 I thought that this topic would be appropriate for this time of year. Just a quick plug for the education program here at the Barnes Foundation. How many of you are first-time visitors? That's good, okay. So many of you know that despite our remarkable collection, the Barnes Foundation has always been an educational institution. And so talks like this are an extension of that. But our real sort of focus is on classes, both short four-session classes as well as semester-long classes. And we have a certificate program that has both accredited class, accredited options, but also semester-long classes. And I see many of my students in the audience, which is very reassuring. The semester, unfortunately, for the fall is already fully subscribed, but the spring semester will come around before you know it. And if you're interested in taking classes, the best way to get notice on that is to sign up to get our email notifications that will give you a heads up as to when classes will be posted online. Okay, so without any further ado. So many of you are familiar with this scene. This is the main gallery of the Barnes Foundation. We're looking at the south wall. And the south wall is the first thing that viewers see when they enter the main gallery. In fact, everything about the Barnes Foundation is deliberate. So the fact that Barnes chose to put directly in front of his visitors or students as a window is of particular importance. We come out of the natural world where we have our everyday lived experiences. We come into the main gallery of the Barnes Foundation. And the first thing Barnes directs our attention to is a window that looks back out in Marion, back out onto the Arboretum and here onto the Parkway. As a visual reminder of the importance, the interconnectedness between our everyday lived experiences and the experiences we're about to have in the galleries at the Barnes Foundation, that they are not something separate, but something that things that are inextricably linked. And then on this first wall that we see, Barnes presents to the viewer and the students two of the modern masters of his own era, and that is represented both by, represented of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Matisse both by the dance mural and also by the riffian here and Picasso by 1907's composition or the peasants. So Barnes is signaling the importance of contemporary art. Now keep in mind Barnes was assembling this from the 20s on to his death in 1950, but these were the two really important artists of his generation. But as important to that is that flanking those pieces are works by two American artists, William Glackens and Maurice Prendergast. These were, and this signals a couple things. First the connectedness between these artists and these European masters of Matisse and Picasso, but also the importance of American art to the collection. The fact that he juxtaposes these works together again is of great importance. These artists are as important to the collection as Matisse and Picasso, as well as Renoir and Cézanne. Glackens and Prendergast were not only contemporaries of each others and of Barnes, but they were friends, they were colleagues, they vacationed together. They exhibited together in two of the most important early American modern exhibitions, both 1908's exhibition of the, quote, eight group of eight at Macbeth galleries in New York, but also 1913's Armory show. So these were really important artists for an emerging modern American art. And they also had not only close relationships with each other, but also with Albert Barnes. So these three figures, their lives intertwine in really important ways. And although, and I'll show you, so here's Glackens the raft that's here to the left, and Prendergast's the beach that's to the right. So that each of these artists, while very different from each other, were important to Barnes's concept of what art should be in their own unique way. That is that each of them learned from the advances, the dramatic change of impressionism, but reshaped those advances in their own unique and personal ways, ways that make them individual. So much so that when Barnes published his first, his second publication for the Foundation, The Art in Painting from 1925, he singled out these two artists as being of particular importance. And just as an aside before I move forward, it also points out the importance of American art to this collection. We often think of the Barnes Foundation collection in terms of its French post-impressionist collection, and rightly so. But as Richard Wattenmaker, who has written and spoken most eloquently on both of these artists, as well as the American collection here at the Foundation, Richard recognized that American artists are represented by at least two works in every one of the Foundation's 23 galleries. So there's no gallery that one can enter where American art isn't represented. The Barnes Foundation is an American institution. Its philosophy is grounded in, rooted in American pragmatism and Barnes's close relationship with John Dewey. And so part of my motivation for doing this is also to remind us, those of us familiar with the collection, how important American art is to the Barnes Foundation. My goal for this evening is fairly simple, and that is to look at these two artists through a particular lens, and that is through this subject of beach scenes or figures by the water. For Maurice Prendergast, the older of the two artists, this was a theme that resonated throughout his life, something he started exploring early on and all the way to the end of his life. For William Glackens, although he did it on and off, there was a period from 1911 to 1915, where he really concentrated on these scenes, particularly 1916, excuse me, particularly over a series of summers that he spent in Bellport, Long Island, many of which the works created during those summers are represented here in the Foundation's collection. And the beach scenes also give us an opportunity to explore the important ways in which the form, the plastic form, that is the expressive vocabulary of both of these artists evolved. They are, again, a kind of lens that we can see how both artists matured expressively and then how that maturation then evolved or continued to develop throughout their lives. And that's, again, particularly true with Maurice Prendergast. So, Maurice Prendergast, again, the older of the two. Prendergast, my other hope is that I'm going to put our