Born: 28 August 1925, Ireland
Died: 10 May 2017
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Barbara Carron
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Terry Clavin. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Warren, Barbara (1925–2017), artist, was born on 28 August 1925 in a maternity hospital on Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, the youngest of two daughters and one son of John Warren, a master printer of Temple Gardens, Rathmines, Dublin, and his wife Frances (née Little), who was originally from a Quaker family in Roscrea, Co. Tipperary, and had formerly been a commercial traveller. Her father owned the family printing company, located in Bachelors Walk, Dublin, and served as chairman of the Dublin Master Printers Association. He was also president of the Irish Rugby Football Union (1938–44). Following his death in 1944, Warren’s mother married Herbert Walkey of Rathgar, Dublin, in 1954. Barbara Warren was brought up in the Church of Ireland and educated at the French School in Bray, Co. Wicklow, and at Alexandra College, Dublin. At school she most enjoyed the weekly art classes, recalling ‘no one could get at me there’ (Barbara Warren RHA, 15). Her parents encouraged her interest; her father by bringing reams of cartridge paper back from work for her to draw on.
The death of her brother John in a car accident in 1940 left Warren determined to pursue her own path in life. Instead of immediately studying art upon finishing school in 1943, she volunteered for the British war effort by joining the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She served for the next two years in a training base for pilots near Cambridge, England, testing the electric circuits and batteries on the Lancaster bombers. Returning to Dublin after the war, in 1945 she enrolled in the School of Art (later the National College of Art and Design (NCAD)), Kildare Street, but left within a year in frustration at having to work from antique plaster casts rather than life models. As her war service entitled her to a student grant in Britain, she went to London, where she received a thorough grounding in art and design at Regent Street Polytechnic over the next three years. This training emerged in the strong drawing and careful observation that underpinned her precisely composed art. She became unusually adept at working from memory or from photographs and in rendering human figures without any model. Her final year fine art teacher and member of the Royal Academy, Norman Blamey, nurtured her development of a cool, meticulous style.
Back in Dublin in 1949, Warren undertook a two-week art course in Connemara under the instruction of Charles Lamb. There, she befriended another art student, Anne King-Harmon, who invited her to share her studio in Pembroke Lane, Dublin. The two women hired models for sessions attended by other artists, while Warren also went to group sessions in a neighbouring studio, accumulating useful friendships and contacts. She joined a set that congregated weekly in Rice’s pub on St Stephen’s Green. A gentle, self-contained character, she was impractical in everyday matters but methodical and unwavering in pursuing her artistic calling. During these years, she taught art privately and in secondary schools. Cecil King, one of her private students in the early 1950s, went on to become a leading abstract artist and spoke highly of her tuition and general supportiveness, a sentiment shared by many others over the decades. For her part, Warren continued to attend art classes throughout her life, including latterly in the Graphic Studio where she learned lithography and etching.
In 1950 and 1951 Warren studied in Paris for brief periods in the atelier of André Lhote, a cubist artist who, through his teaching, had already profoundly shaped the development of modern art in Ireland. Her work immediately became much more abstract, exuberant and experimental, as she learned from Lhote to build simplified forms through colour and tone, going on to develop a flair for rendering endless varieties of grey. She was also influenced and inspired by an older generation of Lhote’s Irish disciples, such as Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone and Norah McGuinness, with McGuinness becoming a friend. In the early 1950s Warren visited Spain and Italy, imbibing the calming subtle colours of the early Renaissance frescos.
From 1951 Warren featured regularly in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts (RHA), the Irish Exhibition of Living Art (IELA) and the Oireachtas Art Exhibition, as well as in group exhibitions held by the Dublin Painters Group and the Irish Watercolour Society. Her first solo exhibition was at the Dublin Painters Gallery in November 1952, where she impressed attendees with her seriousness and willingness to accept criticism. Reviews of this exhibition and of her second solo show in the same venue in 1954 noted her technical competence, excellence in design and distinctively muted use of colour. She straddled the artistic divide by applying a naturalistic finish to her angular structures, earning acceptance both within the modernist IELA and the academic RHA. Avant-gardists, however, sometimes mistook her restraint for timidity, failing to recognise that spontaneity ill-suited her. Others tended to characterise her artworks as arid intellectual exercises, disliking how she pared back the representational frills to weave just a few elements of observed reality into her webs of colour and pattern. Warren revelled in experimenting with contrasted forms and in using geometric lines to frame figures and objects in abstract space, conceiving of the creative process primarily in terms of resolving the puzzle of compositional arrangement. Yet her work still carried an emotional resonance, however unplanned and enigmatic.
