 Hi, I'm Cindy. I'm a curator at the Barnes Foundation, and today we are upstairs in the Bunnell-DeViv room. But instead of focusing on this amazing, really significant painting by Matisse, we're actually going to turn our attention to the wall on the right, to this tapestry designed by Picasso that is often overshadowed in this room. But this work is actually part of this much larger conversation going on here, and especially at this time in the 1930s, about mural decoration, which has its roots in the kind of decorative painting that Matisse was doing with the Bunnell-DeViv. So, let's look more closely at this work. Now Picasso was commissioned to design this tapestry in 1934 by a woman named Marie Coutole, who was a modern art entrepreneur. She started a fashion business in Paris. She had a modern art gallery that held the first exhibition of Alexander Calder's mobiles. She was an incredibly innovative and interesting businesswoman in the arts. She had an interior decoration firm, and she also decided to single-handedly revive the artisan craft of tapestry in France by commissioning really important modern avant-garde artists to design these works. So one of the first people that she turned to was Picasso. And so what Picasso did was design a model for a tapestry. This model is called a cartoon, and then this model was brought to the weavers to translate to weave into a tapestry. So what you're seeing here is essentially a collaboration. The design is by Picasso, but it was woven by these weavers in central France, which I will get to later. Now the design that he chose, these two figures with this woman leaning on a chair and facing this other woman, is very much related to all the other work he was doing at this time, sculptures, drawings, paintings, that were of his lover, Marie Thérèse. So this work is part of a much larger kind of multimedia investigation of this woman as his muse and model. But in terms of technique, Picasso did something really interesting, while so he's thinking of this design for a mural decoration. And what he decides to do is go back to an earlier practice of his Cubist work called Papier Collet, which is essentially paper collage in which he would include strips of wallpaper in his work. Now this technique is something he did before World War I, like around 1912 to 14, and then he just virtually abandoned it for the next 20 years until Coutoli came along and commissioned him to design this tapestry. So what Picasso did was use strips, use pieces of wallpaper that imitated other materials to create a large scale cartoon for this mural decoration that was to be woven. So these strips of wallpaper imitated materials like wicker, like furnishing fabrics, I mean here you can see these stripes like upholstery, and this kind of wallpaper pattern here and here, and even imitation wood for this frame that is around this design. The resulting tapestry is a really clever chain of material translation, meaning it is a woven textile that replicates paper that is imitating other materials like fabric or like wicker. Wicker is essentially woven plant material, and the weavers did something very interesting when they were translating Picasso's design. You see right here, we can get really close, that this is an area where the paper in Picasso's cartoon would have been torn, and what the weavers did was interpret this with silk thread, so it becomes this torn kind of damaged edge, becomes a luxury sumptuous kind of surface. And this kind of transformation of this cheap material, this imitative wallpaper into this wool and silk luxury object was pretty incredible because basically what was going on was that he's having this kind of radical bohemian technique being translated into an object of a very high status and of much more permanence than cut and pasted paper. So the weavers who did this incredible work were a couple. You can see the initials down here AD stands for Atelier de l'Arbre. There was a husband and wife team who were located in central France in a town called Obuson, and Obuson was very near where Marie Coutoli was born and where she spent her early childhood. She didn't move to Paris until she was about 16 or so. So when Marie Coutoli launched this kind of tapestry reliable business back in her home region, she launched it in the 1930s right when the depression had hit. So her business was also a way of reinvesting in her home community and putting these weavers back to work. Obuson had been a renowned center of weaving since the 15th century. And I'm going to show you over here where they wove Picasso's own signature into the work. So you can see this is woven into the work, this collaborative process of the artist and the weaver. Now tapestry is a pretty fragile medium in a way. It's very light sensitive. So what happens is that when it's displayed for a long period of time and not taken down to rest, the colors do fade. And I just want you to notice here that there used to be a lot of green in this tapestry that you don't see anymore so much. And so you have to imagine these colors when they were a little bit more vibrant and fresh. So there was green here. There's this yellow that's a little faded, this beautiful lemon yellow. If you scroll up, you see all of these little bits of green that when you look at, and here too, when you look at the work today, it's definitely not as vibrant and you don't see it as much. But it's still quite a testament to the virtuosity and skill of these weavers. So this tapestry was first exhibited in 1936 in New York in Beaniew Gallery. And this is where Barnes acquired it. And Helena Rubenstein also acquired a copy of this tapestry. And another version of this tapestry was acquired by Nelson Rockefeller. So this was an incredibly successful work. And Picasso would go on to design more tapestries with Coutoli and Barnes in installing this work across from another Coutoli tapestry. And with the Matisse, Bernal DeVieve was very much tying all of this work back to an idea of decorative mural art that was really all about making art part of your daily life and making art part of your well-being in your environment, your interior surroundings. So that's it for today's Barnes Takeout. Join us again next week and have a great day.