discussion in a bit of a historical context, but I really want to focus on the works themselves and really look at some of the particular and important qualities that connect both of these artists, but also, obviously, distinguish them. But I think it's helpful to sort of put it in some sort of historical context as well, just to sort of place them in a timeline. So, Maurice Prendergast was born in 1859 in St. John's Newfoundland when it was a British colony in North America. His family moved to Boston 10 years later. And when you read about Maurice Prendergast, you can't help but also almost always or inevitably refer to his brother Charles, who likewise was an artist and a frame maker. These two had such a close bond that to talk about one, they had workshops together, they traveled together to talk about one is almost always talk about the other. So it's going to be somewhat of a challenge just to talk about Maurice, but that will be my effort. So his family moved to Boston where they lived on the east side. And not a lot is known about his early life as an artist. Ellen Glavin, the art historian, has, I think, successfully argued that Maurice's first introduction to art was in school, in public school, where in the latter part of the 19th century there was an emphasis in the Boston public and actually the Commonwealth of Massachusetts public schools to train students in industrial drawing. As you may know, New England was known for its textiles mill, textile mills rather, and they were facing fierce competition from Europe and there was the feeling that part of what was lacking in that education was a clear training in drawing. So this is possibly where Maurice Prendergas got his first training as an artist, which he then carried on after schooling to doing lettering for commercial signage. Both Maurice and Charles were lifelong Francophiles, and in 1890, Maurice had his first opportunity to travel to France. He was 32 years old, so he was already fairly mature. And he spent the next four years in Paris. He studied at the Academy de Julianne, which is very famous for, as an alternative school to the academy. It was a much sort of freer way of learning. And it was there that he became friends with other English-speaking artists, including James Morris, who was a Canadian artist, who is also represented in the Foundation's collection. With Morris, Prendergas traveled to the coast, particularly to Dieppe, which is on the Normandy coast as well as Saint-Malo. And both of these subjects are important for both artists, but Saint-Malo in particular for Maurice Prendergas. While there, Prendergas produced works such as this. This is the Luxembourg Garden from 1890, 1894. And in this early work, we can see some of the roots of some of the quintessential qualities that are recognizable for Maurice Prendergas. While the palette is very different, it's very sort of local, sort of muted, the composition is particularly Prendergas. The figures in the foreground, for instance, they're rooted and planted. And then Prendergas uses spatial relationships and figures and objects in that picture space as a way of moving the viewer's eye through and into the picture space. So, for instance, the figures, the line of the curbing that just happens to align with the staircase in the back, the figures that are placed on either side of this central skewer of trees. And then, importantly, this line of trees and foliage in the background that act as an end point for the viewer's eye, so that the viewer can travel into that picture space and then back out. The handling of the color of the paint is very loose. I'll zoom in here a little bit. You'll see that it has a loose brushy quality that adds a textural quality, a texture to it, and that the description of the figures are more general than specific. There's the suggestion of these being individuals, but they're not portraits per se. And certainly as we move back into space, they're really just types, young girl, older woman, rather than specific figures. So as I said, after four years, Prendergas moved back back to Boston. And when he moved back, he began to exhibit his work and exhibited quite extensively. And this is something that carried through his life. He was always interested in showing his work, getting his work out. He exhibited not only in Boston, but also here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, as well as in New York and Chicago. And the earliest work in the Foundation's collection is this work. A little more in line with what we think of when we think of Maurice Prendergas's work. This is on the beach from 1896-97. This is a watercolor that is normally up in gallery 17, but is currently down. This is a watercolor. And the medium itself enables some of the particular interests that Prendergas is beginning to develop, and that is in a palette that's lighter and brighter and airier. But we can see ways in which this corresponds with the earlier work. That is, we have these sort of generalized figures in the foreground that are sort of planted and rooted. They create a kind of visual foundation. And then figures distributed throughout the rest of the picture space, moving our eye back to the coastline and then even further still back into the horizon line. And then we see interest in drawing the viewer back into the foreground. What I find particularly remarkable about this work, among many things, is this cluster of figures to the right. He distinguishes these figures not in terms of their specificity, but in terms of color, very particular arrangement of color. So if your eye follows from the red, for instance, that red, those red figures are distributed throughout the cluster, and similar with the blue and the white figures. And each of those, I think, specifically are intended to break up the predominant gray-black figures. So there are sort of the most dominant figures in there, and then these more colorful luminous figures allow Prendergas to separate those figures, distinguish them, and the end result being, and identify a clearly understood grouping of figures, rather than just sort of a mass. The composition, although it's strongly vertical, is very typical of Prendergas as well, in that it's built on horizontal bands. So the bands of the figures, of the shoreline, of the water, of the sky. This helps organize the composition so that even though there's a tremendous amount of visual movement through the picture, there's a sense of organization as