 Hello, I'm Nancy Eisen. Welcome to Barn's Takeout. I'm the Gun Family Chief Curator and Happy New Year. If this is the start of your new year, January 1st, everything is off to a fresh start. I'd like to share with you today a picture that I think is wonderfully uplifting. In many places it's a cold time of year and this is a wonderful Mediterranean landscape that was made by Amadeo Modigliani the Italian artist in 1919 in the south of France and perhaps this is the year where we get to travel again who knows. Now we're in room 19 of the Barn's Foundation so that's one of the rooms upstairs and we're looking to the right hand side of the doorway that you see sort of just off-center in the room and I'm just going to focus in so you can see exactly where I'm in. Here we are, it's a wonderful little scene just nestled in between a suitine and a matis and as you can see has this really wonderful warm palette to it. Let's look at the work more closely. Now you might be surprised if you've come across any of Modigliani's works to know that this is one of the pieces by him. He only made four landscapes in his career so we feel very fortunate at the Barn's Foundation that we have one and it shows cypresses and houses in Ken so even the title there lets us know that we're in the south of France. Now ordinarily Modigliani lived and worked in Paris like so many young artists he was attracted to the city he had left his native Italy to make a life in Paris and there he had become part of a thriving artistic community. But during the First World War life became quite tough for artists. Modigliani had health issues and he couldn't enlist so he carried on working as a as an artist while other young men went to the front. However he still managed to have a reasonably good existence in Paris in the First World War. He had his first solo exhibition during that time but he had health troubles as I mentioned and those were not improving during this period. What's more in the last months of the First World War Paris was bombed. German bombing began on the outskirts of the city in the early part of 1918 and so there was a quite understandably great fear for people's well-being. On top of all of this Modigliani had a drink problem that was getting quite out of control and so his dealer, his art dealer Leopold Zabrowski persuaded him along with a doctor that it would be the best thing for his health and his safety indeed to go to the south of France. And in order to persuade him to do this he encouraged Modigliani to travel with a friend of his, the painter Soutine, and also with his girlfriend Jean-Ébutin. Jean took her mother for the sake of propriety. You know it was not really the dumb thing for a young woman to go off traveling with a boyfriend in the early 20th century but Jean at this time was already expecting Modigliani's child so propriety is one thing but perhaps they're a little late to that. Nonetheless despite all the trepidation Modigliani set off for the south of France in the spring of 1918 and seemingly settled there quite nicely. At first he writes back to his dealer and I've got a little citation from a letter. All these changes, changes of circumstance and change of season make for me, make me fear a change of rhythm and atmosphere so we get a sense that he was worried about this and yet quite quickly he finds a new community in the south of France and starts to experiment. Now what can we say about this landscape? If we look up the way it's painted you can see that really it's quite thin and this is something that's quite distinctive of Modigliani. You see little bits of unpainted ground just around the outlines of the eye of the object so here we have the there's a little sort of white halo around the tree. You can see on the top of the roof that he has seemingly sketched in those little architectural details in blue paint and then filled them quite hastily and again in the colors of the wall we see those little specks of white. I quite like to this way that the look you see that blue outlining here on the barks of the trees there. Now Modigliani and Soutine lived separately from most of the the people that they traveled with. You know Jeanne Boutaine and her mother lived in a guest house, Zabrowski and his partner lived in a guest house and also they traveled with a Japanese painter Fujita and his wife and they they may have traveled together in fact or or they may have just met up when they got to Nice but Soutine and Modigliani stayed in a farmhouse and some of the landscapes actually show that so this really is is typical of the kind of rustic buildings that you see in the works that Modigliani makes of these landscapes and interestingly he decides not to use a landscape format. Instead this landscape is vertical. Now we know that Modigliani used vertical canvases to paint portraits that that seems more logical but my colleague Simonetta Frequelli who's an art historian and works a lot on Modigliani has suggested that maybe he he created this high format to give the sense of hills. The landscape in the south of France is very rocky and you know has lots of changes in altitude and most of the views in fact all the views that Modigliani paints are from Utdiken so looking down the hillside this is much more immediate than some of them. A lot of the landscapes that he makes give you more of a sense of of the surrounding area whereas here the focus is very much on the buildings and what are the coloration and again just focus in on this lovely rich yellow you can just sort of sense the warmth in this palette. I love the way that you get this sort of golden highlight over the white ground it's almost dazzling in its brightness and then just these little flecks of orange as if to describe fruit entrees all very hastily done. Now the south of France for many artists of Modigliani's generation was synonymous with Cezanne. Cezanne had passed in Exxon Provence in 1906 but his memory was still very strong and I think that this was an opportunity for Modigliani to experiment with those kind of colors and to reconnect with the idea of being a Mediterranean painter. He had the Italian heritage the south of France I think in that way seemed quite an obvious location for him to be in and he actually stayed until May 1919 in the south of France so this canvas is dated 1919 and we know that it's likely from that moment because in a letter it was probably made at the beginning of that year. Modigliani tells his art dealer Leopold Zabrowski that he's making these pictures you know he says that the first one might be a bit childish but generally speaking they're all right here you know to paraphrase. What I would say is that the exercise was quite short-lived although Modigliani stayed and worked in the south of France he didn't make many landscapes just those four and when he returns to Paris yeah really the exercise is over but it's wonderful I think to have this little glimpse of an artist working in sandy climbs and really I think you know on a on a cold day it might get us all thinking about where we might head to next. Well thanks very much for listening and see you soon on Barn's Takeout. Bye bye. I'm Tom Collins new Bauer family executive director of the Barns Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barns 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 Barns Foundation