabč’s most fundamental dilemmas, clearly reflected in his
art, was his inability to decide between these two Existentialist, but
spiritually conflicting points of view.
Barnabč’s oeuvre stands as one of the more cohesive and powerful bodies of work
by a modern artist. His sudden, early death in 1961 seemed particularly
tragic in that the extraordinary group of paintings and drawings, he
created over the preceding fifteen productive years, appeared to hold such
potential and also to anticipate so much that would be developed in later art
movements. A noble descendant of Italy’s great artistic traditions, Duilio
Barnabč in retrospect can now finally be appreciated as a remarkable figure in
his own time and as a notable precursor of future art.
R. Stanley Johnson
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