to where those things are in space. In 1907, after 13 years, Prendergas returned to France, and 1907 is an important sort of turning point for Prendergas, because while we see elements of the mature Prendergas that we know in these early works, there's something critically missing. When he returned in 1907, he returned specifically because he wanted to go back to Saint-Malo, this coastal town in Brittany. It's a walled medieval town where he had visited before with James Morris in his first visit. He wanted to return there as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of painting in this seascape. Before he left for Paris in 1907, though, he agreed to participate in this show that I mentioned earlier that would take place the next year, the exhibition of the eight that include, along with Prendergas, artists centered around Robert Henry, who I'll say more about later, William Glackens, as I mentioned, but also the artist George Luke. George Luke's rather, Arthur B. Davis, Everett Chin, John Sloan, and Ernst Lawson. These artists created, sort of formed the foundation of what was to become American modern art. In 1907, Prendergas returns. He spent some time in Paris where he was able to see exhibitions both by Chardin and Watteau, and I don't have time to go into it here, but his interest in the art of the traditions, looking at the traditions of art, the French tradition going all the way back to antiquity, but also the modern tradition is a key component of Prendergas' work. Again, Richard Rockmaker does a nice job of exploring ways in which Prendergas took forms either from antiquity or from modern artists and reshaped them into his own forms and then sort of interjects them into his pictures. These figures are sort of identifiable when we're looking for them, but they're so fully integrated into the compositions that they don't stand out as being somehow far into Prendergas' form. So the other thing in 1907 that Prendergas encountered was a newfound interest in the work of Paul Cézanne. Paul Cézanne had died just a few months prior to that, and before going down to Sama Lo, Prendergas saw an exhibition of Cézanne's watercolors, and Prendergas obviously having an interest in that medium as well, and he wrote in a letter to a friend and fellow painter, Miss Williams, he wrote about seeing this exhibition of Cézanne's watercolor. He left everything to the imagination. They are great for their simplicity and suggestive quality, and in that observation I think we see sensibilities that resonate with Prendergas' own work. So Prendergas is learning not necessarily by being schooled, but by seeing what other artists are doing, and in particular the profound impact that's seeing the work of Paul Cézanne had on him. Yes, it's right. And so this is a work painted in that summer of 1907 at Sama Lo. This is a small work, and we can see sort of the nascent, mature Prendergas here in this picture. And as importantly, we see how much his form has already begun to evolve. I very much like this image because we get to see the edge of the picture, and if you look here at the edge, you'll see that it's painted on a tan brown. You see how this band of tan and brown runs down the full side of it, and this is on both sides. We painted it on a ground of tan brown, which is the color, for instance, we see here, and we also see it peeking through down here. But I think most importantly is how he then overlays these cooler colors of aqua and blue and deeper blue, and so that the combination of the underpainting with these cooler colors enables him to create this tremendously rich palette. So his color now begins to evolve from that very local muted color to, it begins to gain a sense of vibrancy, but he's still sort of tempering it with these warmer colors. The looseness of his color application remains, and notice now he's thinking more, not sort of haphazardly, but more organized. So for instance, these short brushstrokes that create the sky, and here again you see that umber peeking through, or the elongated brushstrokes that build up the tomb of Chateaubriand, which is a landmark of Saint-Malo, and then down the bottom this line of figures. These are quintessentially pretergast figures. Again, suggestive of figures with parasols, certainly not specifically descriptive of that, but that he's using now enhanced and increased boldness of color in these large sort of ovals of colors that as you see run all along the front of the picture. So think back to the Luxembourg garden with those figures rooted in the front, and then the first beach scene with those seated figures in the front. Now he's transformed that into this band of figures along the bottom edge of the picture, but now that band, rather than being merely static, is enlivened because we have these lozenges of color that move up and down and up and down, and then that same idea is carried over into the next band of colors. So what this infusion of impressionist, post-impressionist color enables pretergast to do is to create visual activity of things that the figures aren't themselves doing things, but our eye is moved in and out up and down through the composition. So it becomes a much more vibrant, much more active visual experience. So pretergast painted a large body of over 35 oils, most of them small ones during the summer in San Malo, and then before departing to go back to the United States, he stayed long enough to be able to see the October salon to autumn, the autumn salon of the salon in which 56 works by Paul Cezanne were exhibited. And that moment, so this autumn salon in 1907, was very critical for the development of modern art in general, not just for pretergast, but this was an exhibition that had deep influences on the first artists we saw in the main gallery, Matisse and Pablo Picasso, both of them went and saw this exhibition, and evidence of that is in gallery 11 at the foundation. Matisse's blue still life in which we literally see Matisse almost conjuring up the memory of Cezanne in this riotously active, highly luminous painting. So again the effect of Cezanne resonating through the development of modern art. So pretergast again returned in the end of 1907, preparing for this very important show of the eight that was shown in February of 1908. Pretergast showed 16 works, the bulk of which were paintings that he had done the previous summer in San Malo, and this event was again very much sort of a declaration of the arrival of modern art in