| His work is closely identified with the methods of Structuralism and Semiotics. By the 1970s he was one of the most internationally celebrated French critics and, although his main contribution was to the analysis of literature and other linguistic modes, his influence on the criticism of the visual arts was also substantial.In two articles written during the early 1960s for the sociological journal Communications, Barthes pioneered the study of photographs in their social and cultural context, paying particular attention to a colourful advertisement for pasta by the Panzani company. His detailed analysis of the way in which the photographic medium helps to endorse and authenticate the message of the advertiser looks back to the earlier, more impressionistic study of mass communications carried out in his Mythologies. But it is strengthened by Barthess determination to probe the philosophical implications of photographys relation to the object depicted and its status as a message without a code. The fact that photography, alone among the different modes of visual communication, offered itself as a mechanical analogue of the real implied that it needed more sophisticated modes of interpretation than the traditional arts, if it were to be considered semiotically. Barthess last published work La Chambre claire, also on photography, amply fulfilled the promise of his early essays. Here he continued to insist on the point that photography was, from the anthropological point of view, a wholly new development. It owed its emergence not so much to the painters, with their skills of perspective, as to the chemists who had hit upon the almost magical technique of perpetuating the trace of light rays on a plate coated with salts of silver. Although Barthes discussed a wide range of historical and modern photographs in this study, he placed the main emphasis on the subjective, even perverse, delight that he felt at particular features of these images. The most important photograph mentioned is one that we never see: the study of his mother, taken before his birth, which succeeded in restoring her presence to him after her death.Barthes also wrote several distinguished essays on painting (collected in LObvie et lobtus). He was fascinated by the different ways in which the painter could imitate and simulate the processes of writing. As a result his subjects included the ornamental alphabet composed by the painter and stage designer Erte, the use of graphic signs by the Surrealist artist Andre Masson and the bizarre transpositions of meaning effected by the Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who arranged fruit and vegetables into analogues for the human face. Perhaps his most brilliant achievement in the criticism of contemporary art was a pair of essays devoted to the work of the American painter Cy Twombly, whose combination of eclectic cultural reference and spontaneous technique particularly appealed to him.During his lifetime Barthes, as well as being an accomplished pianist, also practiced painting and sketching. The works that he left behind were charming though slight, testifying to their authors enthusiasm for painters such as Masson and Twombly. Although they were done for personal reasons and rarely left his possession except as gifts to friends, they reaffirm the depth and continuity of Barthess engagement with the visual arts; a selection of them appeared in a posthumous exhibition (1981) at the Musee de lAbbaye Ste Croix in Les Sables dOlonne, Vendee, France. |
