Neighbor Featured Artist #8: Barbara de Saurrure

A Belated Thanksgiving Memory

As you get older, the holidays become more and more a season filled with the memories of those who remain with you only in spirit. Because I am so often aware of what a blessing it is to have joined the Greeneville community five years ago, I found myself thinking this Thanksgiving of an artist friend who helped open the door to Northeast Tennessee even though she was not here in body. Barbara de Saussure was an Oak Ridger – which made her a neighbor in the way all Northeast Tennessee communities are, as part of the pattern in a cultural quilt. She was one of the first “real” artists I can remember knowing, one whose work had a style I could recognize, one whose technique in painting was both sophisticated and difficult to master, and one who, to the end of her life, took more pleasure in making her art than anyone else I can think of.
One of the fascinating things about some of our previous artist “neighbors” is the confluence of events that has brought them to East Tennessee from other parts of the world. Barbara de Saussure was born in New York City and ended up in Oak Ridge because of nuclear energy. She met her future spouse, Gerard de Saussure, when he was at MIT and used to reminisce about their first dates, when they needed a translator; de Saussure was Swiss and spoke only French, in which Barbara would later become fluent. His work at Oak Ridge National Laboratories brought them to East Tennessee, where Barbara remained for the rest of her life. She began painting in the 1950’s and worked with oils, acrylics, and watercolors, evolving from a realistic approach to images to what would later become expressionism, with a strong preference for the abstract. She was largely self-taught, which ultimately proved to be they key to her development of a uniquely personal style. Late in her career, when asked how long it took to paint one of her enormous 60” by 40” canvases, she would shrug, make a face, and say, “It takes an hour to an hour and a half to apply the paint but it took sixty years to learn how and where to put it.” Over the years the couple, Barbara with her painting, and Gerard with his penchant for driving through the twisted Oak Ridge streets in a convertible with white hair flowing in the wind, became low-key legends in the area. Extremely private, Barbara resisted too public a role but instead attracted a dedicated following of collectors who were drawn to the surreal quality of her work. One of these was James-Ben Stockton, now the director of Greeneville’s regional art center. “Barbara was a hero of mine. Wherever I go, I always hang her pieces on the wall first and then I know I’m home.”
Throughout her life, Barbara produced her work in intense bursts of creativity, followed by times, sometimes intervals of years, when she was absorbing ideas and images, lying “fallow” artistically. Her circle of collectors always waited with impatience to see what her next period of production would bring. Each new burst of creativity would bring new images, a fresh series of studies exploring a particular subject, a different color palette. “When I’m not painting, I’m looking at things intensely and thinking very carefully about how the shapes relate to each other and how the colors combine,” she would say. “A lot of thought goes into my work but not a lot of time in painting it. If I work on a piece for more than two or three hours I know it won’t be successful.” Her paintings were distinctive for their bold colors and textures. Stockton, who once mounted an exhibition of Barbara’s work consisting of 46 canvases, remembers the effect it had. “With this wonderful cacophony of colors and shapes, it was like being inside a circus. People who saw it couldn’t help smiling. They would tell me how joyful they felt after viewing the show, which we called Panache.”
One of the longest periods of “lying fallow” for Barbara came after the death of her beloved Gerard. “Then I saw her at one of her favorite restaurants in Oak Ridge,” says James-Ben. “I asked her when she was going to paint again and she said she didn’t know. A couple of weeks later a friend and fellow Barbara collector called and told me she’d seen Barbara and that she’d grinned and said she’d picked up some canvases.” In the next three years, “some canvases”, filled with glorious Barbara de Saussure paintings, numbered more than two hundred. She did some of her best work at what would be the end of her own life. “It was amazing,” says James-Ben. “We inventoried 90 completed works after she died, all of which she left to the Oak Ridge Art Center. Invitations were sent out announcing her final show and sale. Every piece was bought before the show even opened. I know, because I got the last two.”
I felt compelled to include Barbara de Saussure among our artist “neighbors” because, even after she was gone, she helped me move to Greeneville. It was in delivering one of Barbara’s enormous floral studies, in which she could create a perfect flower petal with a single swipe of a palette knife (“I haven’t used a brush in 15 or 20 years,” she’d say) that this gifted artist’s work caught the eye of Scott Niswonger. In large part, that single moment resulted in the relocation of James-Ben: Studio & Gallery to Northeast Tennessee. It is a move I cherish.
One more story. The young man who did the interior painting of my apartment spent an afternoon eyeing one of Barbara’s paintings in its new home on the wall he’d just finished. When he left that afternoon, he said, “I don’t think I understand it. But I like looking at it.” Very little of Barbara de Saussure’s work is still available. But what is can be found, proudly and affectionately displayed, at James-Ben: Studio & Gallery Art Center.