America. And it's possible that this painting itself was part of that exhibition. There a lot has been written about the exhibition of the eight, and that's worthy of a talk in and of itself. The only thing that I'll say is that Pretergast's work was of particular focus for the critics, confounding for some, but some saw what Pretergast was attempting to do. Some of those critics that had seen French art saw the resonance of what Pretergast was doing. But again what the critics focused on, whether good or bad, was his use of color. Again this bold, high-key new palette. Traveling was always an important part of Pretergast's life in 1911. He and his brother Charles traveled to Venice. There's a whole body of work that came from that trip. And while he was in Venice, Pretergast had one of several bouts of illness. He had to undergo an operation that forced him to stay throughout the year. And this sort of going back and forth between good health and poor health is something that again continues to reoccur through his life, obviously up until the end. So he returned in 1912. And 1912 becomes a particular important year for us here at the Barnes Foundation. It was a year that Barnes began to really seriously collect works of art. And Richard Wattmaker in the American catalog of the collection goes through some of the correspondence back and forth between Barnes and Pretergast where Barnes is trying to get Pretergast to first send him work or getting him to... Barnes is saying that he wants to buy work and Pretergast is sort of holding back. He has an exhibition that's up and he doesn't want to get in the middle of the dealer and Barnes and Barnes is trying to get around the dealer. Again, quintessential Barnes is trying to get his own way. And Pretergast is very gently and kindly trying to stave him off. But eventually in 1912 Barnes does begin to buy works by Pretergast and this work by him from San Milo is part of it. That same year Pretergast vacationed with Glackens. And as we'll see in a minute, 1912 was the year that Barnes began to rekindle a friendship with William Glackens. So we see these sort of three artists, these three individuals rather, their lives begin to intertwine again. In 1912, as I said, Pretergast and Glackens spent summer in Cape Cod together. The Barnes's went up and visited them. There's Ira Barnes, Ira Glackens in his book on his father. Glackens in the Ashkahn School talks about Barnes and Mrs. Barnes coming up and spending time with them, Barnes taking them around in his car, around to different areas, different places for the painters to paint. So again, this 1912 year I'll return to in a little while, becomes very important as well. 1913, here comes the second important exhibition for the advancement of quote American art, although overshadowed by European art, that being the 1913's Armory Shell. The focus of the Armory Shell was organized by American artists led by Walter Pock and Arthur B. Davis. The purpose of the exhibition was to highlight American art. They wanted to include European art, but unfortunately the European art ended up outshadowing the, outshining rather the American art. This was the exhibition where Marcel Duchamp's new descending staircase was first exhibited and all of the focus was on the European art. So the American artists were, they were happy that modern art was getting a viewing, but certainly disappointed that it wasn't their art. So 1913, 1910, 12, 13. So in this scene simply called the beach, beach scene rather from 1910, 1913. Here again we see the continued evolution of Prendergast's form. In particular with figures like this, we see the way in which his color harmonies, his interrelationship of these little spots of color become increasingly complex. Rather than sort of large areas of color, he's increasingly breaking color up into small little dabs and then juxtaposing colors to each other. The other thing we begin to see him utilize more are these color lines. And you see even with a color line how he varies the color, he adds these spots of, for instance, a deeper red over this lighter violet color or the way that he has a grouping of these little spots of either pink, orange, or yellow over top these umber colors. The effect is that from a distance we get an overall sense of color, but the closer we look we see that those color areas are made up of a wide variety of colors. And in addition what he's also begun to do is distribute color everywhere. Rather than color being sort of isolated to an individual figure, he begins to use color all over the canvas. And that adds both a sense of vitality, that is of color really being first and foremost, but it also creates a sense of unification, that everything in the picture is made out of the same composition, the same material. In this picture we see again these recurring themes, compositional themes with the horizontal bands, the bands of the landscape in the sea, the shoreline in the sea, the landscape in the distance, the skyline, and then overlaid that these vertical units of the figures, the vertical units that add again visual variety to the otherwise fairly static horizontal bands. And this brings us back to the work that's in the main gallery. So this is the beach number three painted 1914-1915. And in many ways this picture is sort of a culmination of all of the things that we've discussed up to this point. And in particular the complexity of color relationships. This is what Barnes saw of importance in Prendergast's work, that by this period and even by 1910, Prendergast was making color compositions. Everything about these pictures is about what can color do, what is the effect of color, color to color, color in terms of fields of color or blocks of color, or as we see here this really complex overlaying of various color applications. So spots of colors with lines of colors over top, some are opaque, some are more transparent. Again color distribution, notice how the yellow in the blue is then carried over to be a yellow against violet, but the amount of yellow brightens that area where the blue dominates here. And again this color distribution is something we see throughout the picture. The figures are types. They're not individuals and this again goes back to really the first image we looked at. They're doing different things, but they're not specific individuals. Again it's not portrait in any way. They're generalized. They're generalized and yet they're set doing specific things. They're