Georges Barbier (1882-1932) was one of the great French illustrators of the early twentieth century. His style marked the transition from art nouveau to art deco. Barbier was born in Nantes and studied art at the city’s Ecole Regionale du Dessin et des Beaux-Arts. In 1908, he moved to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts; his principal teacher was Jean-Paul Laurens, an academic history painter who was also father of Paul-Albert Laurens, another illustrator of Pierre Louys.
During the early years of his career, after his graduation in 1908, Barbier worked under the pseudonym of Edward William Larry, but in 1911, as his career became more established following the first solo exhibition of his work, he reverted to his real name, albeit Anglicised to George.
After Barbier mounted his first exhibition in 1911, his work became very fashionable and was much in demand. He received commissions to design costumes for the cinema, theatre and ballet- such as the Ballets Russes and, with Erté, for the Folies Bergère– to illustrate books, for the design of jewellery, glass and wallpaper patterns and to produce haute couture fashion illustrations for companies such as Cartier and Arden, being especially noted for his head-dress designs. In addition, Barbier wrote essays and articles for the prestigious Gazette du Bon Ton and supplied illustrations to magazines such as Vogue and its predecessor Le Journal des Dames et Des Modes, L’Illustration, La Vie Parisienne and Gazette du Bon Ton– the latter along with other notable artists such as Charles Martin and Umberto Brunelleschi.
For the next two decades, Barbier led a group of fellow students from the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was known by Vogue as ‘The Knights of the Bracelet,’ a tribute to their fashionable and flamboyant manners and style of dress. The Knights included Charles Martin, whose design of the stage performance of Bilitis has been reproduced on another page.
Barbier’s quite early death, at the age of just 50, seems to have meant that his work fell into obscurity for some decades. Perhaps this neglect was compounded by the fact that he ‘only’ worked on fashion and set designs, more transitory and less elevated forms of art. He has, however, in more recent years been recognised for the skilled artist that he was.
Barbier’s book illustrations are in a distinctive art deco style, often with a hint of Greek classicism- which he greatly admired (alongside the work of more traditional French artists such as Watteau and Ingres). He made use of ‘pochoir,’ a technique which he championed and which was inspired by Japanese wood-block printing . It involved single layers of vivid colour being added by hand to a lithograph using a stencil (a precursor of the silk screening) and its use provided his illustrations with a vibrancy and depth which could not be equalled by printed colour alone. The artist’s interest in the arts of Japan may also be seen in his fashion designs (for example, for a Blouse Japonais, 1913) and in some of his plates for Pierre Louys’ Chansons de Bilitis– as we see from the parasol and cherry blossom below.
Between 1916 and 1921 Barbier produced a series of ‘Almanacs’ entitled La Guirlande des Mois (The Garland of the Months). These proved so popular that they were followed up by larger format portfolios of fashion plates entitled Falbalas et Fanfreluches (Ruffles and Frills)- see cover illustrated above.
Amongst Barbier’s illustrative work were several books about ballet, as well as literary works by Gautier, Alfred de Musset, Paul Verlaine’s Fetes Galantes and Baudelaire’s Poesies. His work on Laclos’ Liaisons dangereuses (1929 & 1934) indicate the artist’s happiness to engage with erotica. His designs for the 1922 edition of Pierre Louys’ Chansons de Bilitis have been noted previously, but deserve further attention for their confident style and rich colouring. Bilitis is, of course, a further work of erotica with a strong lesbian element- just like Laclos. It has been suggested that Barbier was gay and, certainly, his designs indicate an awareness of the thriving lesbian culture with Paris during this period- examples being images such as Dames Seules (1910, above) and an ‘Amazone’ illustrated as part of a series of Costumes Parisiens in 1913.
A major attraction of Bilitis, no doubt, was that it gave Barbier an opportunity to indulge his interest in classical art, which he is said to have deepened by studying the collection held by the Louvre. I have noted already the presence of Japanese motifs, but his love of Greek and Etruscan red and black vases must surely be reflected in the last two designs illustrated here.
At the time of his death, Barbier was working on an edition of Louys’ Aphrodite. The 52 planned plates were completed by Georges Lepape, but it was only in 1959 that Pierre Bouchet engraved these and the new edition was finally published. The results are just as luscious and colourful as the version of Bilitis.
Other illustrators of Pierre Louys have been discussed in postings on his various major books, as well as posts dedicated to particular artists. For more information on his work, see my bibliography for the author; see too my essays on his writing on my books page.
johnkruseblog 
[…] might find additional work in book illustration; other examples I’ve noted previously include George Barbier, Louis Touchagues and Andre Dignimont. All of them surely deserve our respect for their […]
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[…] whose commissions included illustrations for magazines as well as Louys’ books were Georges Barbier, Luc Lafnet, Rojan and Louis […]
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