 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barn's Takeout. My name's Amy Gillette and I'm a collections researcher. Today I'm delighted to be talking with you about this painting. It's entitled Two Mysterious Cabins, painted in about 1934 by the Italian artist, Giorgio De Circo. And just to get this out of the way, you may be looking at the painting and saying to yourself, I see three cabins and I happen to have a copy of the original catalog card right here in front of me and its original title when it came to the barns in 1937 was Mysterious Bathers. So you know to answer that question and now with that said, let's head on into the barns and look at where it is in the foundation, look a bit at the artist and then think some more about the painting. So here it is upstairs in a little corner room in room number 22, right here on the west wall. And this is really one of my favorite rooms. I think it does a great job of bringing together African West African sculpture that Barnes had seriously collected mostly in the middle of the 1920s. A lot of metal work, especially in the middle of the 1930s as he especially as he was working with the philosopher his friend John Dewey on a book called Art is Experience that really is all about how you're supposed to engage with works of art at the barns foundation and what was really a democratic way. And then many paintings that are really quite late for the foundation late 1940s for this figure of Saint Martin by Afro, a sculpture by his brother Marko down here, late work by Paul Clay over here and then dramatically let's zoom in just a little bit because when I look at this particular wall at the barns I see a couple of themes that to me emerge and that the two mysterious cabins participates in. So on one level kind of in these on the lower level we've got sort of iterations of solitary figures, the Saint Martin women at table by Benar, by Matisse. We have a New Mexican figure of Saint Michael the Archangel down here. We've got the standing figurines and the masks by West African sculptors in the vitrine and then above these paintings that engage with architectural themes like Paul Clay's Village Among Rocks, The Mysterious Cabins, A Scene of Acrocorinth also in Grease by Alexei Grichenko up here and then architectural ironwork immediately above the cabins that in its triangular shape seems to echo the pediments of the cabins that we see down here. So we might be bringing these themes into our reading into our reading of the painting but let's just take a peek first at Giorgio de Chirico. So here he is only a couple of years after he painted The Mysterious Cabins, painted it in 1934, displayed it in Roman 35 and then in 1936 to 38 he was actually living in America in New York and visited the Barnes Foundation and here looks I think faintly amused to be surrounded by all this Americana. And then in the ensuing years two self-portraits that he painted of himself kind of the left over here we've got him looking like a Roman senator, nude except for his drapery. Here he's kind of playing with the Roman artistic idea of verism or truth to life where in the case of the senator you see say the face is not idealized but betraying that the man the man's age that he's old enough and wise enough to be ruling wisely and justly. You know likewise here goes no young heroic man over here either and then on the right hand side we have him looking like a Baroque portrait done by Velazquez of the Spanish king. So he's treating history almost as like a series of costumes that he can take on and off with a smile on his face but really showing us his truly deep and discursive engagement with history and art history that he does I believe bring to the mysterious cabins and mysterious bathing scene. I'm just going to put on my my noisemaker over here and as for the mysterious cabins Dikirico was a mysterious artist but these is funny and wonderfully strange as they look have an unusually straightforward explanation to them actually and I brought to you here a retrospective quote given by George Dikirico in the year 1973. He's saying the idea for the mysterious baths came to me once when I happened to be in a house where the wooden parquet 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 in a swimming pool and that he could move and even swim in it. Then I imagined strange swimming pools with men immersed in a kind of water park. He used to sit still and moved and at times stopped moving to converse with other men who stood outside of the swimming pool. So there we go. We've got the water park, the brown zigzaggy water. We have men immersed in it. It does look like this guy over here is kind of gripping the ledge right there. Is it about to try and converse with this kind of heroic colossal suited figure of a man gazing out into the distance against these hazy mountains that might have been the mountains of Greece against this wonderful what Barn said was a renwar sky in which these these flags are kind of standing like still and in suspense. So then to kind of get to other aspects of the mysterious baths, a lot of this was rooted in Georgia to Kyrgyz childhood in Volos, Greece. Volos was a much mythologized city by the way. It was the city where the Argonauts, the myth of the Argonauts of Jason and the Golden Fleece took place. It was also very near Mount Palaeon, the home of of a famous centaur. It was near the site of the myth of Leda and the swan and so we've got childhood memories kind of brought together with mythology. I should stay straight away. On the left hand side we've got this vintage postcard that you can see is of Volos. It's printed here in in Greek and also then in Latin letters. Georgia to Kyrgyz's dad, Averista to Kyrgyz, was in charge of the firm Thessaly Railways and actually connected Volos to Mount Palaeon, the centaur's home, as well as to Athens and connected the city of Volos itself to the seashore and the railway firm had at the newly accessible seashore this series of cabins built, changing cabins where you could go into an individual one, take your clothes off, and then from inside the cabin enter the water by means of these ladders and as a little boy de Kyrgo was just fascinated by their transformative aspect where you could have a person kind of looking modern and vulnerable