 Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Perthes, the Benartzi Watson Director of Adult Education at the Barnes Foundation, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of Barnes Takeout, your daily dose of art coming to you from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The work I've chosen to talk about today is this picture by William Glackens called Racetrack. I'm going to show you this is where Racetrack is. You see it here in the center of the north wall of Gallery 12. If you joined me for my talk on Harris Pippin's Supper Time, it's on the wall just to the right here. You can see giving thanks and other of Pippin's pictures here. And here's that picture by Maurice Prendergast. I'll be going back to Prendergast shortly in a future takeout discussion. But this is the picture we're looking at today. So this painting was started in 1907 by William Glackens, but the dates that you'll see on it are 1908 to 1909. And the reason for that, those dates and the length of those dates is really an important aspect of the importance of this picture and the kind of transformation that this picture undertook. 1908 was a really pivotal year for William Glackens. William Glackens and Albert Barnes were classmates together at Central High School. So they knew each other from the time they were teens. They were close friends. They shared a love of baseball together at Central High. And after Barnes went out and made his fortune and began to have an interest or growing interest in art and not just any art, but modern art in particular, he reconnected with William Glackens, who by the early part of the 20th century had really built a reputation for being on the forefront of American painting. He was part of a group called the Eight Around the Painter Robert Henry at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts here in Philadelphia. And this is a group that evolved into being called the Ashkan Group. I'll probably talk about some of those artists a little in a future takeout. So 1908 rather, Glackens started intentionally to change the way that he was painting. If we go back to that gallery view, off to the right here is a self-portrait of William Glackens painted in 1908. And if you look at the palette, while there are some areas of bolder color, and it's a picture that's very much dominated by or characterized by aggressive paint applications, so you get a sense of the sort of texture and build up quality of the paint, what's called impasto. Very obvious brushwork, directional brush stroke. It gives a really strong texture to the picture. But the palette here is fairly subdued. And this is the palette that Glackens had been working on up until this point. And then in 1908, very much under the influence of the European impressionists and post-impressionists, Glackens changed his palette and started to use these bold and dynamic and dramatic colors and dramatic color contrasts. So we go back to the picture here. The contrast between this startling green grass, this hyperreal green grass, and the reds and yellows that make up the, quote, dirt of the racetrack, if we zoom in on them, you get a sense of that, again, that very aggressive, active brushwork and the high-key quality of the color. It's just luminous in and of itself. And in this detail, you see that areas where he's trying to indicate shadow, look at the colors that he's using. So he's not deadening or darkening the color, but instead he's infusing it with these reds and oranges so that it retains this incredible vibrancy. And if we go up into the, here's the crowd, and you'll see that the crowd is just indicated by these stabbing dabs of color, blues and reds. And if we go up into the canopy of that, look at the, almost the explosion of color that happens in what's, again, we're reading as the shadowed underside of this pavilion. Again, where he's picking up colors from elsewhere in the picture. So here's those reds and oranges, the blues of the crowd now all mixed together to create this sort of shadowed underside of the pavilion. So what Glackens was doing was he was drawing from the lessons of impressionism and post-impressionism, but doing it in his own way. He was taking, for instance, his love of the color of Auguste Renoir and making it even brighter, even what's called juicier. It has a sort of unctuous, oily, vibrant quality to it. And infusing that this new palette into his work and experimenting with the, again, very dynamic qualities that colors and color contrasts can create. And this work was really important for Albert Barnes as well, because it was in looking at this work that Barnes began to confront his understanding of what modern art was. It really challenged him to think very much sort of progressively about what art can and should be. And so this connection, both the close personal connection that he had with Glackens and then Glackens very much through his own artwork sort of demonstrating to Barnes what modern art of his time was and should be. And Barnes at this stage really being the student of Glackens, really learning from Glackens example as to what modern art was. And this comes to a head in 1912, in the spring of 1912, when Barnes gives Glackens a line of credit of $20,000 to go to Paris and to buy the best examples of modern painting that he can find. When Glackens does that, he meets up with his, the ex-patriot American painter, Alfred Maher, whose works we see here on either side of the north wall of 12. So Glackens with Maher, Salve Maher had been living in Paris for a while. They go around and they buy works by Cézanne and Renoir and Van Gogh, and these are the works that become the core of the Barnes Foundation collection. Many of them remain in the collection. If you tuned in very early in this series to Martha Lucy's talk of Van Gogh's The Postman, that picture was one of the pictures that Glackens purchased on that 1912 Buying Spree for Barnes. Interestingly enough, that was the last time that Barnes allowed anybody else to buy works for him. He would consult others, but he did the buying from there on out. And the work of William Glackens remained and actually grew in importance to the collection of the Barnes Foundation. Glackens is featured in two works in the main gallery, really pivotal works for the collection. And really, when Barnes and his colleague Violette de Maisie had published their monograph on Renoir, Barnes sent a signed copy to Glackens, crediting him with opening his eyes to Renoir, Renoir and artists that is really perhaps most identified with the Barnes Foundation collection. And it all began in this picture, or with this picture, by William Glackens, painted 1908, 1909. Its first title was Brighton Beach Racetrack, giving you an idea of where in New York it was painted now, simply called Racetrack. Again, a central work to understanding the Barnes Foundation collection and also what guided Barnes's collecting practices. So I hope this perhaps shows you a picture that you might not have looked at before. When you have an opportunity and come back to the Barnes Foundation, I will always direct your attention to Gallery 12, Gallery 12 being the American Room, and look for this picture by William Glackens. And I hope you'll join us again for another edition of Barnes Takeout still to come. Thank you.