sitting, they're leaning, they're riding, they're adjusting something. But none of that adds any activity to the figures. The figures are static and still. And in this picture particularly as we considered in terms of the first San Malo picture we see the way in which Prendergast could change the quality of his color. So this picture has a much drier feel. It takes on almost a fresco-like quality. And the alignment of the figures very much resonates with the traditions of art going all the way back to the Byzantine era. I said this isn't a focus of the talk, but I think it's important at least to highlight, particularly because in much of the writing, particularly the early writing about Prendergast he was sort of viewed as being sort of a simple, uneducated painter who did things sort of naturally. But that's absolutely not the case. He knew the traditions of art well, both from firsthand experience in his travels, but also from a vast library of books that he referred to. And so this connection, not just in the alignment of the figures, so in the Byzantine work from San Vitali we see the way in which the Byzantine tended to align figures, these elongated vertical figures pushed to the foreground. We see Prendergast doing something similar, again with these aligned figures, very much pushed to the foreground. And then in addition, the way in which Prendergast's spots of color again resonate with the tessera, the little chunks of little squares of either gold or glass and gold or stone or precious metal, the way in which Prendergast's spots of color very much echo those tessera. So his work, not only in terms of composition, but also in terms of quality, very much resonate with the great traditions of art. Jumping to the last work that's in the Foundation collection, this is Marblehead Harbor from 1918-1920. We can see the way in which for all of its similarity with what we saw earlier from 1914-1915 or even earlier than that, how Prendergast continues to evolve his compositions. In this one, obviously the scale of the figures is more in keeping with the other color units, whether boats or houses in the picture. And how, while we often tend to think of Prendergast's work as being dealing with fairly shallow space, we're here, as Barnes himself pointed out, Prendergast was exploring spatial intervals, so the way our eye moves from boat to boat to boat or figure to figure to figure or house to house to house, and how Prendergast has created clean, clear-cut space between them, so our eye moves from one to the other, traversing open space, and so that there's a sense from foreground through middle ground to background of the eye moving through clean, cut, clearly defined space. And we see him using, again, ideas we saw him exploring early on, for instance, figures that are very generalized, but then combining them with things like architecture that's fairly clearly defined, right, with its dimensionality reinforced by these linear perimeter lines or the doors and windows being clearly articulated. So it's not so much a matter of him a disinterest in clarity, but clarity where it suits his need, where he wants things to be clearly defined, he would do so elsewhere, for instance, with figures, he leaves them more generalized. Of this picture, this is one of the pictures that Barnes addressed in the art and painting at the time called Landscape. He wrote of this picture, and here I quote, the entire canvas is a succession of contrasts of line, color, space, mass, and spatial relationships that produce a series of interlocking rhythms crisply punctuated at clean-cut intervals. In every part of the picture, there is an infinite number of variations of color, light, line, mass, space, and general treatment, which correspond to the internal variations in contrapuntal music. In fact, Barnes very often referred to Prentagast's work in musical terms, also likening his work to a Bach fugue with this crisp interplay of color in Prentagast's work and sound in the Bach music. Having found this mature style, this mature form, the rest of Prentagast's life was really an exploration of what he could do to and with that. As I mentioned earlier, he suffered from a series of ailments which, at the end of his life, culminated in progressive circulatory issues. In 1924, he underwent surgery, although his condition worsened after that. And in January 31 of that year, one of the last persons to see Prentagast while he was in hospital was William Glackens. And Prentagast died the following day. Of Prentagast, Barnes wrote in the art of painting, the most important factor in his form, not surprising, is color. Few painters ever had a fine feeling of pure color, both in its direct sensuous quality and in the possible variety of its uses. The sharply contrasted areas spotted with light give an effect of staccato color movement throughout the whole picture. And one like that sometimes achieved of Renoir, high praise for Barnes. Color movement give to his best pictures the glowing vitality of the great mosaics and, at other times, the charm and delicacy of the finest earliest tapestries and frescoes. So this is taken from the 1925 Arden painting. So early on Barnes recognized the importance of Prentagast, which brings us to William Glackens. Glackens and Barnes were classmates at Central High School along with John Sloan. While Barnes excelled at academics at Central High School, Glackens was more well known for, certainly his brilliant intellect, but more for his satirical sketches of his teachers, showing them not as they would like to be portrayed, but as the students saw them. And that comes directly from Barnes' account of their time at Central High. That early idea of him being able, of Glackens being able to immediately capture the likeness or the personality of someone, that is at the root of what William Glackens was. In the 1890s, he worked as an artist reporter here in Philadelphia. This is at a time before photographs were reprinted in newspapers. He fell in with a group of artists, including John Sloan, another Central High School classmate, as well as George Luke's, all around the figure Robert Henry, who was a really important teacher, both coming out of the academy, but also in these sort of newspaper artists' reporter circles. They formed a group called, that they called the Four or the Charcoal Club, and these four artists then went on to form the foundation of what became the Eight. Not mentioned earlier. Glackens