 And welcome to today's edition of Barns Takeout, your daily serving of art from the Barns Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education, and today I'm taking us to Gallery 16. We're on the second floor, and we're facing east, and this is one of the galleries that is full of stuff. I did an earlier takeout on Marsden Hartley's movement here, movement Bermuda from 1916. But on this wall, we can see just an abundance of things to look at and an incredible variety of traditions that are drawn from. The wall centers on a panel by the American artist and carver Charles Prendergast, the Hartleys surround that. And then below we have works from Persia, illuminated manuscripts from France and England, works from China and Korea. But the painting I've selected for us to consider today is all the way over on the left hand corner, up here in the corner, and it's a work by the artist Alfred Moore. It's called Hills, and it was painted around 1908. Moore was an artist who spent American artists who spent considerable amount of time in Europe. Traveling first at the very end of the 19th century and staying until the beginning of the First World War, which meant that, and he spent most of his time while he was there in France and in Paris, which meant that he was present as some of the sort of monumental movements of modern art were emerging and they were influencing him. And chief among them and having a strong influence on Moore in these early years was the movement titled Fovism. It was a group of artists that congregated around Henri Matisse. And the title Fovism was not one they chose themselves, but was one that was foisted upon them, meaning wild beasts, because when these artists first showed these works, the critics were shocked by them and considered the artists that created them something akin to wild beasts, or that the art themselves, these pictures hung amongst very staid and academic paintings, very conventional paintings. The paintings themselves seemed like beasts among the tamed and civilized paintings. Mar adapted himself to the fove technique and palette, and for many years really explored its possibilities. He is considered the first American artist to really adapt fovism and to introduce fovism to an American audience through exhibiting these works in the United States. And so what is it about this work that garnered the term fovism, the wild beasts? I think just looking at it, even today we can get a sense of how the color was quite shocking. The fovists dispensed with naturalistic colors, what we would call local colors, colors that replicate the colors of nature, trying to evoke the visual sensation of things as they actually are. And instead, tried to, rather than looking outwards, looked inwards to themselves and tried to paint by way of color, their reaction to a subject. And landscapes were a big part of this. And what that meant was that rather than using the colors that they may have actually seen in that landscape, they searched for a palette and for colors that would convey their subjective, emotional, and sensual response to that landscape. And we see that, we see that at work here, that we have a foreground that's dominated by these strongly contrasting pinks and lavenders and this greenish-yellow patch. The way that those two colors sort of communicate with each other is quite startling. And then we have these jagged lines that perhaps were brush or a bush or it's not entirely clear what it was, but rather than being the things themselves, more distills them down to their shapes, similarly to the path, to the hedgerow just beyond, and then to the trees and hills that give the picture its name. The titles of these were not really intended to suggest a narrative, but were rather just to sort of identify it. And what is Mara focusing on? Well, he's focusing on colors and color relationships to each other, as I suggested, with the pink and violet against the green, or the yellow, the yellow tree here, set against a backdrop of this rich blue and then green, or this green against blue and then with this cap of yellow and then red. And it's things like this, this line of red that comes up, perhaps a distant hill, that crests that hill, and we see that similar color used over here, that was quite surprising. That is that they're calling out colors that are evocative rather than descriptive. Another thing is that Mara was largely uninterested or didn't really focus so much on literal spatial relationships that is using elements of linear perspective, for instance, but rather allowed the overlapping of color areas and color shapes to suggest a receding space, more like planes of color stacked on top of each other. Volume, dimensionality of the things themselves, the trees, for instance, or even the hills, are not modeled in conventional ways in terms of values, light to dark, but rather are modeled in terms of colors. So again, the crest of the hill and the red and then the yellow and then the green, it suggests some sort of rise to that hill, again without literally reproducing it. Things are simplified to geometric shapes. I mentioned the lines here in the foreground, the curving shape of what was a path, the jagged lines that define that, or the hedgerows, or the hills themselves, all of them into these sort of basic shapes of lines, of circular shapes, of crescent shapes. Again, suggesting the subject rather than strictly illustrating it. And another thing that these artists were interested in doing was making reference to the act of painting itself. So brushstrokes are very loose and open. You can see the way that these blue areas, actually much of the picture, has a textural quality due to the bristles of the brush scraping through the paint. The paint is applied quite lightly, which allows the ground, so this white that we see here is not painted on, but rather is the surface of the panel on which the picture is painted coming through. So learning from the impressionists to use that to brighten and lighten their palette, the folks did that even more so, large areas of the ground exposed. And where the colors applied, it's often applied thinly, which allows the whiteness of that ground to come through, further brightening and lightening the overall quality of the picture. And all but absent, only sort of minorly suggested are shadows, but instead everything is flooded with this bright, brilliant glowing light, light conveyed through color. Essentially what we're looking at while we can still recognize the sort of essence of a subject of a landscape, what we're experiencing is the interrelationship and interaction of colors and shapes and lines, suggesting qualities of space and luminosity or light. But it's really about the experience of looking at a picture, and that's the other thing that the folks were interested in conveying to the viewer, that it's not the illusion of looking through a window out onto a natural landscape, but instead calling attention to the very physicality, the materiality of a painting itself, that one can enjoy the interaction of colors and lines and shapes just as much or perhaps even more so than the recognition of looking at a naturalistic landscape. Ultimately what the foes did was they showed us our world, our familiar world in a way we common everyday people don't or perhaps can't see it. The artist's eyes are attuned to colors that most of us can't see, colors that they will insist are there, or at least that they see and they sense. But in their paintings we're able to experience something of that artistic vision of seeing the world in these bright, vivid, bold colors forming these simplified, distilled shapes. And really being incredibly evocative of the artist's sensation. Mar had a very close relationship with Dr. Barnes in a pivotal time as the collection was being begun to be assembled in the early teens. And Barnes was a strong advocate of Alfred Moore going so far as to finance a one man show of his work in New York. So when you come back to the Barnes, this is perhaps a picture that you may overlook and I'll point out also that there's another picture by Moore here. And just to make the connection with Moore, the foes and Henri Matisse, Barnes hung a work by Matisse over the door as a reference. And there I should say that there are more Matisse's in the adjoining galleries. So the memory of Matisse resonates throughout these several galleries. But when you come back, take an opportunity to spend some time looking at this important American artist. There's still more than 10 works of Moore that remain in the collection, not all of them on permanent display, but many of them on permanent display. And as I said, I hope you'll take advantage of looking at them the next time you come or explore them on our website. Be sure to leave comments if you have any reflections or observations about any of our takeouts. We always love to hear from those of you that are tuning into us and join us again for our next installment of Barnes Takeout. Thank you. Take care. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.