Art: The Barnes Among Women

When Djuna Barnes showed her first oil painting, Portrait of Alice, at Peggy Guggenheim's Manhattan gallery last week, many critics were surprised to find that the woman who wrote Nightwood (1937) could paint with similar distinction. In Nightwood no less magisterial and exacting a critic than T. S, Eliot found "the great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy."

Now the output of original and talented Djuna Barnes consists of a total...

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