 Hello, I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernard C. Watson Director of Adult Education at the Barnes Foundation, and I'd like to welcome you to this week's Barnes Takeout, your weekly serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. In 1918, as German troops bore down on Paris, the Lithuanian-born Jewish artist Chaim Soutine fled the city heading south, accompanying him were his friend and fellow painter Amadee Bodigliani and his dealer Leopold Zabrowski. Soutine settled in the town of Carey in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains where he would stay for about three years. The landscapes that Soutine painted between 1919 and 1922 are some of the most, some of his most prized paintings. Today we go together to Gallery 11 at the Barnes Foundation to look at one of these. So over here towards the corner, it's called Group of Trees and it was painted around 1922. Now, let me bring that up here. Now you would be forgiven if the landscape subject of this picture is not immediately obvious. Indeed, Group of Trees verges on abstraction. I would say actually it is the sort of best example of abstraction, and by that I mean that while it eschews representation, instead it focuses on expressing the and distilling the unique experience that the artist had with his subject. It expresses the intensified perception of Soutine with his landscape. But even if we can't decipher what the subject was, there are some very startling aspects of this picture. So what can we see in this work? Well, for one, we have these curving vertical bands and we see one, two, three, four, maybe five. And these extend from the bottom of the picture all the way up to the top and indeed some of them curves so that they actually hug the very very top of the picture itself. And then between and behind we have this blue triangular shape that moves in a diagonal direction and then running from the bottom of the vertically thrusting bands and then wrapping around the base of the triangular shape is a still thicker band that seems to recede into the picture space. We zoom in and look carefully some of the striking aspects of this picture really present themselves and that's that Soutine is working with wet paint on wet paint. So he's laying one color down and then going right back over it with another color. The consequence of that is an intermixing of color in these skeins and bands of mixed color. It creates a tremendous color interaction and it gives to the picture a very dynamic quality as multiple colors are resonating to our eyes simultaneously. In addition to that and it's a little difficult to see on a reproduction but if I go back to the gallery view and zoom in even though it might get a little distorted you get a somewhat sense or somewhat better sense of another really striking aspect of this picture and actually of many of Soutine's picture and that's the surface quality of it. Not only was Soutine working wet on wet but he was applying paint oftentimes very thickly so that we get this build up, the surface build up of paint what's called impasto so that the paint literally stands off of the surface of the picture giving it a textural quality to the work. So that said what else can we say about this picture even before we try to decipher what the subject or elements of the subject might still be? One thing is that the combined effect of these vertical bands, these curving vertical bands set against this diagonal thrusting triangular blue shape and then with this still thicker band wrapping around it's a sense of writhing agitation. This is a highly active picture as if for instance these bands are almost a chorus of dancers thrusting themselves as they as they march and dance across the picture space. So what might we, how might we interpret this picture? What of the subject might we be able to recognize? Well one could identify these vertical bands as trees now admittedly Soutine has stripped them of all vegetation and really instead concentrated on the linear aspect of the trees, of the trunks and perhaps of some of the branches. The blue diagonal triangular shape one could interpret as a mountain and indeed Coray is as I suggested is a town that's really nestled into the valley of the Pyrenees mountains that's surrounded on almost all sides and so from almost every vantage point one sees the terrain and landscape rising towards the sky and towards the horizon. Now what can we perhaps make of the white and red shapes that seem again to be distributed between and again perhaps behind these vertical linear units? Well given again with a little bit of knowledge of the of the town itself the red may register with the red tile rooftops of buildings and the white perhaps as the the facades of the buildings themselves. Some shapes like this dark shape here or this dark shape here one could interpret as perhaps a door or windows of of buildings. Now admittedly none of that is entirely certain but Soutine Soutine absolutely leaves room for us to to interpret and to to sort of put our own imagination at work in this in this picture. If we go back to the to the gallery and pull back and consider it in the context of the ensemble of of gallery 11 we're looking we're looking south the cluster particularly of the works and objects on to our left again tell us a little bit about both the qualities of the work by Soutine it's paired with another picture by Soutine from around the same time and between them Dr. Barnes has placed a work by Modigliani who as I said earlier was a close friend of Soutine's they oftentimes shared a studio together and it was Modigliani with Zabrowski that Soutine led Paris down to down to correct. The juxtaposition of these pictures is quite telling as well. The Modigliani is in many ways the antithesis of the Soutine's girl in polka dot dress is calm and still and very gentle in its qualities while the Soutines on either side as I said have this writhing sense of of agitation. In many ways not only these pictures but other pictures in this gallery are pictures of contrast of activity and stillness and the sense of of atmosphere that Soutine is suggesting here this is not just any landscape but this is a landscape that also seems to be activated by its environment as if we're witnessing or in the midst of of a storm that is thrashing these trees and perhaps if we read the blue here to the to the side and back as as a sky perhaps sky potentially ready to unleash a storm this again this sense of high activity is conveyed in his work and that stands in strong contrast to to the Modigliani and then finally something I often try to point out because I think it's an aspect of our founder Albert Barnes's personality that sometimes overlooks his sense of humor above the Soutines on either side we have these objects now what they are might not again be entirely clear because Dr. Barnes is definitely taking them out of their context and he's actually combined two pieces together these are actually gutter hooks so they're this part would be nailed against the facade of the building and the triangular part would would hold the gutter along or a roof edge but by combining them the shape that they form is like a like a wind turbine or a windmill again sort of a kind of visual nod to the sense of turbulence of atmospheric turbulence that we sense in the in the picture by by Soutine I focused on Soutine today for a couple reasons one that he's part of our current special exhibition Soutine de Kooning conversation in paint that runs through the 8th of August and I want to encourage you to to visit the exhibition if you can but also because he'll be the focus of two online classes one Soutine's technique that runs from May 5th to May 26th and that will be taught by a conservator who will actually look at the physical nature of Soutine's paintings and the other Soutine in the Barnes collection that runs from June 3rd to the 24th exploring the important place that Soutine plays in the Barnes collection as always I'll remind you that for all Barnes classes we offer scholarships so please take advantage of that if any of these or any other Barnes online class is of interest to you so until our our next Barnes takeout thank you for joining us I'm Tom Collins new Bauer 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