 Everyone, welcome to another edition of Barns Takeout. My name is Kaelin Jewel, senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to spend some time talking about a painting that is on display in gallery number three, which we can see on the screen in front of us. This is a gallery that my colleague, Amy Gillette, has already discussed when she was looking at this 1890s painting on the right-hand side of the ensemble by the artist, Pugli di Siobhan. But the picture I wanted to talk about is on the left-hand side of the ensemble. It was painted in 1934, let's zoom in a little bit, by the American artist, Milton Avery. It is simply titled The Nursemaid. Let's look at it more closely. Here it is. So again, painted in 1934, titled The Nursemaid by the American artist, Milton Avery. And let's zoom in down on the bottom so that we can see the artist's signature. You should be able to see it right here in the lower right corner of the picture. So this is a painting that has been very confusing for generations of students who have come through classes at the Barnes Foundation. We've got this really great series of sort of journal articles or more like diary entries by a man named Paul Mackler who owned a gallery in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square neighborhood back in the 1960s and 1970s. And in some of his sort of memoirs of his life in the Philadelphia art world, he talks about his experience being a student at the Barnes Foundation in the 1950s. And this painting in particular being a sort of point of confusion for him. I have witnessed many people walking into gallery number three being sort of overwhelmed by a lot of the old master paintings that are on display in the room, including there's a really wonderful Titian that my colleague Robin Creran has discussed with us on takeout. And there's this one, which always seems to feel out of place in terms of the artist is American, the time period is the 1930s and the subject matter. We see three people on a beach and it's painted in a very, you could say a simple style. And this style is very characteristic of the artist Milton Avery. If we look closely at it, what we notice is that Milton Avery has utilized thin washes of paint for portions of the canvas. So here you can see that we've got these really wonderful vertical brush strokes, but you can see almost through them and you can see the canvas just below the surface of the paint. Whereas juxtaposed with that on the other side is the white garment worn by this nursemaid and the garment itself is opaque to the point that you almost can't even see the weave of the canvas down below. But then if we look at her hands, notice that her hands are displaying that texture of the canvas. You see the texture of the canvas in the blue of the sea and also of this little doll like child. So the subject matter here is, again, one of those curiosities for many people visiting the barns. There's a really interesting story that when Dr. Barnes purchased this painting in 1934, maybe in 1935, he purchased it directly from the artist when it was on display at a gallery in New York. And it was part of Milton Avery's first one-man show in New York. And there is an anecdotal story that has been passed down through the ages of Barnes traditions that Dr. Barnes purchased this painting because it wasn't on display at the gallery. And the story goes that the painting was not on display because the gallery owner was worried that the subject matter of two African-American women and a young Caucasian girl would not have been palatable to people searching out new works of art to purchase. And so according to the story, Dr. Barnes was furious about this and he said he will buy the painting on the spot and demand that the purchase price be directly given to the artist himself. We don't know if this is true. We do know that Dr. Barnes was a very connected member of American society who was interested in furthering civil rights for African-Americans. So it's possible that this is something that compelled Dr. Barnes to want to purchase this painting. But what we see here is an image that, despite its subject matter, is really about color. And it's related to Milton Avery's other paintings that he paints throughout his career. So let's look at one. I'm gonna show you a few that are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This one was painted earlier in 1929. It's simply called Steeple Chase and it's an image of Coney Island in New York. You can see that there are people hanging out on the beach with the Coney Island boardwalk and rides in the background. There are pictures from the 1940s. This is 1945. It's simply called Swimmers and Sunbathers, also at the Met. You can see this interest that Milton Avery has in color and also Bathers by the Sea. The Sea also takes on an interest for him in terms of landscape painting. So this is called Green Sea from 1954. And then we have this one, which is from 1959 called Speed Boat's Wake. And we can see a speedboat right here and the wake left behind it. And I wanted to show these to you to give you a sense of the kind of paintings that people know really associate Milton Avery with. Our picture at the Barnes Foundation and it's the only Milton Avery that we have at the Barnes is a turning point painting. It's a painting where we are seeing the artist, Milton Avery, turning from more representational style pictures into paintings that are more simplified. They have been distilled down into their essential colors, their essential forms. And they almost have sort of jigsaw-like quality to them. And we can see that in the way that he has utilized color the way that he has applied color in large blocks onto the canvas. And if we look at, let's look at the top here, we'll look in the background. If we look in the background, you can see the way that Milton Avery has almost stumbled or sort of pushed the thin paint, the thin greenish-yellowish paint onto the surface of the canvas, sort of in a circular motion or some short brush strokes. And that soft almost scumbled light quality is something that we see in another artist that is very well-known named Mark Rothko, who is not represented in the Barnes Foundation's collection. This is a painting that you see on the screen that's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's called Simply Number Three from 1953, so painted well after our nursemaid picture. But one of the defining characteristics of Mark Rothko's later what we would call color field paintings is that soft, those soft kind of diaphanous edges of his paintings, almost a stain-like quality that is on the surface or into the surface of the canvas. Not like what we see in many portions of this picture, of three women on the beach. And I'll sort of wrap up by noting that with respect to the subject matter and with all of Milton Avery's subjects, we know that he was interested in only painting from life. And there is a watercolor sketch that we have of this picture. And it demonstrates a sort of spontaneity in terms of capturing the scene. So he was very adamant that although his paintings become progressively more simplified and distilled down into their basic elements, as he moves forward in his career, pushing into the 1950s and then into the 1960s, and he ended up passing away in 1965, we know that Milton was not only interested in distilling these forms down into their basic elemental components of color and of shape, but he was also deeply inspirational for artists specifically like Mark Rothko. And we know that Mark Rothko would go and visit Milton Avery and his wife Sally in the 1930s and 40s and 50s. And when Mark Rothko passed away in 1965, or when, excuse me, when Milton Avery passed away in 1965, we know that Mark Rothko delivered the eulogy at his funeral. So it was a very close relationship that the two artists had. So when you're walking through the galleries at the barns and you come across this curious 1934 painting by Milton Avery, and you wonder, well, why is this in this room? We can see the color palette of the blues, the cool colors are related to the cool colors that we see in the Poubet de Chavant. We also have this kind of arch-like quality of the composition of the figures in the Avery painting, not unrelated to the archway that we see in Poubet de Chavant. So there are many kind of formal similarities or connections that we can make when we look at Milton Avery. But one of the things that I hope you consider when you look at this painting in person is it's sort of inspiration that it provided for future generations of artists that are not on display at the barns like Mark Rothko. So thank you for joining us today. I hope that you spend some time looking at this really remarkable painting in Gallery 3. Thanks, take care. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. 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