 Good morning. Welcome, everybody. So glad you could be with us today for this lecture. My name's Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation, and Education here at the Barnes, and I'm so happy to introduce our two speakers today, Amy Gillette and Kailin Jewel. They are colleagues here at the Barnes, and I have the pleasure of working closely with both of them, so I know what they do very well, and I know them both very well, and not only are they first-rate scholars, but they're both just lovely people. Amy Gillette is a collections research specialist here at the Barnes. She... Oh, I also wanted to mention that the other thing is that they were both colleagues at Temple in the PhD program, where they both excelled, got their PhDs, and so now they're here. Amy got her PhD from Temple in 2016. She specializes in medieval art and works on topics like mechanical devices made for liturgical spectacles. Fascinating. She also does a lot of work on musical angels and has an article coming out in... It's actually an essay in a Rutledge volume coming out soon on music and art in Renaissance Italy. She has also published on this topic in the Journal of Peregrinations. Kaylyn Jewel is a senior instructor here at the Barnes. I'm sure some of you have taken classes with her. She got her PhD from Temple in 2018. Her research focuses on the visual culture of the late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine Mediterranean. Amy and Kaylyn, since they've been here, have been collaborating on a lot of things. They have similar interests. They like to share ideas. They're very collaborative people, which is wonderful. They are working on an article together called A Fragment of Life Presented to Us, Medieval Art at the Barnes Foundation, which, as I said, is co-authored and it's coming out in a special volume of the journal Different Visions, and this volume is going to be focusing on the medieval art of the working class, and that comes out in Fall 2022. The paper that they're going to be presenting today comes out of this interest that they both have in the Byzantine period and sort of its place at the Barnes Foundation. How does it relate to Barnes' project as a collector of modern art? What did Barnes think about the Byzantine period? They've presented this paper at a number of places, including the annual Byzantine Studies Conference at Case Western University in December of last year. I am just delighted to welcome them and to have you all here. Enjoy this talk on the Byzantine tradition at the Barnes Foundation, Amy Gillette and Kaylyn Joule. Thank you, Martha, and thank you for inviting Amy and I to share this work. We are always happy to do so. It's nice to see students of mine in the room and also to everybody tuning in online. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Amy and I are extremely excited to share our work on Albert Barnes' interest in Byzantine art. This research project is one that's new to both the study of the Barnes Foundation and to the wider history of art. It's our hope that our talk today will illuminate the Byzantine tradition's fundamental role in the Barnes Foundation's educational mission and also open a fresh perspective on our collection for you. So before we really get into all of this, what exactly do we mean by the Byzantine tradition? At its core, the Byzantine tradition refers to the art and architecture of the Byzantine Empire, a culture that flourished in the Eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years. Its capital city was Constantinople, founded in the fourth century by the Roman emperor Constantine the Great at the meeting point between Europe and Asia in present-day Turkey. But the world of Byzantium was larger than the empire's physical and even temporal boundaries, in part because its official faith, Orthodox Christianity, thrived in places like Egypt and Kievan Rus, which is the historical predecessor to modern Ukraine. When it comes to the visual culture of Byzantium, it too transcended space and time. To this day, artists like Henri Matisse and architects including Santiago Calatrava have continued to adapt its traditional forms into and three dimensions and formats large and small, and it is this ongoing interpretation that allows us to discuss the Byzantine tradition at the Barnes, one of the world's most celebrated shrines of French modernism. The Barnes Foundation is an educational institution, not a museum whose core purpose is to teach people to see as the artist sees. And in the first half of our talk, I will introduce Dr. Barnes for those of you who are newcomers and then discuss his understanding and construction of the Byzantine tradition. How did he come to be interested in it? What did he write about it? And what objects did he collect to exemplify it? And where did he place them within the galleries? In the second half of the paper, I'll turn the floor over to Amy, who will focus on two 20th century paintings as case studies, both on display in room 22 here at the Barnes, Mistra by Alexis Grichenko, an artist born in Ukraine, and two mysterious cabins by George Dikiriko, himself a proud Italian with Greek ancestry. Therefore, both artists from places historically associated with Byzantium. As we will see, Grichenko rendered the Byzantine city of Mistras in Greece as an avant-garde icon, seeking to understand French modernism and the icon painting tradition of his homeland through each other. Dikiriko's engagement with Byzantium is another new topic, and one that's driven by Amy's pathbreaking research. And we'll see, and as we'll see, Dikiriko seems to have adopted the architecture of the Byzantine church as a way to express his ideas about metaphysics, those big concepts such as being, time, and the causes of things, which abstract as though they may be are fundamental for grappling with human existence. For decades, Dikiriko gleefully multiplied this structure in his art through what postmodern architects later called, approvingly, piles of simulacra, or things that replace reality with its simulation, as a way of asking us to determine our own truth. Accordingly, at the end of our talk, Amy will unleash just a little postmodern theory as a way to think about what the Byzantine tradition at the Barnes can mean for us today. Albert Barnes, who we see here in this magnificent photograph, one of our favorites, Albert Barnes grew up poor in Philadelphia, and by brilliance and force of will, he earned a medical degree, and then a fortune making pharmaceuticals, most notably the antiseptic arderol, a silver nitrate compound. Bored with horses and hunting, he started to collect modern art around 1910 and found a calling. He was guided in this endeavor by his high school friend William Glackens, now an avant-garde painter based in New York City, and by the French dealer Paul Guillaume. In 1912, at age 40, Dr. Barnes dispatched Glackens to Paris on a watershed collecting trip that launched his own quest to support