Barger exhibit at Michener Art Museum will feature more than 50 objects
Raymond Granville Barger’s soaring 25-foot-long bronze sculpture “Transition,” which has stood on the grounds of the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown since 1989, has become as iconic as the museum’s massive iron-studded entrance gate. It is a monumental work, with a weightless quality that belies its bulk.
Some imagine the piece as a huge bird; others see a distinct nautical theme. In my own teenage years, when I viewed the sculpture at its original location in front of the J.C. Penney Building in New York City in the late 1960s, I likened it to the then-popular “banana” seat on a kid’s bicycle.
What is significant about “Transition” is not what it is supposed to be, but what it really is: a remarkable melding of the figurative with the abstract — a quality that characterizes almost all of Barger’s work, from the maquette to the monumental. Certainly, the piece is something of an enigma; but then again, so was Barger himself. One rarely finds examples
of his sculpture in museums, and even the Michener’s most loyal visitors are likely unaware of his other work.
On view at the Michener through Oct. 20 is “The Poetry of Sculpture: Raymond
Granville Barger (1906–2001),” the first solo exhibition of Barger’s work at the museum. The exhibit includes objects from the Michener’s permanent collection, in addition to many loans from private collections rarely available to the public. The show, curated by museum executive director Kathleen Jameson, features over 50 objects, including three on display in the Michener’s sculpture gardens.
Barger was born in Brunswick, Maryland, and is a graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Yale University School of Fine Arts. Soon after his graduation from Yale in 1934, his figurative skills started to become noticed, as evidenced by two of the earliest works in the show. The stately bronze grouping “Three Madonnas,” commissioned in 1938 for an Italian Villa in Rome while Barger was on a fellowship at the American Academy there, is a lovely example of art deco’s stylized human form.
Barger’s untitled bronze fountain, which proudly stands outside the Michener’s main entrance for the duration of the show, was also designed in
Rome in 1938. This classical figure, for which Barger used his first wife as the model, graced a fountain outside the Fisheries Building at the 1939 World’s Fair. In fact, it was Barger’s success in Rome and his work with wellknown architects at home that got him a number of commissions at the fair, the biggest being the 64-foot-high “Column of Perfection” for the H.J. Heinz Company Dome.
It is here that Barger’s story becomes somewhat of an enigma. Had he been like most other artists, an exhibit such as this would continue seamlessly onward, with examples of his work from the early 1940s to the end of his career. But Barger was not a typical artist. Until his move to Carversville in Solebury Township, Bucks County, in 1966, little of his work is generally known outside of industrial design circles. Jameson had to depend on archival material, promotional brochures, and a lot of help from Barger’s two daughters and son to fill in the blanks.
“One of the big challenges of the show was to show what went on in his life before moving to Carversville. I had to rely more on documentary things and talks with family members,” Jameson said. “For one thing, he started calling himself a designer pretty early on, and stops calling himself a sculptor. He really became attuned to working with industry and businesses.”
What Jameson discovered was gleaned largely from brochures from several design studios that Barger created, promoting his model-making facilities and industrial design work, including projects with such renowned architects as Frank Lloyd Wright and Phillip Johnson. These documents are on display in the exhibit, along with photographs illustrating such major projects as a fountain installed at Parkchester in 1941, a planned community in the Bronx that was the largest in the world at the time.
“He designed a machine that allowed him to scale up small models to full-size works with ease,” said Jameson. “He really became good at going from the minute to the monumental.”
Many of the smaller works on display speak the same curvilinear language as his large works. There is something of the same upward sweep of the twin curved bronze horns in “Jason and the Argonauts,” for example, as there is in the huge “Transition.”
Barger’s move to a grist mill in Carversville in 1966 seems to be a turning point in his work, where the “designer” now returns to being the “artist.”
“He says he moves there to have more space, possibly with the idea in mind that he would be getting more of the giant commissions such as ‘Transition.’ It is here he declares his creative freedom and concentrates on his own designs more as a sculptor would,” Jameson said.
One such design is “Womb Man” from 1974, a sleek, androgynous form whose profile curiously suggests a highly stylized seated figure of the kind seen in ancient Egyptian statuary. “Womb Man” shares the same unique construction process that produced “Transition.”
