Yve-Alain Bois on Martin Barre
Martin Barre, 60-T-44 (details), 1960, oil on canvas, 76 1/2 × 38 1/8”.
… In the second canvas, 60-T-44, dating from 1960, all this elaborate painterly cuisine so vaunted by the critical establishment that championed the JEP has disappeared. Any spatial ambiguity is gone. The white ground is plain, untextured, the paint almost mechanically applied. On this whitewashed surface, Barre has drawn colored lines using the tube of paint as his stylus: Two oblique lines (made of juxtaposed blue, white, and reddish-brown tracks) descend toward the center left of the canvas, from which hangs a thick rainbow of paratactic lines in clashing vibrant chromas—as if the canvas from one of Morris Louis’s Unfurleds had been gathered like striped drapery, regaining in the process enough matter to weigh down a clothesline. Here there’s no subtle mediation via the brush: The gesture is direct, prosaic. No play of underlayers, either, and very little color mixing. The only variation is in the speed of inscription: Sometimes the squeezed tube moved very fast over the white ground, and in these passages its track is thin; sometimes it went slowly, and the impasto built up. Line becomes a mere index of process. No transcendence, no illusion, what you see is what you see: With this work, and others of the same series—which he nicknamed his “Tubes”—Barre left post-Cubism and entered the ’60s.
At the time there were few artists among his Parisian group (the JEP) to make such a leap—in fact, Barre instantly lost his support system, the critics who had defended him now accusing him of treason. One could ascribe many causes to this radical turn in his art, but the most important catalyst is probably the great interest Barre took in Yves Klein, though Klein was deemed a thorough charlatan by Barre’s circle—and note that it is Restany, Klein’s champion, who came to Barre’s defense. The position may seem utterly banal now, but rare then was the artist who could at the same time maintain that painting was still a viable medium and admire Klein’s work, which had seemed in those days yet another celebration of the death of painting. One had to be able to look beyond Klein’s histrionics and consider Yves-le-Monochrome’s anticompositional stance as being more than a mere conceptual gesture. For his early admirers both in France (Restany, the Nouveaux Realistes group) and in the US (Donald Judd, among others), Klein represented a fundamental rupture with the (necessarily illusionistic) tradition of painting. “Sure, sure,” we can hear Barre saying, “but yet he still paints.” How to highlight the fragility of painting as medium while keeping it alive would remain Barre’s challenge in all the years to come.
