Although she is an established artist, solo shows of Barbara Warren's workare rare. Aidan Dunne's opinion of the Irish artist, born in 1925, grows even higher with a retropsective at the RHA
Barbara Warren's retrospective at the RHA is something of a revelation. Not that she doesn't already have an estimable reputation, but solo shows of her work are quite rare, never mind this generous selection extending back over five decades. This not only turns up terrific individual paintings, but also allows a compelling overview of Warren's work as a whole. It is particularly significant in her case because she has never pursued a linear stylistic progression - rather, she moves easily between degrees of abstraction and formalism, and a poised, careful naturalism.
As Julian Campbell points out in his richly informative catalogue essay, it is all too easy to characterise hers as a quiet, tentative artistic personality. Those qualities are there, but to describe Warren solely in those terms sells her short. She works within traditional categories of subject matter, including landscape, figures in landscape, interiors and still life, and portraits and figure studies. There is real backbone to her work, not just because she is an excellent draughtswoman, but because every painting has a deliberate, considered presence. More, every mark made, you feel, has been carefully weighed, its effect calculated and lived with before being released into the world.
Born in Dublin in 1925, Warren was keen on art throughout her teens, while attending the French School in Bray and then Alexandra College. After school she opted, for various reasons, to join the services during the war years. She ended up in the WAAF, working long hours servicing the electronics on aircraft at a base near Cambridge. It was an interesting and challenging time. She made friends but was homesick and "at night I'd dream of all the things I missed about Ireland". After the war she enrolled at the NCAD, but stayed only one year. While the college was in many respects a good experience, she bridled at being denied access to the life room. "I was an uppity young thing. I wanted my own way." So she decamped to London and studied at the Regent St Polytechnic. The earliest pieces in the show come from this period, and they are impressively capable and assured.
Perhaps her most formative training, though, came from the French painter Andre Lhote, when she attended his atelier in Paris, a veritable magnet for Irish artists. Warren was extremely receptive to his lyrical brand of Cubism. "He was," she recalls, "quite oldish when I got there, but he was a good teacher, he really cared about and liked teaching." That teaching left an indelible mark on her style, largely accounting for her penchant for simplifying and abstracting.
Prior to Paris, she had worked briefly at Charles Lamb's studio in Connemara and, while she went on to travel for prolonged periods in Europe, particularly in Spain, she was drawn repeatedly back to Connemara. In the long run the West, including the island of Lettermullan, Cleggan and its surrounding landscapes, and Achill, became the source for some of her best work. As this show demonstrates, Achill and Connemara prompted her to create some of the best paintings ever made of these locations.
When John O'Cleary said of her painting in the 1950s that it was not romantic and verged on being "hard and cold in general feeling", he certainly put his finger on a central aspect of her work. But the coldness he perceived has to do not with lack of feeling but with her instinctive liking for a cool, classical approach to picture-making. This doesn't at all prevent her from imbuing paintings with real emotion. Wistfulness, nostalgia, loss, sadness and longing all come through strongly in much of her work.
She is an acute observer, as a careful look at exactly recorded passages in her paintings will confirm. "I did a lot of looking at sculpture and paintings," she recalls, and this was important, encouraging the development of an analytical way of seeing. When she looks at the world with an eye to composition: "I look for space and structure every time. Colour is secondary."
These concerns are very evident in her paintings, in the way she meticulously finds and opens out spaces, and in the way she manoeuvres the eye of the viewer through the forms that define the pictorial spaces. Generally she is a subtle colourist, but each picture suggests careful tonal construction, and as a rule her colour is atmospherically precise.
While she has made paintings on the spot, often they are painted later on the basis of drawings made on the spot, and memory. "I find I have a very retentive memory when it comes to pictures. When I come to paint somewhere in the studio I'm there more than I am here. It all comes back, even textures and scents." She has no qualms about working from such sources as photographs - there is a fine portrait of her daughter Rachel based on a photograph - postcards, or pure imagination. But regardless of the source, the same rigour always applies to her treatment of it.
There is often an awkwardness to her figure compositions. This is not necessarily a criticism, incidentally, even though the awkwardness, which recalls the paintings of Balthus, may arise partly from her occasional practice of placing figures in compositions rather than building compositions around them, giving them a slightly distanced, detached quality. But it also has to do with the way people occupy space, and the way they relate to each other. Certainly many figure pieces are quite psychologically charged and clearly set out to explore the space between lovers, and between, for example, mothers and children. Even one of her most fluent figure studies, her fine portrait of Douglas Sealy, seeks out awkwardness, so to speak, in the distorted hang of his jacket.
Retrospectives are tricky things. Sometimes they ruthlessly expose the shortcomings in a body of work habitually held in high regard and sometimes happily, as here, they encourage us to revise upwards our estimation of an already highly regarded artist.
Barbara Warren's Retrospective is at the RHA, Ely Place until February 2nd