Matthew Barnes (1880-1952)

Born in 1880, in the countryside of Scotland near Kilmarnock, Matthew Rackham Barnes’ childhood doubtless shaped his artistic future in the states. His imagination immersed in the mysterious world of Scottish folklore, Barnes’ childhood instilled a taste for terror and the morose that would later bleed into his art. Before eventually moving to New York with his family at the age of twenty, he apprenticed with a decorative plasterer. This career-move would pay dividends since, in 1906, almost as soon as he had reached New York, Barnes moved to earthquake-devastated San Francisco. With San Francisco in shambles, a considerable demand for architectural reconstruction left an ornamental plasterer such as Barnes with plenty of work.

Inspired by painters he encountered in the bustling San Francisco art scene, Barnes took the initiative to acquire painting materials and began his painting career. Receiving no formal training or education, he approached painting as a means of expression, as a personal retreat from everyday life. Consequently, Barnes paid little mind to the current schools of artistic thought and found himself under-appreciated for most of his career by critics and patrons.

His first exhibition came in 1916 with the San Francisco Art Association at the California Palace of Fine Arts, with whom he would continue to exclusively exhibit with for the next decade with little attention from the press, critics, and fellow artists. Though in 1927, Barnes received honorable mention for The Flood, his first formal acknowledgement. Additionally, after the success of this show, he was invited by his peers to join the Modern Gallery, an organization that promoted the work of younger artists to influential critics and patrons. The following year, sponsored by the Modern Gallery, Barnes held his first one-man show at the East West Gallery. In the same year, at the 50th Annual San Francisco Art Association Exhibition, Barnes split second prize with Ralph Chesse for March Moon. Despite this onslaught of critical success and admiration from other artists, Barnes’ painting career was, financially, little more than a hobby. That is, he still had not sold a single painting.

However, this fact was probably of little importance to Barnes, who pursued means of artistic expression outside of painting. In 1929, he initiated a minor theater career by designing the stage set for Singe’s Playboy of the Western World presented by a stock company in New York. He would go on to write plays of his own, some of them stage-bound, which he starred in. The degree to which artistic mediums allowed for creative cultivation played a bigger part in Barnes’ motives than the pursuit of elevated status.

Barnes even found ways of utilizing his more practical plaster-decoration skills for the sake of large-scale artistic projects. When Diego Rivera visited California for the completion of mural decorations (which incited much controversy), he took on Barnes as his assistant, mainly employing Barnes’ plastering skills for the preparation and application of plaster, but also for other assorted duties. Rivera, in the California School of Fine Arts mural, portrays himself with Barnes amidst other San Francisco artists.

With his rejection of conventional artistic formulae as well as his mere association with Leftist artists viewed as politically subversive, Barnes encountered his share of resistance from certain exhibition spaces. As such, he found his interests aligned with many young San Francisco Modernists. In 1933, he and many other artists that comprised the Society of Progressive Artists were rejected exhibition space at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor due to their greatly questioned merits. The Society, led by Joseph A. Danysh, resolved to show at the City of Paris Galleries. Success from this exhibition led to his second one-man show at the City of Paris Galleries, which stirred a great deal of critical controversy. So great was such controversy, in fact, that Danysh [Barnes’ sponsor and longtime admirer] offered a cash prize for the best essay on the phases of Matthew Barnes’ paintings.

Despite the belated interest in his work, he had still (after nearly 20 years) not sold a painting. Finally, after traveling to New York for the First National Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Barnes finally sold four paintings. Whether due to stingy patronage of the arts in San Francisco or his lack of stylistic congruence, Barnes never fell into favor with collectors during his life, which met a tragic end in 1951; shortly after the death of his wife, he suffered from a heart attack and fell down a hospital stairwell, taking his life.