Frances Barth (born 1946) is an American visual artist best known for paintings situated between abstraction, landscape and mapping, and in her later career, video and narrative works.
[Waltemath, Joan]
"Frances Barth: Scale, Economy and Unnamable Color,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', February 2010. Retrieved May 19, 2022.[Brody, David]
"Nothing Forced Yet Nothing Lax: Frances Barth in Bushwick,"
''Artcritical'', December 7, 2017. Retrieved May 19, 2022.[Kalina, Richard. "Frances Barth," ''Art in America'', October 1994, p. 133.] She emerged during a period in which contemporary painters sought a way forward beyond 1960s
minimalism
In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...
and
conceptualism, producing work that combined modernist formalism, geometric abstraction, referential elements and metaphor.
[Perrone, Jeff]
"Frances Barth,"
''Artforum'', March 1978. Retrieved May 19, 2022.[O’Brien, Barbara. ''Being and Belief: The Paintings of Frances Barth'', Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, 2005.][Moos, David. "Atlanta — 'Dimension,'" ''Art Papers'', March/April p. 33–4.] Critic
Karen Wilkin wrote, "Barth’s paintings play a variety of spatial languages against each other, from aerial views that suggest mapping, to suggestions of perspectival space, to relentless flatness …
hequestions the very pictorial conventions she deploys, creating ambiguous imagery and equally ambiguous space that seems to shift as we look."
[Wilkin, Karen. "Extreme Possibilities: New Modernist Paradigms," ''Extreme Possibilities'', New York: The Painting Center, 2009.]
Barth has been recognized with a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
[John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]
Frances Barth
Fellows. Retrieved May 19, 2022. and
Anonymous Was a Woman Award,
[McNatt, Glenn]
"With Award, Barth Is Anonymous No More,"
''The Baltimore Sun'', December 30, 2006. Retrieved May 20, 2022. among others. She has exhibited at the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA),
[Museum of Modern Art]
Frances Barth
Artists. Retrieved May 19, 2022. the
Dallas Museum of Art,
[Brettell, Rick. "DMA Abstraction Exhibition Mixes it Up," ''Dallas Morning News'', March 6, 2015.] and in the
Whitney[Whitney Museum of American Art]
Whitney Biennial 1973
Exhibitions. Retrieved May 20, 2022. and
Venice
Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...
Biennials.
[Museo di Palazzo Grimani]
''Frontiers Reimagined: Art that Connects Us''
Venice: Museo di Palazzo Grimani, 2015. Retrieved May 20, 2022. Her work belongs to the public collections of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
Frances Barth
Art Collection. Retrieved May 19, 2022. MoMA,
and
Whitney Museum,
[Whitney Museum of American Art]
Frances Barth
Artists. Retrieved May 19, 2022. among others. She is director emerita of the Mount Royal School of Art at the
Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA).
Early life and career
Barth was born in the
Bronx, New York in 1946.
[Rose, Barbara. ''American Paintings: The Eighties'', New York: Vista Press, 1979.] In the 1960s, she attended
Hunter College
Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...
, earning a BFA and MA in painting and art history.
[Robins, Corinne. ''The Pluralist Era, American Art 1968-1981'', New York: Harper & Row, 1984.] Her early interests extended to sculpture (including studies with
Tony Smith), movement and music; after taking a modern dance workshop at Hunter, she performed in works by
Yvonne Rainer and
Joan Jonas between 1968 and 1976.
Barth gained early recognition through several survey exhibitions in the 1970s. Curator
Marcia Tucker
Marcia Tucker (born Marcia Silverman; April 11, 1940 – October 17, 2006)Smith, Roberta ''The New York Times'' (October 19, 2006), Retrieved 23 November 2014. was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New M ...
included her in the Whitney Museum's 1972 painting annual and 1973 biennial;
the shows led to a 1974 solo exhibition and representation with Susan Caldwell Gallery.
[Robins, Corinne. "Frances Barth," ''Art in America'', September–October, p. 113.][Lubell, Ellen. "Frances Barth at Susan Caldwell," ''Art in America'', November 1983, p. 222–3.] Barth also appeared in "American Painting: The Eighties" (1979, curated by
Barbara Rose
Barbara Ellen Rose (June 11, 1936December 25, 2020) was an American art historian, art critic, curator and college professor. Rose's criticism focused on 20th-century American art, particularly minimalism and abstract expressionism, as well as S ...
),
[Foster, Hal]
"A Tournament of Rose's,"
''Artforum'', September 1979. Retrieved May 20, 2022. "American Paintings of the 1970s" (
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1979),
[Cathcart, Linda. ''American Painting of the 1970s'', Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1978.] and focused group shows at the
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston[Belloli, J. ''John Baldessari, Frances Barth, Richard Jackson, Barbara Munger, Gary Stephan'', Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.][Contemporary Arts Museum Houston]
"John Baldessari, Frances Barth, Richard Jackson, Barbara Munger, Gary Stephan,"
Event. Retrieved May 20, 2022. and
Corcoran Gallery of Art.
[Slade, Roy. ''Three New York Artists'', Washington DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1973.] In subsequent years, she exhibited at Tomoko Liguori,
[Smith, Roberta. "Galleries Paint a Brighter Picture for Women," ''The New York Times'', April 14, 1989, p. C-1.] Sundaram Tagore
and Silas Von Morisse in New York,
Jan Cicero Gallery
Jan Cicero Gallery was a contemporary art gallery founded and directed by Jan Cicero (née Pickett), which operated from 1974 to 2003, with locations in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois and Telluride, Colorado. The gallery was noted for its early, ex ...
(Chicago),
[Donnell, Sally. "Frances Barth, Martin Prekop," ''New Art Examiner'', Summer, 1985, p. 59.] and Marcia Wood (Atlanta),
[Cullum, Jerry]
"Frances Barth, Mernet Larsen play spatial tricks at Marcia Wood Gallery,"
''ArtsATL'', March 18, 2011. Retrieved May 19, 2022. among others.
Painting
Since the early 1970s, Barth has explored the possibilities of meaning and metaphor within abstract paintings employing complex pictorial spaces and multiple points of view.
Her work frequently combines flatness and volume, delicately indeterminate color, and a sense of unstable space and scale, often in long horizontal formats that require viewers to "read" (and re-read) them slowly, from left to right.
In her first major solo show (Susan Caldwell, 1974), Barth exhibited 10' to 16'-long horizontal paintings focused on color, movement and gravity, which evolved from common geometric shapes such as triangles, trapezoids and circles.
[Tucson Museum of Art]
Frances Barth
Collection. Retrieved May 19, 2022. The scumbled, scratchy forms functioned as both objects and atmosphere and suggested gently moving planes shifting places (e.g., ''Vermillion'', 1973).
By 1978, she was producing increasingly complex, mural-like arrays that ''Artforum'' described as "long, narrow, friezelike compositions of alternating circular and triangular forms, advancing, receding, stretching out beyond vision" (e.g., ''Mariner'', 1977).
The successive transformation of shapes established a sense of temporality and furthered the dichotomy between surface design and pictorial depth in her work.
[Minneapolis Institute of Art]
Untitled, 1977, Frances Barth
Art Collection. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
Beginning in the 1980s, Barth began to add referential forms and markers to her geometric shapes, incorporating new spatial and graphic languages—aerial mapping symbols, schematic diagrams, perspectival rendering, modeling, pure flatness—that provoked multiple of readings of the work.
[Wilkin, Karen. "At the Galleries," ''Partisan Review'', Vol LIX, No. 1, 1992, p. 111.] ''Art in America'' termed her 1983 exhibition a deliberate "stylistic leap" toward "geometric landscape" with a "deeper, decidedly illusionist space" inhabited by volumetric forms and softer colors (e.g., ''Seventh New Year'', 1983).
[Handy, Ellen. "Frances Barth," ''Arts'', June 1983, p. 35.] In 1989, ''New York Times'' critic
Roberta Smith wrote that Barth's "works have lately opened up into strangely angular landscapes, as abstract as they are imagistic and as gestural as they are structured."
Writers have described these works as both linear "narratives" translating the slow movement of geologic time (e.g., the development of faults or forming of canyons) and as credible, panoramic depictions of landscapes and experiences—including light and time of day—achieved through a subtle and informed use of abstract color.
[Zimmer, William]
"Summit: Constructed in Jersey City,"
''The New York Times'', September 28, 1986, Sect. 11NJ, p. 28. Retrieved May 20, 2022.
In the 1990s, Barth incorporated classical Japanese influences into her paintings, while continuing to counterpoint Western illusionism against modernist flatness.
The Eastern inspirations were borne out in the work's rudimentary landscape imagery, canted perspectives, balance of planar and linear elements, and muted, economical palettes of dusty color.
Critics characterized the paintings as highly individualistic, puzzling, "thoughtful improvisations," noting their juxtaposition of decoration, carefully gridded organization and calligraphic spontaneity (e.g., ''L. Rides West'', 1993).
[Bell, J. Bowyer. "Frances Barth," ''Review'', May 1, 1997, p. 24–5.] ''Art Papers'' described works such as ''sal.-v'' (1997) as "rapt with quietude, intent on describing
heexperience of a moment of recognition."
Reviewers of Barth's shows between 2006 and 2011 often focused on what Joan Waltemath called a "dialectical approach"
mixing divergent syntactic codes, perspectives and unstable scales to produce works simultaneously evoking mysterious terrains, geologic schematics, and "near-minimal abstraction."
