 Hi everybody, welcome to another barns takeout. Your daily serving of art. My name is Kaylyn Jewel, senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to spend some time with you all in gallery number 23 up on the second floor. This is a gallery that I have spent time chatting with you guys about. When we looked at the two cute little bird sculptures that are on top of this American chest. So this guy right here and this guy right here made by an American artist named Tom mailing in the 1940s. But what I wanted to talk about today was the big picture that hangs up above it painted in the summer of 1916 by the French artist Henri Matisse. Before we dip into it though, let's do a quick little survey of the paintings and objects that are on display on this ensemble. And what's kind of cool about it is that this ensemble that we are looking at is relatively simple when we compare it to some of the other more expansive ensembles in the collection. So from left to right we've got a painting up above by an Austrian female painter from the 1940s of a couple of dancers across a stream. Down below we have an American painting also from the 1940s of a juggler. We've got our great ensemble in the middle with Matisse's still life with gourds in the center. American objects placed in sort of a still life fashion on top of this American chest over drawers. Up above the Matisse painting is a piece of a Conestoga wagon part from the 19th century. And then if we go over to the right side of this ensemble on the other side of these beautiful windows, we can see that we've got a couple of more paintings. So the painting down below is a small picture from the 1930s by an artist named Biagio Pinto who was very closely connected to the Barnes Foundation, very good friends of Dr. Barnes. And then up above what's called a Santo or a religious image that was made by an artist in New Mexico in the 1840s. And it's an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. So we've got this really cool smattering of objects from different time periods, different geographical locations and different subject matters, which is very much in keeping with Dr. Barnes' interest in having us look at and bring together objects that we might not normally see together in a kind of art collection. So let's zoom into our painting in the middle and spend some time looking at this Matisse picture. So here we go. As I mentioned, it was painted in the summer of 1916. It's called Still Life with Gourds. And it is a picture that was painted during an intense period of experimentation for the French artist Henri Matisse. There are a lot of Matisse pictures in the Barnes Foundation. Those of you who've been to the Barnes probably already know that there are 59 pictures in our collection by Matisse. And this is one of my personal favorites. One of the things I love about it are the colors and this kind of emphasis on the geometric organization of the picture, which seems to be a little bit at odds with what we think of, when we usually think of paintings by Henri Matisse. One of the most famous pictures that we have, probably arguably the most famous picture that we have by Henri Matisse in our collection at the Barnes is a picture called Bernard de Vieve, which we can see right here. I'm not gonna talk about it, but it is one of our most important pictures at Barnes Foundation. It was painted in 1905, 1906. And it was a painting that was deeply inspirational for other artists at the time, including a very famous artist named Pablo Picasso. And Picasso, when he saw this painting in 1906, he was so shook by it and so artistically kind of troubled by it and inspired by it that he ended up starting to create a new style of painting with a colleague of his, George Brock, called Cubism. So Bernard de Vieve was done in 1905, 1906. If we move forward into the future, into a painting that is also in gallery number 23, if we sort of turn around from our picture of still life with gourds. And it's this painting in the corner here. You can see the edge of this still life. Let's look at it more closely for just a minute. This was painted by honor Matisse in 1906,07. And so this is at a period when we know that Matisse and Picasso are sort of battling it out on the canvas. And they are trying to, in many cases, kind of outdo each other and push each other into new artistic territory. So we can see that Matisse here is using his bright color palette that we so closely associate with him, the kind of compression of space that we also love about Matisse, but also the kind of circulation of air that can kind of move around this compressed space. It's a little bit different than what Picasso was doing around the same time. So if we travel downstairs into gallery number 11 on the first floor and look at this painting above the Modigliani, it was painted by Pablo Picasso in 1914. And it's one of the kind of nice examples of Picasso's Cubist style that we have in the foundation. And it's a picture of some sheet music, a violin, and a bottle. It's hard to kind of pick that stuff out if we didn't know what the title was. We would be kind of confused as to what we're looking at. So I'm showing this to you to give you a little bit more context for why Matisse is wanting to engage with the Cubist style and the Cubist aesthetic that Picasso was so famous for kind of breaking into. So when we look at Still Life with Gord's, painted in 1916, we can see that there's sort of a, an aspect of a grid-like pattern that is formed by these vertical lines here. We've got sort of a window in the background. Perhaps it's two windows separated by a mullion or a piece of the wall. The room itself is a sort of slate gray color. We don't get a sense where the wall and the floor meet. There's no kind of line that's been painted here to give us a sense of that three-dimensional