traveled to Paris for the first time in 1906 with Robert Henry, and he also befriended James Wilson Morris, the Canadian I mentioned earlier. Pernigas had just left, Glackens comes, so Morris becomes also the sort of mutual friend between the two. Glackens went on to be hired by McClure's magazine and sent to cover the Spanish-American War, including capturing images from the Battle of San Juan Hill. And Glackens' ability to capture the specific aspects of figures in their movement, in their personality, in how they hold themselves or how they travel through space, all of these are a cornerstone of his plastic form. And it is illustration at its best, as we'll see in a minute. So this is the earliest work of Glackens in the foundation's collection in Gallery 13 in the east wall over the door heading back into the main gallery. It's a beach at Dieppe. Again, this is along the Normandy coast, painted in 1906. As with Pernigas, we see the way the influence, the strong influence of the French painter Edward Manet in the color applications, in these obvious brush strokes, and in particular the way in which Glackens is swirling wet-on-wet paint to create these sort of streaks of color, and we see that throughout. So this was very much the instruction of Manet by way of Robert Henry, Henry really being the disciple of both Manet and Velazquez and departing that information to his colleagues in Philadelphia. In this scene, by the way, this was painted on the delayed honeymoon of Glackens in Edith Demek, his wife, who were pictured here. And so in this picture, again, we see the way in which Glackens is able to capture the particular comportment of a figure. So for instance, if we look at this figure at the extreme left, we get a sense not only of her being a female, but of the specific posture and what she's doing. He is able to convey the sense of concentration of her holding this rake, of the tilt of the head, of the weight and set of the body, of the turn of the torso. And yet when you look closely, it's done so simply. It's just simple brush strokes that so directly convey these qualities, this information. And this is true of each of the figures throughout this picture. Each of them are doing something specific. This figure, for instance. Just a cluster of brush strokes, and yet we get a sense both of the struggle to hold the hat against the wind, the wind pressing against the body, the body tilting back against the force of the wind, and the cloth of the dress moving forward. All of this just so simply conveyed and yet clearly conveyed. And again, this is Glocken's gift that he's able to do this so quickly. The palette is similar to what we saw in the early work of Prenogas. That is, it's a very local color. It's a very simple color. And just as an example of his ability, we're fortunate to have several examples of Glocken's sketches. He would go out on the street and sketch figures as they would walk by. And in these groupings of figures, you can see the way in which he's selecting figures for particular purposes, right? That they're doing something that captures his interest, and yet he's able to do it, like with a figure, these two figures, for instance, he's able to do it with just an accumulation of lines. But lines that have such variety, if we look at this figure, the line is thick and thin. It's bold at the bottom, bold at the bottom to sort of plant and ground the figure. There's a sense of, again, the movement of the figure through space, of the figure being contained. And each of the figures on so many of these sketches hone in on specific qualities about the individual. Again, it's not about who the figure is, but what the figure is doing, or what's being done to the figure, when it's the winds, for instance, that the figure is struggling against, but the specificity with which he was able to achieve that. Actually, let me go back. For Glocken's, now this is not a beach scene. I realize that. But for Glocken's 1907, 1908, was of particular, 1908 in particular, was of profound importance. And this was the moment when he deliberately retaught himself about color. Having been informed the previous summer, having spent with Maurice Prendergast from Cape Cod, having seen with Prendergast how Prendergast's color had evolved, particularly informed by Impressionist color, Glocken's wanted to capture that same sort of intensity of hue in his own work. And while it's just a preliminary sketch on the left, you see the way, even with the little bit of color that he did add, it was just what those things are, like the green of the grass, the blue of the individual, or the sort of haziness of the sky, where with the racetrack, and this is a work that he painted and then repainted, painted first in local color and then in this new palette, we see the way in which the palette is not just high key, but it's like the volumes turned up to 11. Green is not just green, but it's kelly green. The sky is not just blue, but it's cobalt. The red of the roof of the shed isn't just red, but it's magenta and pink. Everything has this forceful brilliance and it's the combination of these colors to each other. The warm golden yellow of the ground against that cobalt blue that creates the shock and power of each of those color areas. And yet with that, notice what he retains and that is the sense of activity of the figures, of the riders and horses, of the figure leaning on the gate, of these figures, one with his foot up on the bottom rail of the fence. Again, them doing specific things, even though they're very general figures, but they're doing these things that are so specific. And that he's also using color to create, color to create space, both in terms of the atmospheric perspective of the background where things get hazier and lighter, but also this brilliant pool of luminous yellow that becomes a focal point that draws our eye deep into space and then the activity in the foreground, the swirling of activity in the foreground, being a constant magnet drawing our eye back. But as I said, the focus for this talk is beach scenes and it's in this period, now this is from 1910, but from 1908 through about 1916, he begins to use, certainly from 1910 to 1916, he begins to use beach scenes or figures by the water as a way of expanding and exploring this newfound interest in the expressive potential of color. So here we see rather than the large blocks of color from the racetrack, we see him begin to break color up into these