and acquire modern paintings that was to last for the rest of his life. And I'd like to point out these are amazing photographs. Barnes and Glackens sitting on a log, Paul Guillaume and Dr. Barnes' wife, Laura, hanging out somewhere, I don't know, Atlantic City, maybe I'm not sure. Love these pictures. But Dr. Barnes was never really invested in art for art's sake, so much as its connection to human experience or to be more precise in its ability to enrich human life. He began to explore its power with a staff of his West Philly Chemical Lab, who were black and white, women and men, and manual and clerical workers. It was at the lab, really a series of rooms rented at the Hotel Powelton, where they participated in an experimental reading and discussion program. Mary Mullen, an office worker turned educator, explained in an essay that the experiment involved two things. First, a linking up of the modern conceptions of psychology and aesthetics with a firsthand observation of old and modern paintings. Second, through the experience thus gained an application of modern educational methods in a class of students of diverse degrees of culture and social rank. The reading list for the lab workers, she added, featured texts by John Dewey, William James, and George Santiana, among others. Dr. Barnes, in building up his collection and philosophy at the lab, leaned increasingly into the premise of art as experience that he worked out with Dewey, who he met in 1917, and who soon became a close collaborator and friend. The two of them, who you see in this great photograph, the two of them made the case that aesthetic experience was not an esoteric phenomenon, but instead one that emerges out of common work a day experiences. This applies equally to the acts of making and appreciating art. And according to this line of thinking, the art object, whenever and wherever it was made, is the tangent point that connects the experiences of the artist and their viewers, whoever they may be, to engage in aesthetic experience as Barnes and Dewey emphasized involved seeing as the artist sees and exists in living and examined life. As Dr. Barnes proclaimed in a 1942 radio broadcast, he says, art is not a phase apart from the work a day world, but instead a fragment of life presented to us, enriched in feeling by means of the creative spirit of the artist. We do not teach students how to paint, for that would be like teaching an injured person how to scream. We teach them how to learn to see, that is to perceive the meanings in the events of everyday life, as well as in the paintings, sculpture, music, furniture, objects and wrought iron, trees and flowers. For our part, Amy and I would like to stress that this ethical dimension is what continues to make the Barnes collection its display and educational mission so special to this day. Mary Mullins' remark about observing old and modern paintings at Barnes' West Philly Lab is also essential to the topic of the Byzantine tradition. It signals the spark of the idea that a key part of seeing as the artist sees is to grow familiar with the art of the past. It alerts us as well to the fact that Dr. Barnes integrated rather than dismissed the history of art. Barnes solidified his agenda in the galleries and publications of the Barnes Foundation, which received its charter a hundred years ago, almost a hundred years ago in 1922 and opened in 1925. The original site was a Beaux-Arts style building by Paul Philippe Cray on a leafy estate in Marion, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philadelphia. I imagine many of you all have probably been there. In 2012, the Barnes moved here to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City, where architects Todd Williams and Billy Chen constructed a simulacrum of the Cray galleries. They copied both the building and the exact order in which Dr. Barnes had arranged the works of art because they went hand in hand. As Mullins shared when the building opened, quote, the gallery and the arrangement of the works themselves not only heightened their aesthetic appeal, but served to illustrate the continuity of great art in all of its periods and types of development. The building's design, the decorations and the sculptured ball reliefs built into its walls are all harmonized with the works of art. Though Mullins mentioned old and modern paintings at the laboratory, Dr. Barnes acquired most of his old art in 1922. Building the foundation, as we have just learned from Mullins, entailed having the physical space to flesh out his ideas about art. And as you can see from this interesting headline from 1923 in the Philadelphia Enquirer, they mentioned America's six million dollar shrine to all the craziest art. How a Pennsylvania millionaire is spending a fortune to prove the futurists and cubists not insane and teach us to admire his strange work as he does. A dismissive response to the inaugural exhibition of the Barnes collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It also revealed a certain need to vindicate modern art as art, which Dr. Barnes achieved mainly by demonstrating that even the craziest artists made thoughtful and creative use of art historical traditions. By the time of Dr. Barnes's passing in 1951, he held over 150 Byzantine and medieval objects from Europe, Asia and Africa. Here are the ones from the Byzantine sphere. A series of bone carvings from the Eastern Mediterranean on the left labeled Greece 400 BC, but mostly made in the early Byzantine period, so around 400 to 500. A post-Bizantine icon of the Nativity, most likely from Crete. Another post-Bizantine icon of St. Nicholas copied from a wonder-working model from the town of Tsarist, near Moscow. And a baffling, truly baffling, Amy and I are always baffled by this thing. A pseudo, we're calling it a pseudo-Bizantine medal that seems to show the Emperor Constantine the Great and his mother Helena flanking a monumental cross while standing in the ancient racetrack of Constantinople. Obviously. The inscription, in case you were wondering, which we're always wondering about, the inscription is complete nonsense. It's a series of Greek and Latin letters, some that are upside down, some that are backwards. It's pretty bizarre. It's a fun puzzle for us to try to figure out. So let's keep in mind as we're looking at these objects, why they are here. In the context of the Barnes Foundation's mission, more important than these objects per se was the way in which they are presented to us, especially in light of the demand they make on us to use our own brains to make sense of their display. Any of you walking through the galleries have encountered these and you might think why on earth are they here. Several of these objects are on display in room 15, one of the smaller galleries on the second floor here at the Barnes. It is here that we encounter the bone carvings, in a case alongside the post-Bizantine icon, and so the red arrows are pointing to these. Other works on