Antonio Barrera, a Roman painter born in 1889, a sensitive interpreter of a complex era, the one between the two wars, through images of measured realism and pondered space, evocative of almost magical and suspended silences, was one of the protagonists of the Roman painting scene and its profound changes between the 1920s and the 1950s. Born into a Spanish family active in the timber trade, he grew up in a very fertile cultural environment: the drawing room of his parents’ flat at the end of the 19th century was frequented by men of letters, artists and musicians. Despite being driven to study accountancy and to manage the family business, Barrera followed his natural inclination towards drawing and painting and, encouraged by Enrique Serra Auqué, a Spanish painter and family friend, he attended Pietro Gaudenzi’s studio for about two years in the early 1910s, before the outbreak of war.

In 1915, he already had an established studio in Via Margutta 2A, but he enlisted as an artillery officer and interrupted his production during the war years, only to resume it in 1918-19. A sincere and concrete realism was immediately united with a serene formal balance that was summed up in a “particular architectural and drawing sense, in which his acute pictorial sensitivity was adapted and controlled”[1].

His debut took place at the Exhibition of the Amateurs and Connoisseurs of Fine Arts in Rome in 1920 with five works, including the Port of Civitavecchia, a measured and solemn piece with clear, diffused light and an atmosphere of warm immobility, later acquired in 1926 by the Governorate of Rome and which launched his production of marinas, carried on throughout his life. Invited back to the exhibition in 1922, he exhibited Old Dockyard and Little Bourgeoisie, whose “authentic pictorial nature […], an innate pleasantness of colouring and a synthetic simplicity of technique, an honest and frank observation”[2], characteristics that also emerged from the works he presented at the Venice Biennale in the same year, which inaugurated a twenty-year season of presences at the lagoon exhibition until the 1942 edition. He was also invited to the Rome Biennale in 1923, where he exhibited the Arsenal Arcades, Underpass and La bettola, a work illustrated in the catalogue that offers a glimpse into the candidly uncontaminated approach of Barrera’s painting, which, in this popular interior, is clearly influenced by the vernacular climate of seventeenth-century bambocciate.

In a close dialogue with the contemporary instances of the return to order, which Barrera experienced in the cultural climate of the Caffè Aragno, where he met Amerigo Bartoli, Carlo Socrate, Francesco Trombadori and the entire Roman Novecento group, he tackled the 1920s, ranging from landscapes to seascapes to portraits and rich compositions of figures, experimenting with a mediation between Impressionist colourism and a formalism derived from the study of the old masters. An interpreter of a personal and soft classicism, he is one of the main points of reference in the Novecento debate in Rome, open to contemporary suggestions influenced by the synthetic post-impressionist volumetries in the wake of Spadini and Carena, in which the mixtures of colour combine with 17th-century luminism. In 1926, the year he began teaching plastic decoration at the Museo Artistico Industriale in Rome, he took part in the 1st Novecento exhibition at the Permanente in Milan, where he exhibited his Ritratto della moglie, a work stylistically and thematically similar to the one presented by Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Mia moglie incinta. But it was Oppo himself who initially offered a less than enthusiastic opinion of Barrera, not failing however to emphasise the “great honesty”[3] of his painting, only to turn his judgement into a warmer welcome some time later, on the occasion of the 1st National Exhibition of Maritime Art, also in 1926. The author of the text in the catalogue dedicated to the painter, who was exhibiting no less than fourteen works with a maritime theme, Oppo praised his “harmony of inspiration […], a controlled and loving drawing, the truth not borrowed but conquered very cleanly”[4].

Perfectly balanced chiaroscuros and an elegant, velvety modulation of tones characterise some of his female portraits and scenes from the late 1920s, when he received his first awards, including the diploma of honour at the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona, a moment in which he began to give impetus to those suspended and enchanted atmospheres that would return in the essential and poetic Roman cityscapes, including La torre di Ponte Milvio and La via di Roma that appeared at the 1930 Venice Biennale. At this juncture, Barrera’s ‘Roman spirit’ is sublimated in the creation of the so-called Roman Scenes: the painter, under the direction of engineer Reanda and the artistic advice of Umberto Bottazzi, recreates life-size three popular plaster and papier-mâché scenes of Rome circa 1820, The tavern, Il Saltarello and The public writer, taking inspiration from 19th-century lithographs by Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas and from the branches of Bartolomeo Pinelli. The scenes, used for the 1927 Exhibition of Roman Costume at Palazzo Valentini, were then moved to the first location of the Museum of Rome in the former Pastificio Pantanella in Via dei Cerchi and then, in 1952, under the direction of the artist Orazio Amato, to the current location in Palazzo Braschi, to be definitively placed in the 1970s in the Carmelite convent in Piazza Sant’Egidio in Trastevere. These scenes mark, in Antonio Barrera’s artistic and biographical story, a deep connection with the Roman and Latium tradition, with a certain folkloric regionalism in vogue in the 1920s and 1930s and in perfect agreement not only with his habitual frequentation of Anticoli Corrado, with his appointment as director of documentaries on Latium folklore at the LUCE Institute, but also with his closeness to the Romanisti group, active between 1929 and the 1940s. Together with artists such as Orazio Amato, Orfeo Tamburi and Duilio Cambellotti, Barrera gravitated to the evenings at the Osteria della Cisterna in Trastevere, together with poets, artists and intellectuals including Trilussa, Ettore Petrolini, Diego Angeli, Richard Krautheimer, Giuseppe Ceccarelli and Antonio Muñoz, in a fertile cultural climate that combined literature with archaeology, music with painting, food with theatre.