“Barger developed a new technique for these pieces involving electrically welding 7/8” strips of extruded bronze together from the inside, so the seams don’t show,” said Jameson. “It is structurally sound yet relatively lightweight. I’m not aware of anyone else doing this.”
“Transition” was commissioned in 1965 for the headquarters of J.C. Penney on Sixth Avenue in New York City, where it stood until it was moved to its present location at the Michener Museum in 1989. Barger’s welded-strip construction process here closely resembles the planking of a sailing craft. Indeed, Barger was an avid sailor, and there is a definite nautical look to the piece, constructed, appropriately enough, in a shipyard in New Rochelle, New York. But here too, as in “Womb Man,” lies a subtle Egyptian theme. Its basic form strongly evokes the upswept bow and stern of ancient Egyptian sailing craft.
The Egyptian theme goes even deeper. According to Jameson, a number of Barger’s semiabstract forms, including a graceful, wire rod “Growth” sculpture and two curvaceous walnut “Life” pieces — all from 1980 — were inspired by reading about Howard Carter’s supposed discovery of viable seeds during his 1922 excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb. The exhibit’s informative gallery guide even includes a number of Barger’s own iconic symbols, looking remarkably like hieroglyphics, illustrating his sculptures.
Barger’s repetitive use of symbolic forms suggests to Jameson the poetic device of a refrain. Barger himself was a poet, and several of his poems are reproduced in the gallery guide. “His repeated themes of life, growth, and aspiration was due, he says, to his belief that ‘man should explore an idea before he exploits it,’ ” said Jameson.
The nearly seven-foot-high bronze “Monoliths of Man” in the museum’s sculpture garden is a perfect example of the repeated use of archetypal forms such as the ark, block, and circle, as well as a re-use of his weldedstrip process.
From the 1960s on, Barger has been said to eschew the figurative for a newly acquired taste for the abstract. Jameson strongly disagrees. “I think he embraces abstraction incredibly early. To assume he started doing figural work and then embraces abstraction would not be correct,” she says. “One of the ideas that I’ve come away with is that he is a maker of icons, abstract yet recognizable.”
Just like Egyptian hieroglyphs, Barger’s so-called “abstract” works speak the nonverbal language of the icon, and send a strongly figurative message. Those free-form “Life” sculptures clearly suggest the womb-like morphology of seeds, one even containing a gilded ball suggestive of an embryo. His charming bronze “Mother Duck” from 1979 may be highly stylized, yet it would be hard to miss its clear message of motherhood.
Yet it’s in Barger’s “Equality” series of sculptures where one sees his most powerfully suggestive melding of the abstract and the figurative. Following Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Barger was compelled to create a symbol of healing and unity. The result was his most ambitious and, sadly, never-realized project. He experimented with pairs of open cubes, cast in bronze in several sizes, with extending “arms” that would interlock with each other, much as two people embracing.
At first conceived as a proposal for a courthouse in the South in 1968, Barger eventually proposed a giant 144- by 72-foot “Equality” monument to stand on the banks of the Potomac River in celebration of the country’s 1976 Bicentennial. It was a truly ambitious project, involving mounting the two immense cubes constituting the sculpture on railroad tracks.
“He envisioned that for 23 hours of the day, the two halves would be apart, then at noon the halves would come together for an hour,” said Jameson. “The proposed $51 million project got as far as having the National Park Service look for suitable sites on the Potomac, but in the end it never got anywhere.”
To help fund the project, he designed and sold miniature versions of the piece which could be worn as a necklace.
The one on display is from the collection of his daughter Illia, herself a noted Bucks County artist.
The fact that the “Equality” Potomac project never materialized certainly must have been a crushing blow for Barger. At least the Michener exhibit affords him some sort of legacy, with various scale models and an artist’s conception of the “Equality” concept to remind us that the Bicentennial could have endowed this country with something a lot more substantial than the soon-forgotten hype we ended up with.
Barger created a final model of “Equality” in 1980, and a year later revisited his ideas of the interaction of industry and society by creating a series of small bronze sculptures titled “Scribes” and “Little People.”
In the early 1980s Barger moved to California, after which, Jameson regretfully adds, “We are not aware of any further work.”
At least this exhibit makes us aware of Barger’s consummate skill in what he has left us.
Steve Siegel is a contributing writer.