display in the room include a late medieval Flemish and Korean paintings, New Mexican Images of Christian Saints, and Modern Works by Navajo Silversmith, Jacques Lipschitz, and Pierre Auguste Renoir, plus an array of metal things, hinges, escutcheons, all kinds of stuff. This display, like all of the ensembles here at the Barnes, is deliberately provocative and asks viewers to work, that is to seek visual connections between the works on display. Why do this? Why spend time finding similarities between the color, light, line, and space present in these objects? For the explicit purpose of highlighting the idea that artists from all over the world, from different cultural backgrounds and using different artistic media, are all searching for the same thing, to present fragments of their lives, broadly understood to us through these physical objects. In our Barnes Method classes, those courses that have been taught in the Foundation's galleries for almost a hundred years, the faculty and I emphasize the idea of broadly understood human qualities, that we can observe in art objects, qualities such as, and these are just two examples, of crispness and softness of form, which we can see in this comparison of the post-Byzantine icon on the left of the Nativity and the Renoir painting on the right of a Baither gazing at herself. So on the left, we see a work that is crisp and relatively clear. When we look at the Renoir painting, it has a softness to it. Also notice the distinct difference between the kind of jagged mountain in the background and the softness of the landscape in the background of the Renoir painting. So these are just two ways that we can think about these broad human qualities. And we'll talk a little bit more about that when I turn the floor over to Amy, and she talks about Gretchenko. Furthermore, the same questions that Mary Mullen presented to the earliest students here at the Barnes in the 1920s continue to be relevant in our classes. So questions and, you know, the questions that I pose are not exactly these, but they are, you know, definitely inspired by these. Is art an imitation of nature? Can we separate art from life? When is an object beautiful? Why do we say that art is free? Does the work of art have any social value? That is, does it draw people together? If we exert ourselves and try to find out what an artist means when they present a new form to us, how may we be rewarded? One reward of this interrogation of forms and social value and the nature of beauty is that some images like the postman by Vincent van Gogh might even be more iconic than we had suspected unless you are in one of my classes and then this is not new to you at all. Van Gogh wrote when he was painting the postman and other paintings that he did of his wife, he says, he says, quote, if I had the strength to continue, I should have made portraits of saints from life who would have seemed to belong to another age and they would be middle class people of the present day. And yet they would have had something in common with the very primitive Christians. And so I include here alongside Van Gogh's postman two Byzantine images, the one on the left, a Byzantine icon made in the city of Constantinople in the 500s. It's today now in a monastery in the Sinai. And in the center, a mosaic from the city of Ravenna and an image of Christ. So you can see a similarity in the starkness of pose, the frontality, looking out at the viewer, lots of lots of things going on. Regarding regarding the publications, Dr. Barnes is collecting of old objects progressed together with a series of textbooks written by himself and his colleagues from the 1920s to 30s. These discussed specific schools and works of art and the terms advocated by Dewey, Santiana and others on the reading list cited earlier. It emerges moreover from the archives and this was, we were so excited about this, literally so excited in the archives that Dr. Barnes consulted with specialists about the various traditions including Byzantium. Here, for instance, we see a telegram from 1934 sent by Thomas Wittemore to Dr. Barnes. Thomas Wittemore was an American archaeologist who was in charge of rediscovering and restoring the mosaics of the quintessential Byzantine monument in the world, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. In this picture, Wittemore is standing in front of Hagia Sophia, or in the back, actually the back of Hagia Sophia. And Wittemore gushed, in this telegram, Wittemore gushed to Barnes, I have no keener desire than to show you unpublished mosaics which I find so convincingly in the positions from which Matisse's creations have emitted. And here is a letter to Lawrence Binion, who was at the British Museum, about classifying Egyptian objects as Byzantine and Roman. Dr. Barnes and his educational collaborator, Violette D'Amazia, thus announced in the Art of Honor Matisse from 1933, among the forms of Byzantine and Egyptian art that Matisse has adapted, the most important are Byzantine mosaics and metals, Egyptian textiles, and Egypto-Roman paintings. And so here you see just a page from that book in reference to this passage. And you can see on display here, we have a Matisse painting on the right compared to a Byzantine coin, a Byzantine mosaic, that mosaic happens to be from Ravenna as well, an early Italian painting, and one of the Fayoum mummy portraits from Egypt. And many similarities here, but I think the key is the simplicity of form, one of one of the big takeaways here. The passage, this passage from the Art of Honor Matisse underscores their larger point that the fundamental role of the Byzantine tradition in this collection is as a bridge from ancient Greece and Rome to early Italian and French primitive painters through the Renaissance and finally onto the canvases of modern French masters. In French primitives and their forms, a book published in 1931, Barnes and D'Amazia used the word Byzantine 80 times. In his magnum opus, The Art in Painting, first published in 1925, Barnes uses Byzantine more than 60 times and states definitively modern painting developed out of mosaics. To illustrate this remarkable declaration, Barnes included an image of the Byzantine mosaics from San Vitale in Ravenna as a touchstone, as you can see here. We then read that the late, oh, and so before I get into that, I do want to point out the similarity in the visual forms between Matisse on the left and a detail of the mosaics, the Byzantine mosaics from Ravenna on the right. And when we look at these two, lots of things are going on. Direct eye contact is one of them, a general simplicity of form and overall decorative quality. These are all similarities. And also, I think more importantly for Barnes, when he talks about mosaics being the foundation of modern painting, what he means is that with mosaics, you have individual little pieces of stone acting as moments of color that are then fitted together to create this larger image. And when you look at certain