 Hi everyone, welcome to Barnes Takeout. My name is Kaylin Jewel. I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And for today's little chat, I wanted to discuss a painting for you that is on display in gallery number 23 on the North wall. And we are looking at gallery 23 here and it's this painting right here. Let's zoom in on it for just a sec. So it's this little picture by Almir Matisse. It sits above or hangs above this painting by Picasso that I've talked about in a previous Barnes Takeout. Also, there are other works on this wall that my colleagues have chatted with you all about. Let's look at this picture more closely. So the title here is Young Woman Before an Aquarium. It was painted between 1921 and 1922 by the French artist Almir Matisse. It's a picture that is depicting a woman gazing into a bowl of goldfish. She's seated in sort of an intimate interior setting with lots of objects and things on the wall behind her. This is a subject matter that in terms of the goldfish that we see here is a subject matter that we've seen in other paintings by Matisse and at least one other that is at the Barnes Foundation just next door in gallery number 19. So here's gallery 19. We're looking at the South wall here and there have been several Takeout videos about pictures by Amadeo Modigliani and most recently Nancy Ierson discussed this landscape. And then my colleague Martha Lucy was discussing this picture from 1912 by Matisse called Studio with Goldfish and she discussed the really interesting tension between depicted objects and this kind of mysterious space that they're set within and notice this bowl of goldfish here. So it's a theme, it's a subject matter that Matisse was interested in. It's related to his trip to Morocco that he took in 1912 where he was interested in the phenomenon and seeing people in Morocco gazing into bowls of goldfish. So it's something he starts to depict in his paintings. The model for our painting that we're discussing today which was painted about 10 years later than Studio with Goldfish is depicted in several pictures at the Barnes Foundation. Her name is Henriette and she's depicted here in this interior scene of two women playing chess. We see Henriette in a couple of more paintings at the Barnes, several more paintings at the Barnes, three of them on display here in gallery number 10 on the South wall, so this is downstairs, this is a great gallery with lots of smaller paintings. But we see Henriette here in this, what is one of my personal favorite paintings, this woman reclining, we see her here. We see Henriette here, her distinctive dark hair in this painting called Chinese Casket. And then we see her represented in a more abstracted way in this reclining nude image up above the Picasso. So let's return back to gallery number 23. The great thing about digital technology, we can travel through the galleries quickly. So here we have again, young woman before an aquarium painted between September of 1921 and February of 1922. Now I give you those specific months because in September of 1921, we know that Armitice had moved into an apartment in Nice, which is in the South of France. Let's look at a Google image of Nice. So this is Nice, Nice, a coastal city in the South of France. And he moved specifically into this building right here. And it's when he's in this building that he starts to more or less make himself at home in the city of Nice. And he starts to bring objects down from his studio in Paris and put them on the walls in this new studio that he's setting up in this apartment in Nice. He had already been in Nice in the previous several years before this, but he was living in a hotel. So he didn't have all of his personal objects with him. For those of you who might know anything about Matisse, you know that he is an artist who was very attached to his objects. And we often think about Matisse and not just him using paint as a means of creative expression, but he's also using his objects that he has collected over the course of his travels. We see some of that on display here with the inclusion of this red fabric that is on the wall behind him, behind in the background of this image. So what we see here in this interior setting is a young woman. We know it's the model Henriette and she is intently gazing into a bowl of goldfish, which in terms of the subject relates back to Matisse's interest in what he was observing in some of the people in Morocco, gazing intently into bowls of goldfish as a way to meditate and to relax. Now, the fact that we see her so focused on this goldfish bowl, notice how her eyes are directed towards the fish that are swimming around in the goldfish bowl. And there is this intensity in her, the directionality of her gaze, but the way that Matisse has painted it is anything but still. So while it has a stillness in kind of its overall subject matter, a static bowl filled with water, but it has these activated goldfish that are meant to be swimming around. We should be thinking of them as swimming around in this water. And this woman who is very quietly sitting in a chair with her arms folded, leaning on a wooden desk or a wooden table, I imagine many of us have done this before. Those of you who might have fish in your homes might spend time looking at them or if you have pets you spend time looking at them, right? And just kind of contemplating them. And so we see her contemplating them, but the way that Matisse has painted it is anything but quiet, as I mentioned. And notice this kind of quickness of the brushwork that is in portions of the canvas. I see that most pronounced in this strip of browns that rise from the shoulder of the model. So this area here, we can get a sense that he's really kind of applying and dragging his brush across the surface of the canvas. And when you start to look closely at this canvas, and that's one of the great things of being able to look at these in this digital format, especially because this one hangs, you know, kind of high up on the wall in the gallery and it's a little bit difficult to see, is that when we look at it closely like this, we can see the weave of the canvas itself. If we zoom out to look at the dimensions of this painting, the dimensions are more closely aligned with what we would expect for a portrait painting. But instead of being a vertical format, he has taken that vertical format and turned it horizontally to create almost like a landscape. It's perhaps we can think of it like an abbreviated interior landscape. One where we have the inclusion of nature, so a woman within nature. This is something that my colleague, Martha Lucy, has talked about in previous Barnes Takeouts with respect to Matisse's paintings of women in nature. And also the inclusion of water here, which is another aspect of many of these earlier paintings of images of women within nature, you know, bathers next to water, these kinds of things. So we see this quickness in the brushwork juxtaposed with the remarkable stillness and the intensity of the gaze of the sitter. This quickness though is also sort of evoked by the inclusion of these white rectangles in the background. And those white rectangles, you can probably tell, are little sketches. These are little drawings. So Matisse, as we know, kind of loves to often include his own paintings or his own works of art in his works. And we see that here, but he hasn't included final paintings or finished paintings. Instead, he has included these sketches, these drawings, which is again an interesting juxtaposition of a quick, hasty sketch within this finished oil painting. The last thing I'll mention about this picture is that the quality of the oil paint is different across the surface of the canvas. I mentioned that you can see portions of the canvas peeking through when we look at some of these areas where you see the canvas kind of poking up through the paint. And that's because he's using a relatively thin application of paint. It's almost as thin as watercolor. Of course, it's oil painted, not watercolor, but it's a really thinned out version of oil paint. But he doesn't do that all across the canvas because if we look at her face and zoom in on areas like her forehead here, notice that we see this interesting mixing of pigments to create a sense of volume of the curvature of her forehead. And we get a sense that he is utilizing wet paint and he's doing what we call wet into wet painting. So we can see that in the way that the paint is sort of mixing here. We can also see that in the way that he's adjusting portions of this composition. So this white stripe that we have here, which you might not have noticed until we kind of hone in on it, but this white stripe here was applied after he had created the volume of the back of her head. And he's applying that white stripe of paint because he's wanting to adjust the size of the back of her head. So he's making these little tweaks, these little compositional tweaks, but he doesn't smooth that out, does he? He leaves it as that white strip that has blended with the brown of the hair and creates this kind of ethereal, almost a halo-like effect, which I think is pretty interesting when we think about the long tradition of painting and the types of paintings that Matisse himself was very knowledgeable of, including medieval art, for example. So when we go back to the gallery view, you can see how small it is and how much richness we can get out of this close-looking of this painting and this visual format. And I would encourage you to check out our collections website where you can zoom in on both these ensembles and these individual pictures themselves, and you can find out all of these interesting technical aspects of the pictures just by looking at them, which is, of course, something that Dr. Barnes is encouraging all of us to do is to spend time looking at these paintings. So thanks for joining me today with this Barnes Takeout, and stay tuned for the next one. Take care. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer 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.