 Hi and welcome to Barnes Takeout. I'm Martha Lucy, Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barnes. And today we are going to be looking at a work by Paul Cézanne called Bathers at Rest. And it is hanging in the center of this wall here. You can see that Albert Barnes kind of anchored his whole ensemble around this painting. It is a major painting in Cézanne's Ove. It is one of my favorites in the collection. And we're going to look at it up close in a minute. It is full of just really interesting things to look at. And I will also offer that I think it's a very strange painting. And I say that in the most sort of loving possible way. So here we go. The subject here is a group of friends, young men who are spending a day swimming, bathing near a body of water, maybe a pond, maybe a river. One of them is kind of half in and out. One of them is testing his, you know, dipping his toe into the water. This one is relaxing. And then there's, he looks like he's stretching over here. I'm not sure what this figure is meant to be doing. But it is, the scene is taking place somewhere in the south of France in the Ex-en Provence region. And we know that because of this in the background. This is Mont Saint-Victoire, which looms over that region, and which Cézanne painted over and over again in his work. It was a very sort of meaningful kind of sort of icon of Ex-en Provence to him. That's where he grew up. That's where he spent his childhood. And he would have had moments like this with his friends, he out in nature. We know that the figures are based on drawings that he made of classical sculpture. Some of them were probably drawn from the live model. This one is particularly interesting because Cézanne went back to it later, about 10 years later, and did just a single study of this figure, which is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So this work was shown at the third Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1877. And this was a really important exhibition for Cézanne. He showed 16 works there. And it was one of only two times while he was alive that his works were shown in that way. And he had been working during the mid-1870s with the Impressionists. He was friends with the group. He was especially close with Pizarro, who had encouraged him to kind of move away from the kinds of subjects that he had been doing earlier, which were more kind of literary subjects, sort of mythologies. And Pizarro encouraged him to paint contemporary life, paint the real life that you see around you, paint from nature, capture what you're seeing. And so that's what Cézanne is doing here. But what's so interesting here is that at the same time that you can kind of see the Impressionist influence on this work, he's also moving away from Impressionism. And that's what makes this such a pivotal work in his career. So what do I mean by that? Well, Impressionism is about fleetingness and capturing the ephemeral. And Cézanne was realizing that while that was an interesting thing to do, he also wanted to make sure that he was capturing the solidity of the actual object. He didn't want to lose the materiality of the things that he was representing. And so it is such an almost kind of sculptural painting. And here's what I mean. So when you look up closely at this figure, you can see that it's not this kind of quickly rendered Impressionist kind of flick of the brushstroke. It is much more deliberate. It's built up of many, many layers of paint that are then kind of smoothed down with a palette knife. And the whole thing is kind of bounded by this sort of ridge almost, which you can see a lot better when you're looking at the actual painting. Point is that the forms here are thick and material and kind of sculptural. And the same goes for, I love looking at the cloud up here, because in an Impressionist painting, the cloud was a part of a landscape that was sort of the perfect expression of the fleeting and the momentary. In a Monet or Renoir, a cloud would be sort of vaporous and kind of evaporating before your eyes almost. But here, Cézanne gives that cloud so much weight and so much materiality. It really looks like a solid object almost just to get up close to that. And look at the way that he kind of bends this tree so that it follows the contours of the cloud. And that's another thing that makes this work move a little bit away from Impressionism is the attention that he gives to these sort of rhymes that I see throughout it that makes it look much less spontaneous, that makes it look much more designed. The rhyme here between the body and this narrow tree here, these kind of hooks that come down into the clouds. These repetitions is what I'm talking about. And this one I always, I can't, once after I first notice this, I can't not see it. This ridge here in the figure's chest, this kind of blue corner, which really kind of mirrors this. But I think the thing is that that really shows Cézanne moving away from Impressionism most of all is this here, this green triangle of this sort of chartreuse-colored triangle of light. Now the Impressionist love loved to capture light and to paint light in all different colors and to show it, you know, dappled light. The idea was to paint things as they looked at that moment to your eye. And Cézanne struggled with this. He struggled with how to represent nature because he wanted to be faithful to nature, but he also wanted to translate nature into something that was his own. He didn't want to copy nature, he wanted to kind of represent it as something else. And so instead of painting dappled light, he creates a sign for light, like almost like a symbol for light. Now when this was shown at the Impressionist exhibition, it was, you know, that at an already sort of controversial exhibition where the artists were considered radical, this work stood out as one of the more radical works and lots of critics commented on it. And one of the things that, you know, aside from that, that paint application, that thick application of paint that we were just talking about, it was a lot of the anxiety, the critical anxiety had to do with the representation of the human body. Now look at this guy a little bit more closely and, you know, look at the way, the different colors that he brings to painting that chest and the hands, just the shape of the hands, they read almost as paw-like, and that was a word that one of the critics used, the different colors in the flesh. I mean, and I'm talking about the sort of redness of the hands versus the kind of whiteness up here, which probably is meant to show that he was working out in the sun and his hands had gotten red, I don't know. But then over here in this figure, you know, there's this kind of gash, this blue dash of paint. And what is that? That's the kind of thing that disrupted the presentation of the human body as sort of perfect and whole that was such a part of the tradition of Western art. And then over here, this figure who's gender is sort of hard to read. It's hard to know if these are breasts, what's going on here, and that's the kind of thing that upset critics, you know, is this male or female? And then finally, the relationship between all the figures was utterly confounding and still is, but for critics at the time, you know, a work of art, you're supposed to be able to take away some meaning from it, like what story is being told? Why are the figures making the gestures that they're making? And here it's just, it's really hard to say. Each one seems to be kind of in this isolated zone, doing things that have nothing to do with any of the others. And that's, I think, you know, in the end, all of these things combine to make this not just a beautiful painting, but a really strange painting, and one that really was the one that critics were angry about at the time. But I think what's interesting is those are the ones that we end up talking about the most. So that wraps up our Barnes Takeout for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Please join us again. You can subscribe to our channel on YouTube. Thanks very much.