[Wilkin, Karen. "At the Galleries," ''The Hudson Review'', Winter 2007.][Wilkin, Karen. "Barth Ranges Wide," ''Art in America'', October 2006, p. 186–7.][Frank, Peter. "Haiku Review: Frances Barth," ''Huffington Post'', April 23, 2011.] David Brody described the collage-like interplay in Barth's 2017 exhibition (e.g., in ''Yellow Yellow'', 2016 or ''Olive'', 2017) as a place "precisely balanced between lucidity and mystery" in which "an absorbing world of imagination might also be a quirky transcription of observable facts."
He made particular note of the interaction between her paintings and new sequential work (animations and a graphic novel), suggesting the latter works brought "into the open longstanding internal disputes" at the core of her practice, notably, "an implicit argument between abstraction and narrative, between stillness and forward motion."
Video, animation and narrative works
Since 2007, Barth has created two animations (''End of the Day, End of the Day'', 2007; and ''Jonnie in the Lake'', 2016),
[Film Freeway]
''Jonnie in the Lake''
Retrieved May 20, 2022. two documentaries (''Regina'', 2013, about painter
Regina Bogat
Regina Bogat (born 1928) is an American abstract artist currently living and working in New Jersey. Married to artist Alfred Jensen, her own artwork was often overlooked in favor of her husband's, although her work has experienced renewed interes ...
; and ''The Audition'', 2018), and two narrative short films (''No No Boy'', 2015; and ''Dreaming Tango'', 2020).
[Film Freeway]
''Dreaming Tango''
Retrieved May 20, 2022.[Wilkin, Karen]
"At the Galleries,"
''The Hudson Review'', January 2018. Retrieved May 20, 2022. In 2017, she published the graphic novel ''Ginger Smith and Billy Gee'', which featured settings derived from her paintings.
[Barth, Frances]
''Ginger Smith and Billy Gee''
Frances Barth, 2016. Retrieved May 20, 2022. Barth was a guest panelist in a 1975 episode of
Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. featuring
Tom Wolfe, discussing his then-recent book ''The Painted Word''.
Awards and collections
Barth has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977),
awards from the
Joan Mitchell Foundation
Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artis ...
(1995)
[Joan Mitchell Foundation]
Frances Barth
Supported Artists. Retrieved May 19, 2022. and
American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999, 2004),
[American Academy of Arts and Letters]
"Awards."
Retrieved May 20, 2022. and grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts (1974),
[National Endowment for the Arts. ''Annual Report 1974'', p. 109.] Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation was established in 1976. It is an American nonprofit organization that provides funding for the arts.
History
The Gottlieb Foundation was established after Adolph Gottlieb’s death in 1974. Esther Gottlie ...
(1993), Anonymous Was a Woman (2006)
and
Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2017),
[Pollock-Krasner Foundation]
Frances Barth
Artists. Retrieved May 19, 2022. among others. In 2011, she was elected to the
National Academy of Design.
[National Academy of Design]
Frances Barth
The Academy. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
Her work belongs to the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art,
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
''Hakuryo'', 1981, Frances Barth
Collection. Retrieved June 8, 2022.[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
''Color'', 1978, Frances Barth
Collection. Retrieved June 8, 2022.[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
Untitled, Number 500, 1979, Frances Barth
Collection. Retrieved June 8, 2022.[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
''Vessel'', 1978, Frances Barth
Collection. Retrieved June 8, 2022. Whitney Museum,
Akron Art Institute
The Akron Art Museum is an art museum in Akron, Ohio, United States.
The museum first opened on February 1, 1922, as the Akron Art Institute. It was located in two borrowed rooms in the basement of the public library. The Institute offered clas ...
, Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
[Albright-Knox Art Gallery]
Frances Barth
Person. Retrieved May 19, 2022. Cincinnati Art Museum,
[Cincinnati Art Museum. ''Cincinnati Museum Association Annual Report 2020'', Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, p. 108.] Dallas Museum of Fine Art,
[Dallas Museum of Art]
''Bowery Two'', Frances Barth
Artwork. Retrieved May 20, 2022. Davis Museum,
[Davis Museum at Wellesley College]
Untitled, Frances Barth
Objects. Retrieved May 20, 2022. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,
[Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art]
''Henning'', Frances Barth
Objects. Retrieved May 20, 2022. Minneapolis Institute of Art,
, and
Tucson Museum of Art,
among others.
References
External links
Frances Barth websiteFrances Barth
Guggenheim Fellowship page
Frances Barth
Silas Von Morisse Gallery
{{DEFAULTSORT:Barth, Frances
20th-century American painters
21st-century American painters
American women painters
Abstract painters
Hunter College alumni
Painters from New York City
American art educators
1946 births
Living people