paintings, Henri Matisse is one example, so the red madras headdress here at the Barnes is one example of this. The patchiness that we see in the brushwork of the background or of her cheeks is similar in concept to the patchiness that we see in mosaics. So this passage from the art of Henri Matisse underscores their larger point. Blah, blah, blah, you read that. When we read that the late medieval and Italian artist Cimabue took the first steps in the transition to modern painting by so modifying the Byzantine mosaic tradition as to engraft upon it an individual expression. So he's saying here that Cimabue is taking Byzantium and pushing it forward. We then read in the works of Giotto, and I don't have an image of Giotto, but Amy does later. He notes that the Byzantine tradition is shown in the formalized pattern of the composition, but with the pioneering uses of perspective and color and weightiness. Giotto is very known for his weightiness of forms. Barnes then says, all painting, all painting since the Renaissance, has been so much informed by the Florentine tradition, so Giotto and Cimabue, that it cannot be properly understood or judged by anyone unfamiliar with it. And more interestingly, the converse of that statement is true, namely that the meaning of the Florentine tradition is only fully revealed by the development that has followed from it. In other words, in the journey through the traditions of art, Barnes understood the art of Byzantium as an important connector between the medieval or primitive past and the modern present. I'm going to turn things over to Amy. All right, so we've just learned that Dr. Barnes, the main, we've just learned that to Dr. Barnes, the main artery of western art channels the Byzantine tradition through the Florentine ones spearheaded by Giotto. Let's take a step back now to think about these propositions. Is it true that we need each tradition to fathom the other in both directions? And does this formulation remain useful a century after Barnes wrote it? To move forward with these questions, let's consider the paintings we introduced at the start Mistrov by Alexis Grichenko and Two Mysterious Cabins by George Odukiriko. Here they are again in Room 22. They share this space with a number of power objects that Dr. Barnes believed were made during the Middle Ages based on scholarship current at that time. And this is the subject of a whole other talk, but I should at least note that an underappreciated fact of art history is that the same individuals like Thomas Whittemore whom we met often did double or even triple duty in pioneering the fields of modern Byzantine medieval and or West African art, something that we don't usually do today. And Room 22 is a physical consequence of this scholarly episode. Anyhow, the allegedly medieval items include the central statue from the Dogon culture of West Africa in Vitrine, whose airy forms Dr. Barnes compared to agaithic cathedrals, and the iron French steeplecock on top of it, which coincidentally or not coincidentally probably crowned the spire of agaithic cathedral, and a counterfeit Gothic triptych of the crucifixion that you can see above the case on the left hand side. And here too, here too, also in Room 22 are further modern works inspired by medieval ones, Byzantine figure by Humezeboff, Village Among Rocks by Paul Clay, and St. Martin by the Italian artist Afro, both sculpture friends by his brother, by Mirko, his brother. Now unto itself, Grecchenko is me strong. You can see it up there in the upper left corner with its softly jagged fractured geometries. It may resemble to you, as it does to me a shaken-up version of Paul Cézanne's beloved Maus Navictoire, which you can see on the bottom left of this slide. And notice the shared colors, the focus on the geometric skeleton of things, and the pressing of spatial distances onto the frontal plane, especially in the Grecchenko. The style was definitely avant-garde in its abstractions, and moving painting, one could say, moving painting to its authentic two-dimensional self. But this was not new because icon painters had done this already hundreds and even thousands of years before. And Mistras placement in Room 22 helps disclose that the Byzantine tradition informed both its style and its subject, which is the fortified city Mistras in the Peloponnes Mountains of Greece near ancient Sparta, and that's by the yellow star on the map. Mistras was first settled around 1250 by French crusaders, and shortly thereafter brought into Byzantine rule, being governed by members of the imperial family. The building visible on the ridge is their palace. By the 1300s, the city became a major centre, linked culturally and economically to Constantinople, the Mediterranean sphere, and the courts of Western Europe, like that of France, until the takeover of Mistras in 1460 by the Ottoman Empire. Now, de Kiriko's two mysterious cabins seems initially less Byzantine than maybe some deviant version of Renoir's bathers, of which we've got plenty here at the barns. I think the one here is barns' favourite in the main gallery. And in this respect, it fits right in here. And it is true that de Kiriko admired Renoir for his deeply traditional focus on craft. Still again though, Room 22 prompts us to probe the painting's sources further, keeping in mind Mary Mullen's questions to her earliest students that she wrote assuming we are intelligent and assuming pictures appeal to us, what do we try to find out about them? And she also wrote, if we exert ourselves and try to find out what an artist means when they present to us a new form, how may we be rewarded? Two mysterious cabins it shows. Turns out there are actually three cabins for people to change from their street clothes into swimsuits. And the cabins have red or yellow doors with two holes at eye level, actually a lot like the masks that you can see on display in Room 22. And they've got pediments sporting bright but strangely stiff flags and ladders beneath the cabins leading into pools of zigzagging water. In the water are two new bathers and a striped beach ball outside, a colossus in a suit gazes across a sandy plain toward distant Renoir-style mountains. So who work Ruchenco in de Kiriko and how did they relate to the Byzantine tradition as it's represented at the barns? I hope you'll appreciate the slide, I think that it reveals almost everything we need to know about the both of them. But both were born in the 1880s in Krovlitz, Ukraine and Volos, Greece. Their careers both began around 1910 and continued moving around Europe with visits to America and both of them to the barns until the end of their lives in the 1970s. As young artists, they both skirted the avant-garde in Paris. Ruchenco initially through the mogul collectors Ivan Maratsov and Sergei Shukin in Moscow and then later in person. It was in Paris in the 1920s that he and Ruchenco both met Dr. Barnes both through the dealer Paul Guillaume whom we met earlier with