 Hi everyone and welcome to another edition of Barnes Takeout. I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education at the Barnes Foundation, and Barnes Takeout is your daily dose of art. We're like you working from home and missing both our colleagues as well as our collection and using this as an opportunity to focus on works that we find of particular interest in our collection and saying something about that and sharing those observations with you. The work that I've chosen today is by the American artist, Horace Pippin, and it's called Supper Time. You'll see it here. It was created in 1940, around 1940. First, a little bit about Horace Pippin, an African-American artist born in Westchester, Pennsylvania, just a little more than 23 miles west of Philadelphia, so he was a local artist for us. As a child, his family moved to Goshen, New York, where he spent most of his childhood. He enlisted in the First World War in 1917, and in 1918 was injured. He was part of the 15th Division of the New York National Guard that saw some pretty horrific fighting in the First World War, very much dominated by trench warfare. So Pippin was injured. He was injured in his right shoulder. He was honorably discharged in 1919, and in 1920, married and moved back to Westchester and began creating works of art. So this picture demonstrates a couple of things that are notable about Pippin's work. First is the subject matter. These sort of interior domestic scenes were ones where he was drawing on his childhood memories of his family and friends. And so here in this image, we see over to the right a stove, so a wood or coal burning stove, wonderful little detail of a frying pan, a sputtering frying pan on that stove, which gives us the clear indication that that stove is hot. The window where you'll see that there's snow or frost gathered on the mullions. Again, a detail that tells us that it's cold outside. If you've spent any time in a cabin with a wood or coal burning stove, it often gets very hot, and so another wonderful detail that I like about this picture is this open door. So the door was letting in some of that cold outside air to try to moderate the temperature inside. Clothes hanging on the line, again an indication that it's cold outside and warm inside. And then the figures, I'll say a little bit more about them in a moment, gathered around a table, and much like the sputtering frying pan, very specific details such as the coffee pot, and you'll see that there's steam rising from its spout. Here what I'm reading is a glass of milk, a cup and a saucer. Some details are a little more difficult to discern, so this might be a sugar bowl or maybe a cake or something, and it's not maybe another coffee mug or something that the woman is holding. The figures gathered around the table and identified with very specific use of color, so this really brilliant bold blue. Another detail that Pippin adds is the change in color here that suggests perhaps some perspiration, again giving us the idea that it's hot inside. The complementing this blue is this nice pink area on the shirt of the man, so these complementary colors on either side, the blue to the pink, and then his use of white. So even though the palette is fairly simple, he's using it very effectively with the areas of white, whether it's the apron or the headdress, the white of the child, or of the laundry on the line, drawing our eye through the composition. He positions the figures on either side of the table so that the opened door and the steaming coffee pot are obvious, and those bold areas of the blue and the pink really draw our eye back and forth across the composition. Before I go any further, I want to show you where the picture is in the Barnes Foundation, so we're in gallery 12 and we're facing east, and you'll see here's our picture, and it's one of three pictures by Pippin in this gallery, three of four works by Pippin in the collection, and actually you'll see that it's surrounded by works by, this is a work by Maurice Prendergast, Joel Pascant, and Ernst Lawson, American artists, and that's the theme of this gallery, of gallery 12. It's dedicated entirely to American artists, so Maurice Prendergast here, and this frame, this frame, and the frame on our picture are frames created by Maurice Prendergast's brother, Charles Prendergast, so a unique quality about it that Barnes chose to put it in a Maurice, Charles Prendergast frame. I like this gallery view because in the raking light, the light coming down from above, we get an even better sense of the texture of this image, and now that we've had some time to look at it, you may have noticed one of the other things that makes this image unique. I mentioned Pippin's interest in scenes drawn from his childhood memories, so this domestic interior scene, but also in this raking light, you get a much better sense of the texture of the picture. It has a rugged texture to it, and you may have noticed that areas like this and this are a grain of wood. This picture is not painted on canvas, but rather on a piece of repurpose, actually several pieces of repurposed wood that were bound together, fastened together, and that Pippin has used, if we go back to that gallery view, has used a very unique technique to create the boundaries of many of these color areas, and you get a sense of this here, where you see the ridges. What he's done is he's used a hot poker to actually burn lines into the panel, so he held the hot poker that he heated up in the stove in his home, and then supporting it with his right hand, again the hand that was injured, he pressed the panel against that hot poker, holding it in his left hand, and maneuvering it around to burn these incised lines into the panel. The other thing that he's done is he's left this wood grain exposed, and he's used it in some ways that are perhaps more obvious, like the grain of the table, that seems like a pretty reasonable choice, and we get a sense of that with the chair as well, how he's left some of the wood grains, so that it clearly indicates that the material of the chair is wood, but then he's also done that for the landscape that we see outside the window, that he's left the wood graining for there, rather than painting an exterior, he leaves this grain exposed, as well as using it for the flesh tone, so in the figures the flesh tone is the wood grain, again the wood grain itself, and here he's burned a couple details of eyes and nose and mouth, and if you think about the effort it takes to, particularly if he didn't have full use of his right hand, to choose to create the image in this way, it's a very laborious way of creating, that it really speaks to one of the things that so many people appreciated and continue to appreciate about the work of Horace Pippin, and that is that he's really speaking with a personal and a forceful expressive voice, that he's not trying to copy anybody else, but he's doing and creating these images in a very personal way, it's a very direct kind of visual voice, it's at the time what would have been identified as a kind of primitive and a primitive manner, and that was not certainly as Barnes used it a negative, but rather that he wasn't, again he wasn't trying to copy anybody, he was trying to be genuine to his own intentions, but also in particular using the wood grain that this speaks to a very modernist intention, allowing the materiality of the medium to be obvious to the viewer, so leaving this exposed wood grain very much taps into a modernist sensibility, so these are two things that certainly would have interest Barnes as well as many of Pippin's contemporaries, that he was sort of navigating between this sort of primitive unique singular voice of his own, but also very much tapping into modernists' intentions, so I hope the next time you come to the Barnes Foundation you visit Gallery 12 and come and see Pippin's Supper Time, again created in 1940, and I hope that you're doing well and that you join us again for the future editions of Barnes Takeout. Again, I'm Bill Perthys, thanks for joining me.