Robe d’intérieur 1913

George Barbier’s print “Robe d’intérieur” is like a page from a fashion magazine that’s been infiltrated by a surrealist sensibility. Look at the way the coral patterns on the woman’s robe echo the real coral in the fishbowl. Barbier has transformed her dress into a kind of underwater landscape, and her gesture is as ambiguous as any I’ve seen in a painting. Is she blessing the fish, or merely acknowledging their presence? It’s a tiny move, but it suggests a much bigger world of gesture and the possibility of communication across species. And then there’s the backdrop, a dark wallpaper decorated with… are those cherries? Flowers? It's a strange counterpoint to the watery world in the foreground, a reminder that we’re not really underwater, but in someone’s very stylish drawing room. It feels as though Barbier is suggesting all of these different pictorial motifs and visual languages are just different ways of decorating reality, and the only limit is our imagination.