space. We've got a couple of tables here, maybe three tables, this pink tabletop here, this lighter gray tabletop here, and then this darker one kind of the skew in the sort of middle ground. We've got a sculpture on one of the tables. The sculpture is in profile. We've got a bouquet of flowers in sort of a clearish green, a sort of transparent green glass vase. And then we've got the namesake of the painting, the gourds here that are on this sort of very light gray dish. It's always nice to sort of zoom in and look at these aspects. And when we look at the composition as a whole, as I mentioned, there's a sense of a grid-like pattern here, which is sort of in keeping with that idea of cubism to an extent. So if we think about what cubism is, the basic sort of understanding of cubism is that it's artists who are interested in taking the three-dimensional world around them and rendering them on a two-dimensional surface. So taking the three-dimensional world of a still life, like we have in front of us, and then rendering it into two-dimensional planes on a two-dimensional surface, like a canvas. And so when that happens, you have a flattening of the picture plane. So no longer does the picture plane feel like it's moving back into space, but it has a sort of frontality to it as though aspects of the painting or images in the painting are starting to be pushed forward to the front of the picture plane. And we can see that here. We can see Matisse engaging with those strategies when we look at this tabletop in the foreground. Notice how the tabletop is tipped forward so that we can see what is on top of it. We're not looking at the side of the tabletop. We're looking at it tipped forward. The same is true for this pink tabletop in sort of, and where is that? Is that behind the tabletop? We were just looking at it in front of. That kind of confusion of space is another aspect of cubism. We know that Matisse himself when he is engaging in this period of experimentation was really interested in pushing himself beyond cubism. He found cubism to be sort of a frustrating point in his artistic career, something that he felt like he needed to almost conquer in a way. And it's with this painting Still Life with Gordes that he gets the sense that he's finally pushed past that cubist desire to restrict things, to restrict visual images to a kind of grid-like pattern. And so how is he doing that? When we look at this, notice how there are aspects of the painting where the color of an object and its black outline are no longer aligning with each other. We can see that most clearly in this portion of the painting here with the pink tabletop. We don't necessarily know exactly what it is that he's representing. Some kind of maybe a dish, maybe a sculpture. It's sort of unclear, but we have these black outlines and then the fields of color are sort of wrapping around it. They're not lining up here. You can see this undulating form here of the pink and then the black outline sort of going over it. But he does allow, in this part of the picture with the Gordes on the plate, he does allow those outlines to adhere to the borders of the color fields. So even within this one painting, he's using multiple visual strategies. I mean, there are a thousand ways to talk about this painting. We could spend forever talking about it. And one of the things that I always come back to with it is that it really seems to be Matisse exploring how he can free himself from the strict grid of cubism, which we sort of have in the right side of the picture and it seems to dissolve in some ways as we move over to the left side of the picture. So we know that after he's painting in this way, that Matisse ends up painting in a looser kind of freer style where he's utilizing a different kind of mixture of paint, paint that tends to be a little bit thinner. So if we turn around when we're in this gallery, so this photograph is taken as though we are standing in front of Still Life with Gordes and we've turned around and we're looking into the rest of room 23. And one of the great things about this photograph is that we can see into gallery number 19 just through the doorway. And through that doorway, we can see just the edge of a picture done in 1917 by Matisse called the Music Lesson, which is painted in a very kind of thin, almost washy-like style. The paint application is very, very thin and you can see lots of drips in the paint and it has a different kind of aesthetic feeling than we had with his pictures from the period of experimentation where he's kind of battling with Picasso in many ways. And so to kind of ramp up, one of the other interesting things about this painting and really this period of experimentation between Matisse and Picasso is that we know about 20 years later or so, Picasso paints a picture that scholars have referred to as being part of his Matisse period. So we know that not only was Picasso having a huge impact on Matisse, but Matisse was actually having a huge impact on Picasso. So this kind of artistic rivalry was really intense and something that kept both of these artists moving into new artistic territory. So when you come back to the Barnes Foundation, when we all go back, keep an eye out for Still Life with Gordes and think about it in relation to the other Matisse paintings in the collection and the other Picasso paintings in the collection because it serves as a really interesting kind of pivot point between a bunch of them. So thank you for joining me today. I hope you've enjoyed our chat about this picture. And again, this is one of many, many ways you can talk about this painting and it just happens to be the way that I like to think about it. Join us for another Barnes Takeout. Thanks, take care. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer 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.