Kaelin. Yet both artists distinguished themselves by hedging their innovations in traditions and theorized about this at length. Ruchenco brought to the subject a background in philosophy plus direct experiences with icons, including learning from a priest to paint them when he was enrolled in his late teens at the seminary and internative in Ukraine. The Kiriko was a proud metaphysician who styled himself as a recurrence of Friedrich Nietzsche whose mental collapse had taken place in the year of his birth which was 1888. In many cases their works responded to geopolitical crises of their times. Mistra for instance was an act of synthesis following the dissolution of the Russian Empire. The Kiriko who claimed to hate modern art almost as much as he hated fascism offered an antidote to facile or dangerous idealisms. Now by the time Ruchenco painted Mistra he had already penned two treatises Russian painting and its ties with Byzantium in the West in 1913 and the ruse icon as the art of painting in 1917 is shown here. They also these treatises share much with the views of Dewey and Barnes concerning the dialectics of Byzantium and modernism including Giotto's pivotal and mediating role and over and above that why they or really anybody cared which is the belief that art is a vector of human experience and the ethical weight that that quality carries. Ruchenco's first treatise begins with the medieval period and culminates in a comparison of Picasso's painting of 1912 the violin to an icon because Ruchenco said it builds a new hole from the violin's fragments breaking it open to reveal its inner life. This sense of animation which transcends representation was likewise critical as Ruchenco knew to holy icons to show that they channel the true presence of the archetype of the archetype depicted that is the person of Christ for instance or the virgin Mary or other saints and Ruchenco's second treatise evolved from his work with Maratsov's icon collection and a trip to Italy where he discovered what he called a cubist resolution of space and color in frescoes and panel paintings by Giotto and his contemporaries like Cimabue. Additionally new books about late Byzantine architecture by Gabriel Milaim and Charles Charles Diehl both of them were French prompted the artist to refine his ideas by by seeking common sources for Russian and Italian art in the mosaics and frescoes of famous Byzantine sites like the Carriagami in Constantinople and its descendants in the monuments of Mistras which blended Byzantine idioms with some Gothic and Italian ones. For example Diehl wrote the unknown master who painted the frescoes of the Parapleptus church in Mistras has shown the expressive power of Giotto himself as for instance in his admirable rendering of the divine liturgy and the detail at the bottom right here shows I think this is so charming this is from the Parapleptus church in Mistras it's got six angels dressed as deacons and priests carrying veiled patterns and then chalices for the Eucharistic bread and wine up to the heavenly altar and I do kind of love how the those are the angel deacons in the front the veils obscure their halos I guess I guess because halos are made of light right anyway this is a detail from Mistras that that they thought was kind of Giotto style okay so it comes as little surprise that after revolutions in 1917 upended life in Moscow and Maratsov's Maratsov's and Shukin's collections were seized and nationalized Gretchenko fled to Constantinople and set about concretizing his treatises in his own art here he created scores of watercolors and guaches of sacred spaces and street scenes thanks partly to reading the books by Millet in Diehl he was enraptured with the architecture of the carrier designed by the eccentric scholar statesman Theodor Medikaites in this mosaic in apparent accord with his own writing style which was in short overwrought here he is presenting a model of the carrier to Christ and wearing what I think everybody agrees is the most fabulous hat of Byzantine art history and and the the jangled planes of Gretchenko's watercolor animate the buildings undulating domes multicolored masonry enormous flying buttress and Ottoman minaret and the patchy clouds that he's shown seem to share in the building's buoyant spirit and Robert Osterhout who's a scholar of Byzantine architecture has described the carrier as a series of interlocking spaces in which architectural forms and decoration fit together might remind you of the barns but he says we're led personally experientially from one space to the next by narrative gestural and architectural connections so it's perhaps no wonder that Gretchenko formed a personal bond with the carrier that surpassed its scholarly acclaim and be that as it may be that as it may his immersion is in Byzantium was only just beginning in nineteen twenty sixty six of his watercolors were purchased by Wittemore himself who was living in Constantinople while working on relief efforts to support refugees like Gretchenko from Russia the next year nineteen twenty one Gretchenko sailed degrees on the proceeds from the Wittemore sale the sites of mistrust moved him it seems to knit the cosmopolitan and immersive and affecting aesthetics of its churches in true reciprocity with the modernist analytical approach he'd already mastered and now he absorbed himself into the Pantanossa church which was home to a community of nuns who to this day offer hospitality for visit visitors plus a colony of cats these are the cats of the Pantanossa the church seemed a monumental affirmation to the artist of his theories about traditions between the Italian style bell tower look back at that for a sec nope there we go um the gothic festoons and lancet went lancet window frames embellishing the apps wall and the exquisite Byzantine fresco program on the interior Gretchenko wrote to Wittemore while there every morning I went to the Pantanossa for an hour worked enjoyed myself in solitude and made copies of the frescoes I climbed the ladder and examined fresco after fresco and he added that the nun scolded him pretty severely for this practice if you can believe it looking at that nun watering the flowers um but anyway I hope it was worth it so um to view Mistra by Gretchenko with the Pantanossa nativity or indeed the barn's icon helps us to see as Gretchenko saw by clarifying his expression of the site's inner force as he met it the charisma of Mistras the site seems to break through his cubist scaffold while his scumbled brushwork seems to move as though it were caught like an icon in the glimmer of candlelight relatedly we appreciate Gretchenko's effort to find a home as a Ukrainian between Byzantium and the west the integration of Mistra in room 22 both affirms as we saw in his genealogical narrative about traditions and at the same time challenges us to confront our own positionalities you can ask yourself what experiences do we bring to these works that shape how we interact with them