 And welcome to Barns Takeout. I'm Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation, and Education at the Barns. And today we are going to be looking at a work by Pablo Picasso called Head of a Woman. It was done in 1907, and here it is, on the wall in room 22, which is upstairs. And you can see that it kind of hangs across from another work that was done in the same year, like, you know, definitely a kind of companion to this work. We're going to come back to this shot in a minute, but I want to zoom in on Head of a Woman. So as I said, this was done in 1907. And it was right after the blue and rose periods, which spanned roughly 1900 to 1906. And what's important to think about for those periods is the fact that while they were experimental, the forms were largely naturalistic. He didn't really do the sort of abstraction and distortion that he would later become known for. But here you are starting to see some of that distortion and abstraction. Look what he does to the human face here. The eyes look, they almost don't look human. They look hollow. The face looks kind of frozen or petrified. And just in general, the face is translated into this collection of simplified and flattened geometric forms. So what's going on here? What is Picasso doing? What is he thinking about? Well, this work is a great example of Picasso grappling with a few of the artistic traditions that were obsessing him at the time. Artistic traditions that were remote to him, meaning they were distant to him, either in terms of time or in terms of culture and place. One of these traditions was Iberian art, Iberian sculpture, ancient Iberian sculpture. There had been an exhibit of ancient Iberian sculpture in 1906 at the Louvre. So the year before this was painted. And Picasso also had a couple of Iberian stone heads in his own collection. And this kind of curly cue form that you see here in the ear was taken, was borrowed directly from one of those sculptures. But also the simplified forms, these kind of almond-shaped eyes, the triangular nose, these things were also inspired by Iberian art. But the even greater influence here is African tribal masks and sculpture. In the early 20th century, the French Empire was expanding into sub-Saharan Africa. And African objects were being brought back to Europe and displayed in museums. There was an exhibition of African tribal sculpture in 1907 at the Trocadero Museum in Paris. That was an ethnographic museum. And Picasso visited that exhibition famously and the story is that he had a kind of revelation there. But he wasn't the only one who, the only avant-garde artist who was interested in African art. His circle, his colleagues, people like George Brock, Matisse, Andre Duran, and later Modigliani, all of these artists were interested in African art. And they really had, I don't think that they didn't know much about the original contexts or functions or meanings of these objects. They were riveted by their forms. And so along with his colleagues, Picasso begins incorporating the forms of African masks and sculpture into his paintings. And so those same geometric shapes that we were just talking about, those are also seen in African masks and African sculptures. Again, those almond-shaped eyes. This triangular nose, it's sort of like a wedge. This oval, this very defined oval that creates the face and that comes to this sharp point up here at the top of the forehead. Also borrowed or inspired, I should say, by African art. And look how the forms here repeat one another. He uses that oval, the exact same shape for the eyes and for the face. He uses the triangle for the nose and he uses a triangle for this. This here, whatever that might be, maybe it's a shadow, maybe it's meant to represent striations that you see on a lot of African masks and reliquary figures. There's also a kind of triangular shape up here. And if you look really closely, here's what I love so much about this work, is that he's not just taking these forms from African masks. It's like he has really committed to the mask because this looks like it could be literally a mask. And I don't think that that's what he meant to be saying. I don't think that he's saying, like, look, I'm showing a figure wearing an African mask, but it does look like this whole area could just be kind of lifted off of the face. And when you look back here, there's no side to the head. It just sort of disappears. There's no neck. The face kind of floats. It's disembodied. So what was Picasso's attraction to African art? He liked what he perceived to be its authenticity. He perceived the cultures that made these objects to be closer to nature and uncorrupted by all the artifice and pretensions of modern European culture. He liked the simplified forms, of course. The formal vocabulary that he picked up from these objects helped him move beyond the naturalism that had so long defined Western art. And he was always searching for ways beyond this kind of naturalistic representation. But his interest in the forms was also philosophical or conceptual. It's almost like Picasso is asking the viewer, how much information do you need to be able to recognize this as a human face? Maybe all you need to represent a mouth is a line. Maybe all you need to represent a nose is a triangle, especially if those shapes are arranged in a certain context. Context is critical, in fact. Think about it. In another context, these same shapes could stand for something entirely different. Take the triangle out of this context and it could become a vase. It could become a piece of cheese. And actually, that was how the poet Paul Ellward described this nose. He said, it looks like a wedge of brie. But the point is that these shapes have multiple valences. Their meanings are unstable. And so if we go back to this, what we were just talking about, the forms repeating one another, it's interesting because it's not Picasso just trying to kind of create a formal cohesion in the picture. It's his investigation of the multiple meanings that a simple shape can take on. So even within this picture, the shape of a triangle can stand for a nose. It can stand for a shadow above the eye. It can stand for a shadow or whatever this is meant to be here. An oval can be the whole shape of the face. It can be an eye. This play with forms and their multiple uses. And also this play with the question of how much information do you need to recognize a subject or hear a human face? It gets taken to an extreme a few years later when he enters into high analytic cubism. And in that period, it becomes really hard to recognize subjects. The subject is sort of there, but it kind of disappears. The minute you kind of hold on to the minute you kind of recognize one form, like maybe you see a piece of what looks like a finger, you realize that that finger could also be part of like a guitar. So he's very interested in sort of the instability of forms and their meanings. What we're seeing here is actually Cubism's beginnings. He is beginning to develop that language. And in fact, this painting and the other one that we saw hanging in the same gallery, they were almost certainly studies for a couple of the figures in Les Des Moises d'Avignon, Picasso's major, major statement from 1907, which is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And it was this incredibly radical painting that is understood at the beginnings of Cubism. So if you're not familiar with that painting, please look it up. I want to go back to looking at the gallery because it's really important where this work is placed. You can see that it actually hangs in a room with African masks and sculptures. Barnes collected around 130 pieces of African sculpture. He bought them between 1922 and 1923. He's notable for his collecting of African art, but even more so for his display of African art. He wasn't the first collector in America to collect African art, but he was one of the first to display it for its aesthetic value, simply appreciating its forms rather than displaying it as some sort of anthropological specimen, like something you'd see in a science museum. And so he recognized the importance of African art for what painters were doing, for what modern painters were doing in the early 20th century, not just Picasso, but also Modigliani here. And what he's doing in this installation is he's making a kind of argument for the importance of African art in the development of modernist vocabularies. So please come visit the Barnes when we open, come up and look at this room. It's a beautiful room. And I hope that you have enjoyed today's takeout. Thanks very much.