Obituary: Sonia Maria Barron, January 30, 1934 – June 25, 2023

MEMBERS of Canberra’s visual arts community have been saddened to hear of the death of long-time art critic Sonia Barron, who died on June 25 at age 89 after complications from pneumonia.

Barron was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1934, to Swedish immigrants Carl and Ida Olsson. She was educated in Boston before undertaking a journalism degree from the Swedish-American Upsala College in New Jersey.

In 1956, she moved to Sweden where she worked at both Ericsson and Scandinavian Airlines as a translator then worked at Berlitz teaching English as a second language. There she met English language and history teacher David Barron.

The couple moved to London, then emigrated to Hobart and later they moved to Sydney, then to Canberra in 1965.

By 1972 the family, now with three children, moved to London under a three-year posting with the National Library for David (who later became Canberra Public Librarian) and in 1975, they returned to Canberra, where Sonia enrolled in Fine Arts at the ANU, studying under art historian Sasha Grishin.

She became assistant registrar of the art collection at the Australian War Memorial, then in the 1990s became registrar of the art collection at Parliament House, retiring in 1999 at the age of 65.

For many years until failing eyeing forced her retirement in the mid-2000s, she wrote art reviews for “Muse” then “The Canberra Times” where, working in tandem with Grishin, she would  review exhibitions by new contemporary artists, effectively becoming the chronicler of the developing art movement described in Anni Doyle Wawrzyńczak’s 2020 book, “How Local Art Made Australia’s National Capital”, where she is frequently cited.

I worked with Barron as her editor for many years and enjoyed both her rich sense of humour and recollections of life in London and in New York, including a visit to a concert by jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.

Sonia Barron belonged to the fading school of “I say it as I see it” art reviewers.

Her critical honesty once led her to rap me over the knuckles about some thoughtless remarks I had made about deprecating remarks about her ancestors, the Vikings, written after visiting the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin. I was happy to be admonished.

I visited Barron in her retirement several weeks ago and found her as lively and keen as ever to engage on the subject of the arts.

She is survived by her children Lisa, Christina and Daniel.