 Hey everybody and welcome to Barn's Takeout. My name is Martha Lucy and I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barns. And today we're going to be looking at a painting by Henri Matisse called Studio with Goldfish. And I want to show you where it hangs in the barn's collection. There it is in room 19, which is upstairs. And you can see how big this painting is compared to everything that surrounds it. Matisse made this in the spring of 1912, right after he got back from his first trip to Morocco. And so what are we seeing here? This is his studio. He was living at the time in a suburb of Paris called Issy Le Moulinot. And he had a villa there. And there was a garden next to the, that was part of the villa. And in the garden was a studio where he worked. And so that's what we're looking at here. And you can see this is an open door to the outside. And that is just a little glimpse of the garden there. I'll just give you a little tour of the studio. So over here you see his easel. Behind that, this thing here, this yellowish thing is a screen that a model would have gotten changed behind before posing or after posing. And there's a robe for the model hanging over it. There are paintings on the wall that are Matisse's own paintings. And he frequently did this. He included his own work in his paintings over and over again. On the table are several objects that he would have used probably when painting a still life. So some flowers and a bowl with goldfish. And this, which is also a work by Matisse, something he had made about six years earlier. It was a bronze sculpture that he made in 1906. So something that's interesting to think about when you're looking at paintings by Matisse where he's including works that he had already made is the way that he transforms those works when he kind of repaints them. And it's especially striking with the sculpture because the bronze is, the bronze sculpture is bronze in color. And here he sort of does away with that and paints the sculpture in this kind of pinkish tone. And he also does all of these kind of abstractions to the figure, to the figure's limbs. And I'll show you a close-up of this in a minute. But you can see how he kind of obliterates the feet here. In the actual sculpture, those feet are perfectly present. And he also, he does the same to the hand over here. So this was, there was a long tradition of artists painting their own studio. A lot of times an artist would include himself or herself in the painting of the studio. Matisse has not done that, but his presence is obviously still very much felt here, especially through his inclusion of his own works. Now there's a lot going on in this painting. There's, first of all, a very interesting relationship between the objects, the objects that are tangible in the painting and the things in the painting that are intangible. And I'm talking about the space. So all of these things like the table, the easel, the paintings, even the view into the outside, these things are all kind of lit up and easy to see and sort of well defined, well articulated. But the rest of the space is filled in with this bluish black, just kind of suffused, saturated with this one color that runs everywhere. And it has the effect of kind of, it's almost like it just kind of submerges everything that's within it into this continuous space so that it becomes hard to differentiate floor from wall. It just looks continuous. I mean, you can, right? You can sort of see a line there and you can imagine that this is where the floor and the well meet. Matisse is showing you his studio here. This is where it all happens. He is showing you something of his life, how his art gets made, but he's doing a lot more than that. And this is where I think this painting gets super interesting. He is posing, I think, a sort of philosophical question in this painting and he does it in others from the time as well. And that question is, what is the relationship between artifice and reality? And I think that he plays with this question and kind of asks it in several ways. And he makes reality and artifice hard to distinguish from one another. And let me show you what I mean. First of all, I think the most striking example of this happens up here, where you've got this long rectangle and the painting hanging above it. Now, this long rectangle is meant to represent the view to the outside. But here, it really reads more like a painting. Like you look at it and think, I mean, you might, when you first look at this painting, think that it's two paintings kind of hanging one on top of it, you know, a long vertical painting here. And he, you know, he really, I think the reason that it reads that way is, first of all, it has the same dimensions as the painting hanging above it. It's sort of lit up the same way that the painting hanging above it is lit up. But also, there's no, if there's not that light that kind of pours into the room, and that lights up sort of, you know, the floor around it the way that you would expect if this were a view to the outside. There's also, you know, in this, in this kind of play between reality and artifice, it happens here as well with this. You've got cut flowers. So a sort of example, you know, these are real flowers, but there's artifice in the fact that they are now cut and put into a vase versus the sort of real nature outside. And then you've also got the play between the woman who is not present here, the model, but she is alluded to through this robe. So the actual model and the painting of a model or the sculpture of a model. So he does this over and over again. The goldfish theme is something that Matisse becomes really interested in around this time. He paints goldfish over and over again. And, you know, I think on the one hand, it allowed him to do interesting things with color. You know, you can tell that he is loving the orange against the blue here. But more than that, he had become interested in goldfish when he went to Morocco because he had seen that goldfish were something of like a kind of object of contemplation in that culture. And so he includes them over and over in his paintings going forward after 1912. There are, so that's one of the kind of traces of Morocco in this work. Another one is up here. This is a, it's, we know specifically what this painting is. It's a portrait of a woman that he painted while he was in Morocco. And then there's also just the general contrast between light and dark. You can kind of imagine how that's something that he sort of visually took away from Morocco. Now, I love looking, zooming in on these paintings and looking closely and to see that when you get up from a distance, these, the space, that bluish blackish space looks very, it looks kind of flat. But when you get up close, you see that there's actually a lot going on with the brushwork. It has a certain kind of texture to it almost. And then going over here to the still life, just look more closely at what he does to the figure here and how kind of messy the paint is and how he's just really just kind of working this area of the painting and kind of, you know, just, just dragging that, that cream colored paint like over the shape of the feet and kind of just, just obliterating it. And then over here, you know, same with the arm, then over here you have these really interesting moments where he, he paints the rim of this dish here, but then the blue from the fishbowl kind of gets in between there. So it doesn't really make sense. And he does these things on purpose, you know, that there are these kind of deliberate ambiguities or things that don't quite make sense. And he's playing. Another thing that strikes me as a sort of play is, is this here, this blue, this slice of blue, what is that, that blue triangle? Maybe it is meant to, as to sort of represent light that's coming in. Because in the sculpture, there was a space here between the body and the base. So light would have been coming through here. And maybe he's just representing that light by a block of blue. And then finally, over here, looking closely at the fish, I like to look at it and see the way you can see something about the way that he painted. So what I mean is that it looks like he painted the fish first, and then surrounded them with the blue. You can see that the blue strokes go over the orange strokes here, here, here, except for in this area. It looks like he painted the fish filled in the blue around it. See, see what I mean. And then, but then decided he wanted to make this tail, you know, give it more of a tail. And so then painted that something that many people have observed about this painting. Another sort of interesting, I don't know, sort of conceptual thing about it is the combination of objects on the table. Because what you have here are the traditional elements of the traditional subject of the nude in a landscape, the nude in a landscape painting, which was a which was a subject that Matisse himself painted, especially like in his famous Le Bonheur de Vives, which was at the Barnes. So you've got the nude, you've got this kind of representing, you know, standing in for the landscape. And then you've got fish that kind of also and water that represent, you know, water that might have been in one of these landscapes. So many of them were bathing scenes. So in a way, he's kind of making this here into a painting. And even the way that this figure is facing out towards us, it's like she is she is participating in this paint in in the in this painting at this moment. And the fact that they're all kind of bounded by this square table, which has the shape of a canvas now, possibly I'm over reading it. But these are the things that I like to think about. So that wraps up our Barnes Takeout for today. Subscribe to our channel so that you can get more daily servings of art. And please feel free to leave a comment. We love hearing from you. And thanks very much for watching. Bye bye.