and man very much stamped with your time wearing whatever fashion was fashionable then and then you'd emerge on these ladders into this literally naked kind of primordial humanity and not only that but de Kyrgo was kind of horrified at the ladders how you could see down just a few feet until they disappeared into the oceanic abyss maybe some of you recognize that kind of similar horror of deep water and then there were also swans kind of nearby that had come from the Anaveras River and so we're bringing together the sites, memories, de Kyrgo's impressions, he was also his interest was super peaked by the way in which these cabins seemed to resemble masks and almost like the West African masks that you can see them set up next to at the barns where they by masking seem to disclose something metaphysical or mysterious about humanity where when you go into them as when you put on a mask there's something transformational you may be kind of unveil instead some sort of higher or deeper truth about humanity or human experience and for that it seems to be going into the mythology mythologization of man and the sort of conversations between mythical and modern man which are themes that de Kyrgo seems to be drawing out in these mysterious baths and it was indeed quite a long series it started one year earlier in 1934 with a series of 10 lithographs that de Kyrgo had made to accompany poems called mythology by his friend Jean Couteau and as a matter of fact if we don't see it here but in other lithographs you see like leaping centaurs like those that live in on Mount Julian next to the mysterious water but also going deeper connecting this kind of Greek mythology with dinosaur history and let's look back at this image over here of um the swan note how the plesiosaur from de Kyrgo's favorite childhood book the world before the flood getting deeper into that oceanic history and oceanic abyss that he was kind of talking about when he talked about his fear and horror of um of the ladder going down into the water and um and so he kept repeating these theories um these theories these series to try and I think get at um more of a fleshing out of the conversations between myth um between peep history and the experience of modern man we see um this is kind of splendid an image of 1936 it's called mysterious baths Manhattan where he believed that these um skyscrapers of Manhattan really took on the same mysterious aspects um their kind of ability to both fail and unveil as we saw with the cabins that he amalgamates too with his architectural motifs from other paintings like the um the curtain sanctuaries of temples that we can see over here and over here that we can also see out other paintings at the barns foundation like the rival or the red tower that he painted in the teens and these resolved um oh oh so before we get to that actually one more thing that I'd like to think about so as he's working through these series I wanted to touch briefly on this idea of repetition but before we get to the finale so here's um here's a quote that I thought was incredibly useful um by Emily Braun in a 1996 um book or exhibition catalog called the Kiriko in America she wrote in the famous critic Clement Greenberg's terms the avant garde moves while alexandrianism or what was believed to be this kind of decadent period of um of Greek or Hellenistic art stood still but the kiriko rejected the modernist strive to supersede in favor of kind of a pre-post-modernist deepening that arrests time and a continuous back and forth of associations citations and repetitions if you want to remember him being a roman senator or being a spanish baroque king inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of the eternal return the kiriko conceived of his art as an endless recycling of motifs themes and styles he also adopted Nietzsche's perception of modernity as the age of comparison wherein all styles civilizations morals and habits can be seen side by side and are available to the common man and aristocrat alike and so I think first of all this um this leveling of the fine of the high with the sort of quotidian every day the popular is so perfect both for the kiriko and for the barns foundation this is exactly what barns at the time was really trying to flesh out and bring to our experience with John Dewey um but with this idea of repetition and the repetition of motifs I think that here's a wonderful way to look at it finally where this is um this is an installation done in Milan in 1973 this was actually the equation of the quote about the water parquet that I read that we looked at a little bit earlier together and we see this like triumphal resolution of these series of paintings in the mysterious baths fountain where we have um real water it's immersive it's a real um swimming pool and people have used it as such with the cabin um with the swimmers where we've got the actual water and the um sculpted three-dimensional water um I love this guy doing freestyle over here and then we see um the so-called metaphysical source of the water over here with its painted zigzags kind of coursing down into the stream and I think what kiriko really was getting at at this is um the water was basically a site of that idea quoted from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus that everything flows that everything is cyclical but kind of as the motif of the mysterious baths paints again a little bit differently in every iteration that adds just a bit um to the kind of mythology of man um the kind of metaphysical meanings that you make for yourselves out of your experiences and your memories and in the same way I think that you get the same experience at the barns foundation every time um you bring yourself to paintings like the two mysterious cabins here we'll look at it again um it's just a teeny bit different for you and so plenty to think about with these wonderful mysterious images plenty of mystery to discover and um I should note by the way that I'll be teaching a course on de Kiriko in April that anyone's welcome to sign up for and um and so that is it for today's takeout thank you so much for watching I'm Tom Collins new bower family executive director of the barns foundation I hope you enjoyed barns 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 barns foundation