does Gretchenko's Mistra shed new light on Byzantine art for you and in what ways does the current war in the Ukraine shape your responses to his art so um let's turn now to Dikirikos two mysterious cabins these structures refer in the first order to the changing cabins provided for the bathers at the beach of Amvolos in Greece where he grew up later in life the artist recalled his childhood fascination with people's metamorphosis from their public selves into the vulnerable primordial state of nudity while the plunging of the ladders into the oceanic abyss he reminisced and he's always carrying the sense of drama in his writing he said it the plunging of these ladders into the ocean caused him great dismay and in the picture the peculiar wood like water flows from a separate reverie that Dikirikos had when watching a man walk across a polished parquet floor as if moving through a strange pool or as it were through a glass starkly old photographs of the real cabins that you can see here now show that Dikirikos altered them in his painting principally by adding pediments that triangular shape on top of the cabins in doing so he summoned his first self-described metaphysical image the enigma of an autumn afternoon from 1910 this scene is set in the piazza Santa Croce in Florence in Italy and expresses Dikirikos conviction that the absurdity of human existence is best captured by lucid Mediterranean aesthetic an idea that he borrowed from from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche Dikirikos wrote in 1912 that when the autumn sun lit Santa Croce he said I had the strange impression that I was seeing all these things for the first time now each time I look at that painting I again see this moment but even here as you can see Santa Croce isn't quite itself he rendered the church archetypal with mysterious curtains replacing doors in its portals likewise as he evolved the mysterious baths into a series he sometimes furnished the cabins with curtains which you can see I think best in the middle picture and giant arabesques those kind of twirly forms leaning up against the cabins or in or even with sky scrapers you can kind of see that in the edge of the right hand pictures so what was going on now the archetype of of these structures may may Kalin and I suggest have been the Byzantine sanctuary the sanctuary of the Byzantine church familiar from Dikirikos youth in Greece as a site of veiled mystery the most suggestive testimony is from his brother the philosopher Alberto Savinio who is thinking perhaps of a church they would have known like would have known as kids like Haggius Laurentius in this slide and Savinio wrote in the quote that you see on on the screen here in the Greek church is hidden something that one is not supposed to see at the center of the archonestasis stood in arch masked by a curtain of red percoline and just behind in a cold and violent enclosure upon a fraying cane chair beard flecked with gray tired and downcast sat the god of the Greek church and a warm pity brought tears to my eyes the god sat behind the curtain and in the candlelight smoked a cigarette um so Dikiriko it seems fleshed out Savinio's discovery in his transformations of Santa Croce in his comment that in the art of Giotto of course he wrote in this quote that you see here the architectonic sense reaches high metaphysical spaces all of the openings he said let us present the cosmic mystery and a really good example of what Dikiriko was referring to is in this fresco by Giotto of the Ascension of St. Luke which happens to be painted inside the church of Santa Croce that um that church that we already saw was the basis of his metaphysical picture so what you see happening is um kind of a cutaway building if you look on the floor there's this rectangular space that was the tomb of Saint John there he is um zipping up through the structure of his church into heaven into the arms of Jesus Christ himself in heaven well you can see the people around some of them looking into the tomb like holding their head in confusion are not really quite so sure what is happening here so this is what Dikiriko says about Giotto his space is let us present the cosmic mystery and I also think incidentally this is why um Dikiriko never quite uses precise scientific perspective um I think that he's trying to show that there's a bit of mystery just as Giotto did now um further in the 1930s Dikiriko discovered the same enigma that he saw in Giotto in the cityscape of New York City of which he remarked quote as in Saint Mark's church in Venice one finds variations colors curves spirals and arches forming together one highly suggestive block so in New York one experiences the drama of all construction throughout the years there's a medieval tower an English cottage Greek temple a Byzantine church a Roman arch in a chateau on the Loire and from the skyscrapers above all the enigmatic breath of the autumn afternoon proceeds the nostalgic and Nietzschean serenity of buildings brightened by the sun of autumn this last quote in addition to illuminating Dikiriko's thoughts about the metaphysics of buildings alerts us to the difference between early works like an enigma of an autumn afternoon on the left and later ones like two mysterious cabins the critics who condemned the later works for their recursions and for their kitchiness missed the point through a prolific profound and yet personal and leveling approach to history Dikiriko presented a foil to the increasingly sinister problem in the 1930s of the fascist aesthetic policies promoted by figures like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler and absurdity as the artist knew is a specific aesthetic category with intimately related metaphysical and ethical dimensions it links the power of human beings to create meaning he believed in a chaotic and reticent world to the freedom and indeed the necessity of deciding who we want to be through iteration and art furthermore Dikiriko gradually developed the meaning of the cabins as liminal spaces exposing behind thick curtains and naked urbinal core that god of the greek smoking a cigarette and he took this meaning and built it up positively in the aggregate and this is the heart of his vision of eternal return Dikiriko had first met the concept which is certainly a difficult one while watching a bubbling fountain so too did Nietzsche as maybe you might have guessed and their common source was um was a famous but fragmented statement from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus it's often quoted as you can't step in the same river twice um at least that's what the um the disney version of Pocahontas quoted it as but um but it was the fragment from Heraclitus was more properly something to the effect of into the same rivers we step and do not step we are and are not uh so how helpful is that exactly um I think maybe not very so what Heraclitus seems to have meant is that the endless flow or flux of everything in the world