The beginning of the 1930s thus marks a crucial moment for the painter in which his pictorial ductus, especially in the city views and landscapes, loses its impressionist matrix body to gradually abandon itself to the intersection of compact and plastic portions of colour, which give life to lyrical and silent compositions with a terse and rarefied atmosphere, in a suffused abstraction reminiscent of Antonio Donghi’s Roman landscapes. This turning point is clearly visible in the works of Orientalist extraction executed in Libya, including Street in Dahara and The Bakery of Suk el Giuma presented at the 1931 Rome Colonial Exhibition, but also and above all in the highly personal scenes of Roman life, including the Motivo romano exhibited at the Sindacale Fascista del Lazio in 1932 and above all The Courtyard, exhibited at the Venice Biennial of the same year, together with Children at the balcony and some Parisian landscapes.

Letting himself be inspired by the almost solemn tranquillity of a silent and solid Rome, in a strange luminous stillness before the storm of war, Barrera composed elegiac landscapes interwoven with a verist and at the same time enchanted purism, in a calm simplification of forms and planes. Ponte Milvio, The Tiber in flood, Dredgers on the Tevere the changes in the Rome of the Ventennio, in an almost abstract and visionary interpretation, made up of dilated tonalities, undefined contours and chromatic synthetisms, harbingers of a suspended and magical dimension, which the artist must have known to perfection, also as a member of the Urban Planning Commission of Rome between 1935 and 1936.

In the meantime, the figures maintained their poetic solidity, as can be seen in the Portraits of Sovereigns executed for the Senate Council Chamber (now lost), the Female Portrait exhibited at the 1930 Lazio Fascist Trade Union and the iconic Street in Roma at the 1930 Biennale, up to The Sea Wolf patrol, presented at the 1931 I Quadriennale di Roma – of which he was also a member of the organising committee – purchased by the Galleria Civica di Torino in the same year. Appearing in the pages of magazines and newspapers, including “L’ambrosiano”, “Enotria” and “L’Italia coloniale”, it was defined as a “painting of exotic flavour that was brilliantly set up and of lively effect”[5], as were La scarrozzata and Serenity, considered “remarkable groups of paintings”[6] by Margherita Sarfatti. Invited to the Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Paintings in Baltimore in 1931, he sent Woman of the Roman Countryside, in fact appearing among the sixty-two Italian artists chosen by Oppo and Roland Joseph McKinney, director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, for a series of three prestigious travelling exhibitions in the United States.

He reached the peak of his success at the Venice Biennale in 1934 with Passa il Duce (purchased by the Fascist National Party) and then at the Quadriennale in Rome in 1939, with one of his most iconic works, The Sailor and the Circeid, preserved today at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Towards the end of the 1930s, he worked on various public decorations: he first worked on the building of the National Fascist Social Security Institute, designed by architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo. While Ferruccio Ferrazzi worked on the mosaic on the façade facing the Mausoleum of Augustus, with scenes from the legend of the foundation of Rome, Barrera decorated the atrium in Via della Frezza with various views of the Mausoleum, set in an imaginary and idyllic Renaissance. Costumed figures populate the square and monuments, in scenes of everyday life set in pure, clean spaces, reminiscent of the 15th-century perspective studies of Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca: compositions halfway between antiquarian erudition and Magic Realism. At the beginning of the 1940s, he was called as an official Navy painter with the task of depicting war and maritime subjects, and took part in the First Exhibition of Italian Overseas Lands in Naples in 1940 with a large mural panel in the Libyan pavilion that synthesises exoticism and colonialism in a combination of brilliant formal solidity, also present in the Blessing of the Boat, a fresco painted for the Hall of Honour of E42 on traditional Italian life, and today still in situ with the other frescoes in the current Museum of Civilisations in Rome.

