Girl with Titian Hair 

Curator: Alice Pike Barney created this piece titled "Girl with Titian Hair." Editor: It’s dreamy and ethereal. The softness of the colors and lines give her a romantic quality. I find it striking how the focus is entirely on her face and hair. Curator: That's interesting. The artist, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often explored female portraiture. Barney used pastel, pencil and charcoal to emphasize her subject's delicate features, also in keeping with the trends of impressionism in depicting women. The very name, with its explicit reference to Titian, a 16th-century master, suggests that Barney had very specific aims in the kind of idealized image of beauty she was creating, evoking classical, Renaissance, or Pre-Raphaelite paradigms. Editor: Yes, "Titian hair" serves as an instant, easily understood reference. But the portrait, because of the impressionistic style, avoids too much classical formalism; her soft features convey an interesting contrast between ideal, almost archetypal, beauty and something closer to more spontaneous and emotionally vulnerable. It’s a powerful combination of a deliberate set of historically-coded cues combined with that ephemeral quality that makes it so emotionally resonant. Curator: Indeed. Barney came from a wealthy background, enabling her to be part of intellectual circles. Her work often depicts women as complex beings, engaged in intellectual and artistic pursuits rather than as simple muses. One wonders who she saw in the subject. There is much more here, surely, than simply hair color. Editor: It feels both intimate and detached. Perhaps because she’s looking off to the side, we aren't invited into direct communication, as we would expect in a portrait. I keep coming back to this sense of her as both woman and symbol, an individual, yes, but also an idea about beauty, femininity, or, as you suggest, creativity, an image with considerable force behind it. Curator: Thinking about how women were represented at the time, particularly women with intellectual ambitions, throws a new light on what Barney's drawing achieved, especially from a female artist. Editor: A quiet revolution, maybe? Anyway, I leave seeing the image now in a completely different light than when I first looked at it. Thanks.