is paradoxically kind of a condition of a higher order constant constancy or stability through time so it's wonderfully appropriate therefore that Dikiriko's finale to the mysterious bath series was the glorious mysterious baths fountain created in 1973 so you can see the cabin the swimmer with um sculpted water um you can see the cabin as well um and the observed aquatic monument triumphantly answers a challenge that Dikiriko knew that was issued by issued by Nietzsche which said what if someday or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you this life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live it once more and innumerable times more and there will be nothing new in it but every pain and every joy and thought and sign everything that is unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you all in the same succession and sequence even the spider and moonlight between the trees and ever this moment and I myself would you not throw yourself down and nash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus or have you once experienced a tremendous moment where you would have answered you are a god and never have I heard anything more divine so um yes that is what Dikiriko answers in the affirmative and Dikiriko's embrace of repetition echoes probably with some connection the Byzantine sense of the power of the copy with respect both the icons and buildings in short the belief was the more goodness and authority one of those things has the more it ought to multiply and this is also where as promised we pivot to the postmodernism that we said we'd get to at the very beginning of the lecture Dikiriko surely would have been thrilled that postmodern artists and architects assumed his mantle of recurrence one enthusiast was Andy Warhol who copied several of Dikiriko's paintings this one by Warhol is Dikiriko's Italian square with Ariadne and right now I should point out Warhol also happens to be the subject of an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum which is running till June titled Revelation that explores the impact of his Byzantine Catholic upbringing and icons therefore on his own work and in New Orleans we rediscover this is so wonderful um Dikiriko's bubbling zigzagging fountains among others in Malacra from his paintings in Charles Morse's Piazza d'Italia conceived the architect wrote as a surprise plaza in the mode of the urban Mediterranean where pedestrians proceed unaware along a narrow passenger alley only suddenly to emerge into the sunlight as Dikiriko into the Piazza Santa Croce and the mysterious cabins endured in the works of Aldo Rossi who is best known for his conviction that archetypal monuments like the cabins embody collective memory something entirely germane to Dikiriko's eternal return Rossi accordingly used the cabins as funerary chapels in his San Cataldo cemetery and spliced now with a coffee maker as the cupola of the Bonifantan Museum in the Netherlands which Rossi envisioned as a lost hole which we only recognize thanks to those fragments of our lives which are also fragments of art and of bygone days so um to end with post-modernism underlines the novelty of the Byzantine tradition at the barns both as a topic and in its repercussions we have approached Byzantine visual culture through the eyes of Grichenko and Dikiriko and through the 3d expression of art as experience in the barn's galleries a difficult hole our investigation has revealed that in this framework and please do note that emphasis the Byzantine tradition is a live wire and Giotto is unavoidable whether we like it or not most important though is the faith and aesthetic experience as philosophy in action and open to all to quote Mary Mullen one last time the foundation has sought to aid in the advancement of learning and original research but it is sought no less to strip of their technicalities the idea of the scholar and the specialist to humanize them and to bring them within the grasp of the plain man its eminent success in the past furnishes no small assurance of success in the future as to that future as it's unfolded so far we've seen that the barn staff Grichenko and Dikiriko anticipated each in their own way the democratizing of traditions characteristic of postmodernism postmodern works may consequently be an ideal revelation of the Byzantine the comedy of the piazza d'Italia and the tragedy of Ukraine we have come to appreciate at any rate the dangers of narrow idealism as opposed to open-ended experience and the failure of any single lens to account encompass retrospectively the totality of a tradition instead as the critic Manfredo Tafari noted in a quote that seems made for serial encounters with barn's ensembles each grasp at a tradition like the Byzantine can simply appropriate fragments of the broken up work the work will have something to say for each of these histories and the critical act every time we commit it every time you go into the galleries will consist of a recomposition of the fragments as we continue to make and remake ourselves in the world hopefully each time for the better thank you all so much thank you both that was so fascinating so much to think about we have time for some questions for people tuning in online you can type them into the chat and i will read them out loud but why don't we get started yes and i'm going to ask everybody to to be a little bit patient because we have to pass this microphone around otherwise people especially online won't be able to hear you so there's a question over here i'm supposed to throw it okay thank you that was absolutely brilliant uh i'm glad i came down here from boston to hear you um it um and i just wanted to simply comment on the um it was seemingly a passing remark but so incredibly profound that the um in a way the increasing abstraction of the curico was directly tied to the um national sovi uh socialists uh striving actually loving of course his rotations of the antique which of course was the great ideal and so rather than keep that fodder going as a a point that could denigrate than any artist who did anything different he deliberately then it changed his style to keep the same concepts but to remove those visual quick links to oh oh i know that i was on the roman former and that's exactly the way it should be so wonderful that i mean there's so much in what you said that one could really expand a great deal thank you oh yeah thank thank you so much um i i think that's a wonderful point um to curico definitely thought that the fascist appropriation of classical visual culture was very crude and if you guys go into room 14 you'll see a couple of um gladiator paintings by to curico that look like they're drained of blood um that was something that was totally to that point it was a criticism of um of muslinia's approach so yeah thank you so much for that comment in terms of the volume of the bizantine collection that's here at the barns like in the context of other collections like how