little dabs of color and notice what he's begun to do. So the, quote, blue of the water is now infused with spots of yellow and lines of magenta red and areas of green along with these little spots of white. So he's begun to use what we call broken color, that is color that has, the spectrum of which has been separated and then in little components added back so that the overall effect, when you look at this field at the bottom of the picture, the overall effect is of blue, but when you look closely, it's actually composed of a wide variety of colors and we see him doing something similar here to the left to what is, quote, brown grass. Look at all of the colors that he juxtaposed to create that quality. So both broken color as well as color according. So this picture is also in the main gallery. It's on the northeast corner. So there's two works by Glackens, sort of side by side essentially. This one in 1910, the other one from 1915. This is unusual in a couple different ways. First for our vantage point as a viewer. So he's put us out onto the water and we look back to the seashore, back to the shore in this architecture on it. We're maybe on a pier or on a boat, but what that does is it limits the water aspect of it and it enhances the importance of the landscape. And you'll notice that the landscape is made up of these large pieces of architecture and the distribution of which, again, a band here and then buildings back that move our eye back into, again, limited picture space. Along with this, and again, the color is bright. It's luminous. There's a sense of light being everywhere, everything filled with light, not just on the water but everywhere. The general lack of shadows, right? He's not creating, he's not locating figures by contrasting them with shadowed areas but rather allowing them to sit as these bold color-made figures. One of the aspects of this picture that I have always found curious is his use of what I would call unseen space or his exploration of unseen space. And what I mean by that is he's doing it at least three times here with this figure, this figure, and this figure. What I mean is that they're all moving but they're moving into space that we don't see. They're moving between buildings or into a building or out of the picture space. And it's a way that even within this fairly confined and restricted picture space he's able to suggest additional space. That is space that's between things or beyond what we actually see. And although Glackens was certainly aware of the traditions of art, it's not something he necessarily drew on as much but this is something that was of particular use, was used particularly by Flemish artists. That is, as Flemish artists were beginning to explore what picture space could do, they often did this sort of exploration of unseen space. Which means this to another picture in the collection. So around this time he was, Glackens rather was showing his work. And it's not that nobody understood what he was doing, it's just that sort of fewer critics certainly understood as clearly as Barnes did what Glackens was after. But one who did was the critic James Honaker who wrote, and I'll just read a brief portion of this, he wrote, and this is in 1910, he wrote, Glackens color grows more harmonious though often shocks by its brilliant dissidents. He's pulling up the key year after year and his studies at Cape Cod, at Cape Cod summer before last and at Nova Scotia last, so the previous one that's from his summer at Nova Scotia are of exceeding interest because apart from their technical accomplishments they begin to show however dimly the gold to which this ambitious and gifted young man is steering. Beaches of inland seas, the water of which are vivid blue, skies that are hard blue as Italy's, white cloud-like boulders. All of these he says recall the presence of what William James called the emotion of recognition. And again this goes back to Glackens ability to show us things that we immediately connect with because there are often sort of physical memories that we see in his moving animated figures, things that are familiar to us. In this picture, the little pier, we see something a little different than we saw previously. Here he turns his attention out to the sea and notice again, he's expanding on this use of both broken color and color courting. And as importantly, he's learned how to adjust his color. So you'll notice that he's using these tightly packed and compact crescent-shaped colors, brushstrokes rather, and that he's again color courting, interspersing these magenta colors with blue and with green. And yet when we look up here the brushstrokes become farther apart. They're softened, they're not as hard and as insistent. And so he's able to create variety in both how he treats color and how his color, the effect that his color application has. And this picture is somewhat different because the figures themselves aren't necessarily the entire focus. They're part of the composition or not the entire composition. And in many ways they function in a similar way that the boats or the pier or the dog function. And that is as these points of interest. You'll notice that the figures aren't nearly as animated as in some of the earlier ones. They're much stiller, much calmer. And so in many ways they function as compositional elements, not so much as the entire focus of the picture. And as I said, 1911 begins a period when the Glackens spend a series of summers in Belport and Belport Long Island. And this becomes, because he returns over and over again it becomes a real sort of key point for the Glackens development. His son Ira Glackens, I keep saying Ira Glackens, Ira Glackens wrote again in his book about his father. He said he said of Belport at the time, Belport was a simple place. Cottages, nothing showy. Belport was still an unspoiled town and life was largely confined to the village street. There were no large estates in the neighborhood. Near the beach stood a large barn-like quote vacation home from New York shop girls which supplied subjects for many of my father's canvases. A fairy every fine day took bathers across the bay to the ocean beach, old inlet, whose rolling white dunes and scraggly bayberries and beach plums saw many picnics. Picnics. And that brings us back to... So in the raft, I think in many ways we see all of the aspects that have been developing up to this point realized. So this is from 1915. We see the harmonious use of broken color