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• 1 2021-07-30T14:45:17+00:00 Biography of Ralph Barton (1891-1931) 11 plain 2024-02-15T00:09:28+00:00

  Early Life and Work

  Ralph Barton (1891-1931) grew up in Kansas City, Missouri with religious parents who had withdrawn from their respective careers (his mother as an art teacher, his father as a lawyer) to devote themselves to Christian mysticism.¹ He began publishing illustrations, a comic strip, and advertisements for Kansas City newspapers at the age of 16, and at 18 moved to Illinois to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. He disliked Chicago and the Art Institute, which he felt did not teach him anything useful, and returned home after two months to marry his high school crush, Marie Jennings. At 20 years old, he moved with his wife and their daughter Natalie to New York City after selling a cartoon to humor magazine Puck. While his career slowly developed there, his relationship with his wife deteriorated and she finally left him to return to Kansas City with Natalie in late 1912.
  
  Barton’s more stable career in Manhattan began with work as the staff artist for the fashion magazine McCall’s from 1912 to 1914, where he illustrated the latest dresses. He contributed elsewhere to both newspapers and magazines. However, his breakthrough would occur in Spring 1916, when he held his first gallery show at Braun Galleries and signed a six-month contract with Puck, for which he had continued to produce occasional illustrations. His first cover for the magazine appeared that March, after which he regularly provided cover art. His work also garnered the interest of Vanity Fair, for which he would begin providing occasional illustrations. His apprenticeship in fashion magazines revealed itself in the central role of costume for his drawings.
  
  These years also saw significant (and unsettling) events shaping Barton’s tastes, opinions, and personal life. On his first trip to Paris in spring 1915, he fell in love with the city and French culture, and he returned that fall. This trip also fostered his distaste for World War I and the idea of the United States entering the war. After his first wife divorced him, he took custody of his daughter in a disturbing scenario where he kidnapped her from his ex-wife’s mother and aunts, with whom she was living, after being encouraged to “just go and take her” by a neighbor.² Shortly after, he married his second wife, the model Anne Minnerly, in 1917. Later, invited at the onset of the 1920s to design sets and costumes for a Rudolph Valentino movie in Hollywood, he met Charlie Chaplin, who became a close friend for the rest of Barton’s life.
  
  
  

  Fame and Fall

  At the onset of the 1920s, Barton’s reach across the spectrum of mass magazines was spreading. His association with Vanity Fair evolved into more consistent appearances in its pages, and he contributed regularly to the film news magazine Photoplay. In 1920, Henry Sell took over editorship of the William Randolph Hearst-owned Harper’s Bazar and, having befriended Barton at a party, began including Barton's illustrations first as stand-alone items and then as illustrations for works of fiction and non-fiction published in the pages of the magazine. By the publication of Blondes in the pages of Bazar in 1925, Barton was a mainstay of the magazine. One of Sell’s motivations for acquiring the book from Anita Loos and encouraging her to expand it into further installments was to give Barton something to illustrate. (In later accounts Loos bristled at the idea that Barton’s illustrations were a significant driver of sales, pointing to a successful edition that excised the illustrations as evidence that the book would do just as well without them.³)
  
  Barton’s breakthrough to widespread fame would come in early 1922, when he created the largest illustration of his career, covering the entirety of the intermission curtain for Balief’s Chauve-Souris, a touring musical review that had reached New York after playing in Russia and Europe. The illustration was reproduced in the program for the Chauve-Souris, and it featured a view of a theater-full of famous figures imagined to be in the audience. Barton had produced one such composite caricature in the pages of Vanity Fair the prior year, but the publicity around the curtain, which was reproduced in Vanity Fair and The New York Tribune later that spring, made it a temporary mainstay of his work. Through the remainder of 1922 and 1923 he would produce other composite caricatures for Vanity Fair, Life, and Harper’s Bazar featuring topics such as the silent film industry, the staffs and associated luminaries of the various magazines, and high society. By this point, he was the principal caricaturist of 1920s New York magazine culture and would be eclipsed only by the younger Miguel Covarrubias from Mexico as the decade continued.
  
  Barton would also illustrate two full-length books for the first time in 1922: a collection of essays against censorship by celebrity writers, and a parody of etiquette manuals written by Donald Ogden Stewart first as a serial for Harper’s Bazar. Barton’s own first solo-authored illustrated book appeared in 1924, Science in Rhyme without Reason. That year he would meet Horace Liveright, who eagerly hired him to illustrate the Fall 1924 Boni & Liveright publication catalog cover—another composite portrait featuring the various authors of forthcoming titles. As that year drew to a close, Barton received an invitation to join the inaugural advisory board of The New Yorker, which would publish its first issue in early 1925. Barton remained on the board only briefly, although he still drew illustrations for them afterwards until his death.
  
  
  As the decade passed, Barton struggled to maintain his productivity, especially in meeting deadlines for books he was illustrating, written by others or himself. As he wrapped up his work illustrating Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, editor Tommy Smith at Boni & Liveright, who was also guiding the publisher’s acquisition of Loos’s novel, proposed Barton illustrate an edition of Balzac’s Droll Stories. Barton eagerly accepted, and the press printed the books with spaces for the illustrations to be tipped in, but Barton did not deliver them until 1927. Barton’s personal life simultaneously began to shatter, perhaps driving his creative problems. He had married his third wife, stage actress Carlotta Monterey, in March 1925 after living together for two years (close friends thought they were already married); however, they separated by the end of the year after Monterey caught him with another woman. Barton would remarry again in December 1926, this final time to Germaine Tailleferre, a French pianist and composer, but he increasingly lamented losing Monterey. In 1929 Tailleferre also divorced him after he frightened her into a miscarriage when she told him she was pregnant. Barton’s final years witnessed a slide into deepening depression and erratic behavior, and after returning from a final voyage to Europe with Chaplin in spring of 1931, he committed suicide.

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  Footnotes

  1. Biographical sources on Barton’s life are scarce, and the fact that Barton took his own life fairly early means he left no substantial memoirs or autobiographies, in start contrast to Anita Loos. This biography draws heavily from the one full length study of Barton’s life in addition to mentions of him in other works, and draws samples of his work from publicly available digital archives. For more in depth discussion of his life, see Bruce Kellner, The Last Dandy, Ralph Barton: American Artist, 1891-1931 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991).↵
  2. Kellner, The Last Dandy, 64-65.↵
  3. Anita Loos, A Cast of Thousands (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1977), 80.↵