Cornelia
Barns,
the daughter of a theatre impresario, was born in Flushing, New York,
in 1888. She attended the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts
and her cartoons published in The Masses,
The Suffragist, the Women
Voter, The
Liberator and
the Birth
Control Review.
Cornelia
Barns, The
Masses (1914)
Barns
was a socialist and her cartoons dealt
with issues as women's suffrage, political
corruption and birth control. Cornelia married Arthur
Selwyn Garbett,
a music critic from England.
After the First World War, Cornelia, suffering
from tuberculosis, moved to California with her husband and young
son. In her later years she designed magazine covers and contributed
cartoons to local newspapers. Cornelia
Barns died in 1941.
Cornelia Barns, United We Stand: Anti-
Suffrage Meeting, The Masses (March,
1914)
(1)
Max
Eastman, Love and Revolution
(1965)
Cornelia Barns possessed an instinct
for the comic in pictorial art that few American artists have ever
surpassed. She was a gentle brown-eyed girl with soft hair sleeked
down around a comely and quiet face. She had no ambition or aggression
in her nature, and came through the open door of the Masses
like a child into a playroom, moved only by her liking for what she
saw there. When its door closed she disappeared from fame as quietly
as she had entered upon it - I don't know why.
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