 Hi and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher here at the Barnes. Today we're going to go upstairs to gallery number 23 and look at one of the weirdest and one of my favorite pictures in the collection, entitled the Mysterious Swan. Here let's go in just a little bit farther. The Mysterious Swan, painted by Greek born Italian Italian artist George D'Aquirico in the year 1934. And he may have actually joined for a discussion of this picture, the rose tower that the same artist had painted 21 years earlier in the year 1913. Let's take a little bit of a closer look at the Mysterious Swan. Here we go. And it's wonderful, isn't it? So at center we have this multicolored swan of yellow, red, blue, white, a little bit of kind of purple at the bottom. Looks like it's got its eyes closed and it's so strangely psychedelic for something that was painted in 1934. And it's swimming or floating in this brown zigzaggy water. And it's these stilted structures at kind of odd slanted angles with one ladder kind of going up. And to start to delve into the mystery here, let's take a look at the artist himself, George D'Aquirico. Here he has painted himself two self-portraits, one as a younger man in the 1920s, where he's pretty clearly compared himself to the Greek god Hermes over here. And so we already get the sense that he's got this flair for the hermetic. And then this one I think is just fabulous, a self-portrait done in 1948 in the Baroque style when he was really challenging the kind of canon, streamlined canon of modernism. So in what way I think we want, what kind of myths are self-mythologizing? Is he creating in the mysterious swan? Here's a picture from the same, like, mysterious bathing series that he created that might help it make a little bit more sense. And we can see some of these elements repeated. Here's our swan. Here's its zigzaggy water. We've also got a beach ball, ladders, a new man down here, two more, but also a dressed man in a business suit opening the door to this little structure. And so what D'Aquirico has painted is a scene from his childhood in the Greek city of Volos. And the story behind this is that his dad was an engineer for the Thessaly Railways. And when D'Aquirico was a boy, his dad had supervised the building of a tram line from the city out to the shore, which was very near where the Anavros River entered the ocean, and also had built these changing cabins, individual changing cabins, where a person could go in, take their clothes off, and then descend these ladders to go swimming in the sea. And this shift from this clothed modern self-presentation to primal nudity fastened D'Aquirico, he even thought that these changing cabins reminded him of masks that both like concealed as well as revealed. And he even had stuff to say about these ladders. I'm going to read you a quote that he wrote. He said, I remember that the beach cabins always disturbed me and gave me a sense of dismay. Those few steps of wood covered with algae and mold immersed less than half a meter underwater seem to say they must have been descending for leagues and leagues down into the oceanic darkness. So kind of complimenting the nudity of the people who've taken off their clothes. The water itself has got this sense of like pre-Luvian primal nature about it, and that picks up in his depiction of the swan as well. So here's an image from D'Aquirico's favorite childhood book called The Earth Before the Flood. And it seems like he copied this image of a plesiosaur as inspiration from the swan. You can see kind of the weird eye and the curve of the neck alongside this, I guess, if the athaur. And so like the nudity, like the water, he's trying to signal to us that let's see the swan again. It's not really a swan. And I think that the sort of neon rainbow colors that he's given us are these like big signals telling us, like look beyond just the shape of this animal, and perhaps even the weirdest key way that he's painted the bottoms of the changing cabins are also a signal to say, there's something hermetic here. Let's look beyond the picture surface. And then this zigzaggy water too. There's also something going on there that I'm going to read you. So here we go. If it reminds you of a parquet floor, a wooden parquet floor, you're precisely right. So, as an adult, there was an encounter D'Aquirico head and then here's another quote. He wrote, the idea for the mysterious baths came to me once when I happened to be in a house where the floor had been polished with wax. I watched a gentleman walking in front of me whose legs reflected in the floor. I had the impression that he could sink into that floor like a swimming pool that he could move and even swim in it. Then I imagined strange swimming pools with men immersed in a kind of water parquet. So it seems this vision dovetailing his memories of the seashore of Volos prompted this whole mysterious baths series. And here's the first a series of 10 lithographs that he did in Paris in 1934 to complement poems by Jean-Luc Coutot. So you can see the title is mythology and there are many elements that we recognize from our painting of the mysterious swan. We've got the changing cabins with these sort of strangely static flags, the man in a suit, the nude men. But then we also have like leaping centaurs and a colossus and also this like D'Aquirico called this element over here, the source of the water park, water parquet, meaning a sort of metaphysical first principle or even kind of delving into this idea that everything flows, something that the Greek philosopher Heraclitus had introduced and modern philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche had modified. And so this is something that truly did interest D'Aquirico is in a world where he believed there was not necessarily any external meaning. How can you create your own myths and because Volos and the Anaphras river in the seashore were so very mythologized as the site, for example, of the saga of the Argonauts or myth of Lida and the swan, it made a certain sense that D'Aquirico would look back to Greek mythology as a way of kind of constructing his own memories and self myth. And here's this. So that was the beginning of the mysterious bathing series and here's its triumphant conclusion in the year 1973 in three dimensional monumental form in the city of Milan. And again, we see this source of the water parking up here with real water coming down in it. Here's our mysterious swan in all its polychromatic glory. We've got the swimmers and I love that the water parking is actually sculpted up around them and then you can see the zigzagging at the bottom. And so the series I think is is funny is playful. It's a great way of D'Aquirico talking about how, say, memories and myths can actually shape perceptions of self of place of the past. But there's one more thing I'd like to think about before closing, which I do find pretty fascinating is check out this image over here. An exhibition of 1936 called Recent Paintings by George D'Aquirico given in New York City and you can even see that Albert Barnes wrote the preface. So here you might have noticed this, the parquet waters shown back up and so as a man in a suit, now he's behind this also very liminal device of a curtain. And we see several more elements repeating in this painting here that you can also find in room 23 at the Barnes. So the same room is mysterious swan entitled Horses of Tragedy. So we've got this curtain, we've got this viaduct that's repeated over here, aqueduct or whatever it may be the horse that's submerged into this sort of pit down here. And so one of my colleagues at the Barnes did figure out, this is Kaelin Jewel, she figured out that these four horses are the horses of the apocalypse, issuing in a certain destruction and you may even be able to see this Roman soldier chasing away a philosopher up here. And it seems to be an indictment of the destructive mythmaking of fascism as a kind of corrupt version of the Roman Empire that Benito Mussolini had issued in. And I think that this is the connection with our mysterious water where we see that D'Aquirico has made this mysterious path as a kind of personal self mythologizing. But I think he's saying that occurs on the same spectrum as mythologizing that can be political, ideological, cultural, and so when we look at the mysterious swan and perhaps think about this idea that everything flows and everything recurs, maybe we can think about how do we these days construct our own myths and how do those intersect with those of the wider wider world. Thank you so much for joining today and I look forward to seeing you back at the Barnes and that's it for today's take out.