significant is it compared to other aspects that are here that's a great question so the amount of bizantine objects here at the barns is is very small very very small when you compare it to um a collection like the metropolitan museum of art in new york where you've got whole a whole kind of wing that is dedicated to bizantium or any other kind of giant museum but i think it's interesting that here at the barns barns himself felt that it was an essential part of the traditions and that he wanted to include it in the we kind of call it the march through the traditions um those of you who are in my traditions class i see a couple of y'all in here um that it's an essential essential stop along the way from the ancient world all the way up to modernism yeah and um to dovetail what kailyn noted i think if you count the bizantine works of art as bizantine inspire and bizantine inspired ones the collection is massive yeah yeah yeah if you yeah everything is bizantine as my students know or everything is medieval to be fair not so much a question but just kind of a comment the things that there were there were just a couple really kind of revelatory moments that for me during your your talks um the mosaic um as the foundation of of modern painting now i'm going to see everything as a mosaic um but that yeah including the sarah the pros and cons of course um but um the was it the grichenko the the pentanasa church painting yes you didn't say it but maybe it was we were all supposed to it was we were all supposed to see it i mean so mosaic like just a patchwork of of color i think it was worth the trouble with the nuns yeah um but the other thing which i kept you know i first started thinking about when you um when you showed the Picasso and talked about an icon as i guess it was grichenko's writings about um an icon as something that is supposed to sort of reveal the presentness of the thing and how Picasso was really sort of letting you see the inside of the guitar and so it was sort of bizantine in that way and so i started thinking about what you're not seeing and which is obviously it's such a theme in de curicot's work right the curtains there's always something that you have a you're seeing so clearly in his works the crispness but there's also something always hidden um and when you read that quote in me about hadn't hadn't ever connected that to the bizantine theory until you read that quote in the greek church is hidden something one is not supposed to see fascinating and then when you showed the the painting of de curicot's painting of new york city it's like you can tell that he's looking at that cluster of buildings and there's so much in that cluster of buildings that you can't see just the way he's painted it they're all kind of together as one sort of dark mysterious mass um anyway i just i loved your talk thank you um any other questions comments um there are a couple things um online but why don't you go first just a quick question i think i heard um when you were talking about icon and with movement and could you explain that a little bit um i've seen lots of i i lived in russia twice so it's um but i don't understand what you're talking about with the movement because i oh yeah thank you so much for for that point um so with an icon um if often if you're going to be praying to it or viewing it in a church there's going to be a candle set up in front of it and it's got the gold and it's the candlelight kind of flickers it creates a sense of animation and it seems to an extent with the way that grichenko kind of scumbles his brushwork and shakes up the planes a bit it looks like he's almost trying to create that effect of an icon um maybe maybe you'd agree maybe not as well Joan DeWalt how rich your talks are i learned so much from you both do you recommend any books for the reading on this oh my god there's so many books actually just got a question from one of my students um i think in terms of oh god i don't even know where to start so there's an edited volume called Byzantium sorry Roland Bettencourt i'm butchering your title yeah Byzantium slash modernism i think is a really great book to think about um there are also some really wonderful catalogs that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has put out on Byzantine art that i think are extremely accessible and also very richly illustrated and also available as PDFs for free online if you go to their website um so i would i would look through them the Metz website yeah i i think so those are wonderful suggestions um Roland Bettencourt's 2015 volume Byzantium slash modernism um the Met Museum's um suggestions i think i i also wanted to note that the de Kiriko Foundation has published a whole bunch of stuff on their website where you can also access for free um apropos to what Martha just mentioned a couple of minutes ago there are a lot of his own articles like um a 1938 one called the Metaphysics of New York where he gets into his experience with the skyscrapers um but if um if you want to get in touch with either of us we'll give you a bibliography um happily so um so yeah feel free to do to do that and i'll also just plug um on the barns website Amy and i have written um a couple of kind of short form essays about paintings de Kiriko paintings and Grishenko paintings so um and those have readings associated with them too and and footnotes yeah they're gonna be teaching this summer right in July on the Byzantine tradition yeah so Amy and i will be doing a workshop on the Byzantine tradition i also will be teaching a class on the mosaics of Ravenna um next month i think it's next month so hope to see you guys we hope to see you all well i think we should wrap up unless there's maybe we have one more great so my question is um about how like with like the barns foundation's collections it doesn't seem to shy away from like the so-called minor arts of like having like those pictures of everyday life um and something that you kind of approached with um like Byzantine influences was like textiles like as like one of those like so called minor arts and i'm curious like how you see that play out with like um modernism and like how it's inspired by them like textiles like as a very rich corpus of Byzantine material yeah um so i mean modern artists are looking at all kinds of things and when you walk through the collection here at the barns it's sort of a full display of these are the things that modern artists like Matisse would have been thinking about or looking at and textiles absolutely being one of them um in in a couple of those barns books barns very specifically places Matisse paintings next to early Byzantine textiles from Egypt um so he he's making that very clear distinction and Matisse also had a very his own that's like another talk um his own very close connection to the development of Byzantine studies and so he owned metal work he owned like little coins and stuff that he was thinking about so yeah hope that answers your question