In 1955 Warren took first place in the art history exams conducted by Trinity College Dublin for the Purser Griffith scholarship, also receiving a diploma in the history of European painting. This paid for a six-month stay in a cottage in Lettermullen, Connemara, where the rock-strewn landscape, with its wild shores, stone walls and thatched cottages, made an abiding impression on her. She returned nearly every year either to Connemara or to Achill Island, spending five months on the latter in 1991. These locations were her most reliable creative stimulus and inspired some of her best work, which unsentimentally caught something of the desolate grandeur of the west of Ireland. She spent seven months in 1956 travelling unchaperoned around Spain and Portugal when this would have been unusual for a young woman, also working for a time in the studio of the sculptor Lluís Maria Saumells in Tarragona, Catalonia. During 1955–6 she harvested material for many subsequent paintings by filling her sketchbooks with drawings and gouaches of scenes from Iberia and the west of Ireland. Her 1957 solo show at the Dawson Gallery, Dublin, juxtaposed the boldness and vividness of her Spanish scenes with her more understated Irish ones.
Through the Dublin bohemian scene, Warren met William Carron, a poet and fellow artist from Clontarf, Dublin; they married on 12 August 1961 in Christ Church, Leeson Park, Dublin. They had a daughter, Rachel, and settled from 1961 in Grey’s Lane, Howth, Co. Dublin, where Barbara had her studio in the attic while William, who worked as an art teacher in the nearby Sutton Park School, built two at the bottom of the garden: one for art, another for pottery. Barbara also continued giving private art lessons. The demands of family life saw her output tail off in the 1960s: she appeared only sporadically in group exhibitions and went eleven years without a solo exhibition following her fourth solo show at the Dawson Gallery in 1961. During this interval she engaged in slate carving, exhibiting some of these works in 1972.
From the late 1960s through to the next century, Warren once more featured at regular intervals in prestigious group and solo exhibitions. Her solo shows were in the Dawson Gallery (1972 and 1976), the Taylor Gallery (1982, 1986, 1992 and 2002) and the United Arts Club (1991). There were joint exhibitions with her husband in the United Arts Club (1976), the Robinson Gallery, Dublin (1978), the Kevin Carroll Gallery, Longford (1993) and the Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar (1996). She also taught life drawing and print in the first-year course at NCAD (1973–84), where she enjoyed working alongside fellow artists. Michael McGuinness, a colleague at NCAD who painted in a realist vein, influenced her adoption of a more representational style, though her cubist roots were always apparent to some degree.
Mostly content with traditional subject matter, including portraits, landscapes, interiors and still life – occasionally combining all four by framing her interiors with an external window – Warren featured scenes from Connemara and Achill especially, but also Howth, Spain, Italy, Brittany and Mauritius. As a mature artist, she created lightly simplified, rigorously linear representational paintings, further stylised through using pale tones of rich colour to develop a mood of quiet intensity. She guided the viewer’s eye by offsetting the angular framework with carefully positioned curved or asymmetrical shapes, while flashes of bright pigment add to the sense of harmony and rhythm. Her scenes, which worked best when done on a smaller, simpler scale, gradually unveil a subtle intelligence and can variously evoke longing, unease and whimsy; they have a meditative quality, occasionally incorporating dreamlike elements. The elongated human figures – passive, reflective and largely faceless – always look a little awkward, and while this was clearly a way of communicating her recurring theme of loneliness and alienation, it may suggest a failure in scene building. In contrast, the inanimate objects invariably fit.
By the time Warren re-established herself on the Irish art scene in the 1970s, her work had come to seem dated and would not assume a classic aura for another generation. Until then, critics underrated her while acknowledging the consistency of her output, which they characterised as accomplished but pedestrian. In remaining true to her deeply held personal vision, Warren never quite delivered what the most fashionable taste-makers expected of her, with one observing that her work was of a type that appealed more to private collectors than to public institutions.
A fixture for over sixty years at the RHA’s annual exhibition, Warren duly became an associate member of the RHA in 1979 (as did her husband in 1996) and then – to her surprise – a full member in 1988; the academy bestowed senior membership on her once that category was created in 2001. Her absorption into the art establishment was complete when she was elected as a member of Aosdána in 1989. She became an ex officio member, through the RHA, of the board of the National Gallery of Ireland in the 1990s. Warren held to the middle ground in an RHA which was by then uneasily accommodating modernists as well as academics, though private comments she made in 1989 indicate that she lay more in the latter camp, particularly in her attitude to art education, where she believed that modernism had undermined standards. The RHA’s 2002 retrospective of her work provided a reputational fillip and coincided with the Taylor Gallery’s exhibition of a collection of her preliminary drawings of landscapes and figure studies, dating to the 1950s – typically rendered in conté crayon, these draughts showcased the immediacy of her fluent structural lines.
Even after Warren moved into a nursing home, she continued attending weekly life drawing sessions at the RHA. Barbara Warren died on 10 May 2017 in a nursing home in Swords, Co. Dublin, following which her remains were cremated. Her husband survived her by a few months. Warren’s works are held in the Ulster Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Office of Public Works. There is a 1984 self-portrait in the National Self-Portrait Collection, University of Limerick, and Una Sealey, one of her former students, made a portrait of her in 2007.