corded. So in the variations of how these intermixed colors are distributed in these identifiable brush strokes in these tiny little crescent shapes. But as importantly, the focus on the figures. They are clearly of dominance. And these, again, although I've said this before, I think it's worth repeating, that these are specific figures but not individual figures. So they're doing things that are specific. Each figure in this picture is doing something different from somebody else. They're about to slide. They're splashing. They're bobbing. They're reaching. Each figure then has its individuality expressed in terms of its sense of motion or activity. But the figures themselves are highly generalized. So you'll notice facial features are all but eliminated. The forms of the figures are attenuated, elongated. The appendages have been simplified. The hands don't articulate fingers but rather almost like these mitts, right? Thumb and then sort of a tapered end. Similarly with the feet. The feet of the figures are just these sort of delicately tapered forms. This elongation accentuates the linear quality of the figures. And you'll see that most of them are doing something with their arms. And that adds a sense of activity as well. So the arms are curving. They're inching. They're encircling. So they become active in the composition. And that activity is carried over into the other things. To the extent that we almost hear the putt-putt-putt of the boat. And here's the stream that it leaves. We feel the lean or tilt of the sailboat or the rocking of the raft itself. Everything is in motion. Everything is moving. And we connect with that. Importantly Glackens creates this deep-receding seascape and then populates it throughout the composition. Everywhere we look, there is something occupying that space. There's no dead open space. Where there is open space, that's necessary transition from one thing to the other. From the sailboat to the figure on the top of the slide to the sailboat in the distance. Or the episodic quality of these figures. We have a sense, if you look at the relationship of these figures to each other, we have a sense of continuity or of continuum of this figure sliding down the slide and splashing into the water. And then bobbing along and then swimming around and there's a narrative that's suggested. It's not a narrative that's described or told but everything connects with one another both in terms of how he treats it in his palette but also in terms of what the figures are doing and the relationship of figures to figures. And most importantly what we see in this picture is that Glackens has successfully transformed his illustrative skill his ability to capture quickly and simply but directly the activity of figures he has been able to transform that and now expresses it in terms of color. Color becomes a medium that all of everything we perceive in this picture is said. And that transition from illustration to illustrative expressive quality that's what allows Glackens to not merely be an illustrator but to importantly be an illustrator artist of being somebody that is able to say what he has to say not merely in how it's described but in terms of his chosen medium that being color. So after this time in Belport it's not that Glackens never returned to beat scenes they just didn't necessarily an important part of the subjects that he chose to describe but over this period after this time at Belport Glackens and Barnes remained close friends I think it's impossible to imagine Barnes being the collector educator that he was without his friendship with Glackens. Glackens was the one person he entrusted a large sum of money to go to Europe in 1912 and buy the best examples of modern art. Barnes never did that again but he continued to consult Glackens Glackens was somebody who's not just his eye but Barnes greatly admired and listened to in many ways Glackens schooled Barnes in what modern art could be both by what he showed him in that buying trip and bringing back but also what he himself did what Glackens himself did Glackens died very unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage in the spring of 1938 on hearing the news Barnes wrote to Edith Dimmock Glackens wife and here I quote I was shocked and not only that but a feeling of deep sorrow because I loved Butts Barnes' nickname for Glackens as I never loved but a half a dozen people in my life he was so real and so gentle that I would have given millions to possess and he had the millions and he would have bought it if he could and here importantly as an artist I don't need to tell you I esteemed him only Maurice, Maurice Prendergas among all American painters I knew was in his class he will live forever in the foundation collection among the great painters of the past who could they speak would say that he was of the elect that statement so recognizing with the passing of William Glackens that only Maurice Prendergas was of the same level as he saw in William Glackens and Barnes was true to his word that Glackens would always have a place in the foundation not only in the main gallery where he's represented by the two works but also in gallery 12 the quote American Room that is very much dominated by Glackens work and then distributed throughout the rest of the foundation that commitment not only to William Glackens but obviously also to Maurice Prendergas but to American art and the importance of modern American art in its relationship not just to the traditions of art but to modern European art as I said at the beginning of this very much at the foundation of what this place is and so why did Barnes hold these two artists in such high esteem as he wrote about both of these artists he returned to one thing not surprisingly their understanding and use of color that what they had to express was always done in terms of their chosen medium the vocabulary of a painter being color and that they did it in multiple ways but that importantly what they did was rooted also in the traditions of art that they took from what they learned of impressionism and didn't redo it but actually made it their own made it into their own form their own what they what interested them and what their focus was and that's why these two artists were and remain important artists thank you so we have time if anybody has any questions we don't have time but I have time if anybody has any questions nope that's fine ok well thank you all for coming out tonight