Between the 1940s and 1950s, during and shortly after the conflict, Barrera worked with tenacious dedication on a conspicuous and lyrical repertoire of Roman landscapes: poetic narratives of the small everyday contingencies that unfold against the backdrop of a city with a monumental history and appearance. Some of these works appear in exhibitions of the 1940s, including his penultimate Quadriennale of 1943 in which he exhibited Roman Winter, and his last one of 1948 in which he presented Forum of Trajan. Other works of this characteristic ‘Roman cycle’, interpreted with grace and naturalness, were exhibited in the painter’s solo exhibition at the Galleria San Marco in Rome in May 1944, presented by a text by Michele Biancale, who praised “the rapid layout of his visions, the beauty of certain tones that have by now become peculiar to him, such as the blues, the tawny and warm browns, the reds experienced in the rendering of the colour of Rome, in his Spanish piazzas, his very fresh whites and greens in evocations of sunny gardens are by now acquired in him as his own particulars”[7]. Biancale does not fail to note that, compared to the suspended, clean and rarefied compositions of the 1930s, in the urban views of the following decade, the painter was more intent on investigating the “thickness of the material”[8], through more intense chromatic relationships and a full-bodied, full-bodied, once again Impressionist brushstroke. This tangible evolution from the fresh and methodical transparency of light and colour to a more spontaneous rendering aimed at capturing the impression of its almost photographic instantaneousness is perfectly expressed by the nucleus of six works presented on the occasion of this exhibition. The courtyard of the 1932 Venice Biennale, as mentioned, belongs to that almost dreamy and melancholic world of a city that in the meantime is at the centre of massive transformations and demolitions. But Barrera captures, on the contrary, an intimate moment of silent suspension of an inner courtyard, interrupted only by the presence of the black kitten in the foreground and a woman on the terrace – almost a faceless mannequin: an impalpable painting, with a plastic and sharp morphology, in which a rarefied Rome is portrayed in its ordinary and everyday simplicity, in a magical torpor, reminiscent of Antonio Donghi’s The courtyard (via del Lavatore). But moving forward, to the Roman views of the 1940s Flowers at Piazza di Spagna (1945), View of via delle Carrozze da Trinità dei Monti with the dome of San Carlo al Corso in the background (1945), Santa Maria della Pace (1945), View from Trinità dei Monti (1946) and View of Piazza del Popolo (1946), Barrera adopts a more synthetic and constructive touch, with Impressionist inflections, in which realism emerges with accentuated lucidity in the choice of warm pictorial pastes and in the spontaneity of the light that invests architecture and people, uniting monuments and anecdotes of life in a single glance. Aspects that emerge from the words of Renzo Fanti on a visit to his studio in the 1950s, attracted by certain Roman views such as that of Santa Maria del Popolo, “in which the architectural and monumental element fades and dissolves in the colour of Rome that dominates, undisputed lord, as much in the artist’s conception as in the visual emotion of the admirer”[9].

Lyrical expressions that return in Barrera’s last productive phase, the one that took place between Argentina and Forlì. Arriving in Buenos Aires in 1951, he worked as a painter, set designer and playwright and remained in Argentina for seven years, between Montevideo, Palpalà, Vinchina and Buena Vista. He absorbed every aesthetic and vital detail of the places he visited, jotting down in his diaries the moments, colours, fantasies, temperatures, hues of the cities and deserts where he captured, among the heights and cacti, the “abstractionism of reality”[10]. The works and impressions with a fast sign born from the visual stimuli of this long stay were then collected and exhibited in 1959 in an exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, entitled Motivi argentini del pittore Antonio Barrera. Retrospective curated by Renato Mucci, who summarised this South American production in terms of a “post-impressionism in which the demands of the modern chromatic element are reconciled with the postulates of the classical tradition”[11].

Returning to Italy, now far from official exhibitions and the urgencies of the market, he spent his last years continuing to conduct his pictorial research on urban views between Rome and Forlì, where for five years, from 1965 to 1970, the year of his death, he was a guest at the Garzanti Foundation, where he devoted himself to his last, spontaneous and synthetic watercolour works.

Elena Lago

[1] A. M. Comanducci, Dizionario illustrato pittori e incisori italiani moderni e contemporanei, Milan, 1962.

[2] A. Carelli, La 90° esposizione della Società Amatori e Cultori di Roma, ‘Emporium’, LV, 329, 1922, p. 294.

[3] C. E. Oppo, La Mostra del ‘900 italiano, in “Il Secolo XX”, 21, 1926, p. 228.

[4] C. E. Oppo, Antonio Barrera, catalogue of the I Mostra d’arte marinara (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1926-1927), Rome, 1926, p. 102.

[5] Soggetti coloniali alla Quadriennale, ‘L’Italia coloniale’, 3, 1931, p. n.n..

[6] M. Sarfatti, La pittura alla Quadriennale di Roma, in ‘Rivista illustrata del Popolo d’Italia’, 1, 1931, p. 50.

[7] M. Biancale, Antonio Barrera, catalogue of the personal exhibition (Rome, Galleria San Marco, 10 – 19 May 1944), Rome, 1944, p. n.

[8] Ibidem.

[9] R. Fanti, Note critiche, in Antonio Barrera, exhibition catalogue edited by G. Giorgetti (Forlì, Saletta XC PACIFICI del Municipio, 20 December 1980 – 4 January 1981), Forlì 1980, p.n.n.

[10] A. Barrera, transcriptions of personal diary in Antonio Barrera, exhibition catalogue edited by G. Giorgetti (Forlì, Saletta XC PACIFICI del Municipio, 20 December 1980 – 4 January 1981), Forlì 1980, p.n.n.

[11] R. Mucci, Motivi argentini del pittore Antonio Barrera, exhibition leaflet (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 16 – 25 November 1959), Rome, 1959, p. n. n.