Cornelia Barns

Cornelia Baxter Barns (September 25, 1888 – November 4, 1941) was an American illustrator, political cartoonist, painter, feminist, and socialist.

Early life Barns was born on September 25, 1888 in Flushing, New York to Charles Edward Barns and Mabel Balston Barns, the eldest of three children. Charles Barns initially entered law school, but then explored the sciences before launching a career as a newspaperman for the New York Herald. While living in New York, she earned a reputation as an author and poet. By 1910, the family had relocated to Philadelphia, where her father established himself as a theater manager and Cornelia studied art.

Career As educational opportunities expanded in the 19th century, women artists joined professional enterprises and founded their own art associations. Artwork made by women was considered inferior. To help overcome that stereotype, women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern, and freer "New Woman." where she became a pupil of William Merritt Chase and John Twachtman. She has also been mentioned as an associate of Robert Henri and his Ashcan School. and a second in 1913.

Barns exhibited her work at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, In her mid-twenties she married Arthur S. Garbett, a British music critic working in Philadelphia. The couple had a son in Philadelphia, with whom they also spent some years in New York City.

Max Eastman recalled an incident from his early days as editor of The Masses, around 1913. "Cornelia Barns, an elf-eyed girl with smooth brown hair, turned up with the picture that was brilliantly comic and not like anything else in the world." In another work, Eastman wrote: "he drawings of Art Young and Cornelia Barns and William Gropper were of their own intrinsic nature comic. Captions here were unnecessary, or were at least a supplemental element––often, in fact, supplied by the editors in the office."

In 1915, Barns was one of the 23 featured artists at "American Salon of Humorists," an exhibit organized by Louis Baury at the Folsom Galleries in New York City.

Political life From 1913 to 1917, Barns was a frequent contributor to The Masses, a socialist magazine that featured several notable writers and artists. For three years, Barns served on its editorial board. As art historian Rebecca Zurier commented, "The closest thing to a feminist statement by a woman Masses editor appears in the cartoons of Cornelia Barns, who refrained from any serious social analysis." In 1925, the New Masses was announced as "A new radical magazine of arts and letters, without political affiliations or obligations but with sympathy and allegiance unqualifiedly with the international labor movement..." Barns was listed as a contributing editor. depicted two immigrant women with young children, juxtaposed with the stare of a male dandy in a three-piece suit, holding a walking stick. Her cover, "Waiting," published in The Suffragist in 1919, is a powerful portrayal of an unending mass of strong-bodied women, two with babies in their arms, holding a lighted torch while waiting for political recognition through suffrage.

In 1918, in its second year of publication, Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review

Later life and death

In 1920, Cornelia Barns moved to California with her husband, Arthur Selwyn Garbett, Seeking job opportunities, the Garbetts next moved to Berkeley. Garbett became a radio station program director, He also served as music critic for a San Francisco newspaper. She contributed a feature column for the Oakland Tribune, "My City Oakland." Garbett and Barns retired to Los Gatos, California, It was speculated that years of using etching acids on zinc plates in poorly ventilated studios had damaged her lungs. Others have noted that her paternal grandmother and great-aunt both succumbed to the disease. Following a flood in the family dwelling, few of her original artworks survive.