 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barn's Takeout. My name's Amy Gillette. Today we're going to be talking about this painting created by William Glackens about the year 1914. It's called Landscape Factories. So what we're seeing is an American town or city. We've got a river starting in the left hand corner going out to the right of the canvas. We have pretty much right in the center this little brown colored bluff with this tree growing out of it with its branches kind of covered lightly in these fluffy like reddish purple leaves. Over here we've got apparently a steam a steam powered factory building shaped like a basilica. That means it's got a higher central vessel lit by these windows and then the sides are a little bit lower maybe some warehouses along the river. A couple of chimney smokestacks over here. On this hill it looks actually very cozy to me. We've got a number of what seem to be white timber framed houses kind of fading into the distance with this purple hill over here and then up on this hill we've got more brick buildings with with their chimneys and a water tower in the sky that's blue at the top with what three puffy white clouds and then these very these sweeping lilac colored strokes suggesting that maybe it's moving toward twilight. And let's look quickly at where it is. It's here in room above the door in room number 22. We can see it up here between a couple of keyhole discussions. It's a room that's very interesting. It has this wonderful iron steeplecock from France. A lot of sculpture from West Africa kind of centered around this carving of a wife and her husband by the Dogon people in what's the modern nation of Mali. Paintings by Paul Clay by Giorgio D'Aquerico by the Italian painter Afro and his brother Mirko. And then further sculptures from New Mexico paintings by Henri Matisse. More sculpture from West Africa and so it's a room that has a lot in it and toward the end of this talk we'll look at some ways where we might be able to interpret these works together. But moving on to the artist William Glackens over here. Here he is on the right hand side of our screen sitting on a big log with his very good friend Albert Barnes used over here with his cap looking ahead very intently. These two were friends when they were at Central High School in Philadelphia together in the late 1800s and they lost touch a bit as Barnes went into pharmaceuticals Glackens pursued painting here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and later from 1896 in New York City where he was one of the group of the American avant-garde artists called the eight. But the two friends reconnected around 1910 after both had established themselves in their respective careers. And one of the things that changed the course of both of their lives really is when Glackens had painted this painting right here between 1907 and 1910 entitled The Race Track and it's installed in room number 12 here at the Barnes next to Glackens' slightly earlier self-portrait which was more typical in its palates kind of these brown tones, realist tones of what American painting had been. But Glackens painted this one, The Race Track on the tails of having gone with his wife over to Paris and really delving in to the art of Henri Matisse who was in his fourth period of the great colorist Renoir and applied those lessons and traditions now to American paintings. And when Barnes saw this picture he was fascinated he didn't understand it because what Glackens is showing here and in paintings like our factory is not necessarily physical reality as light bounces off objects and hits our retinas. But colors of perception and Barnes said that Glackens taught him to see as an artist. Like Barnes even wrote in a letter around 1915 so again as Glackens is painting the factory that the two of them had been looking at water and he Barnes himself saw maybe basically blueish grayish green and Glackens he said saw the entire spectrum of the rainbow. And so it was Glackens that inspired Barnes to start collecting modern art and what the effect was there let's go back now to look at 22 was Barnes ended up thinking that he wanted he wanted to create a school where he collected modern art and he had modern modern and old art to teach people to see how an artist sees and he thought there were two really important ingredients to that. First was the way that an artist would be able to leverage the traditions of the past whether that was say the western medieval Renaissance past the recent French past past traditions from other cultures such as Africa or Islamic arts or arts from East Asia but also for the artist to be able to put his own or her own experiences into whatever work of painting or architecture or sculpture or design work that they may be creating. And so you know I think if we look at this work of of Glackens we actually I see that it's discoursing it shows architecture and it's discoursing with things that would have come from architecture like these hinges like the steeplecock it even relates to an extent with churches I think in as much as here for a sec we mentioned that the factory over here the factory building is shaped like a basilica and the steeplecock probably would have rested atop a similarly perched building maybe we can have kind of a discourse between like hand design and industrial craft as we may be seeing produced in factories so thinking about the filters that Glackens himself would be bringing to his work I think it's in the spectrum of colors we see bringing to the sky with its blues its whites its pinks its lilacs even if we look a little bit closer into the brushwork of of this hills almost rainbow of color I think the the tilt where everything looks a little bit windswept is coming from his personal experience of the nature of the site but there are a couple other things to that I'm a little bit curious about in this painting where we looked at the beginning of the talk at these trees how their wispy kind of burnt red leaves look like it might be maybe late fall or the beginning of spring but then I'm um I'm looking at these behind the factories missing to be trees that are fully leafed out and likewise if we look at these buildings over here they do seem to be what would look like steam or water powered factories but perched on top of the hilltop which I don't believe happens and so maybe a decent amount of the scene is coming from Glackens perception and I think in spite of that because of that it's something that Dr. Barnes would applaud and so if you're interested in this painting and other paintings within the American landscape tradition I'd encourage you to check out a painting that's online at the Barnes dedicated to the subject that'll happen in July and regardless thank you so much for watching today and it's always a pleasure that's it for today's Barnes takeout I'm Tom Collins new Bauer 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 thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation