 To another edition of Barnes Takeout, my name is Kaelin Jewel. I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to talk about a fabulously weird painting that is in gallery number 18 on the second floor. And it's a picture that I think a lot of people walk right by or really right under because it's above the doorway. So it's this picture that we have here. It's by an Italian artist named Giorgio DiCerico and it was painted in 1935. The title is Alexandros. But I want to draw your attention just for a second to the kind of layout of the galleries that we see here. Of course, we've got the symmetrical arrangement on either side of the doorway. These pictures are arranged according to what they look like. That is what Dr. Barnes had wanted. We also have the inclusion in the very background. If we zoom in, you can see that we've got the painting by Henri Rousseau that Nancy Ierson, my colleague, talked about in a previous takeout. So when we are in gallery 18, there are a number of things to look at. And one of them is the inclusion of blue across the entire ensemble. And if we zoom in to the blue scene above the doorway in this DiCerico picture, we can get a sense of part of the aspect that Dr. Barnes really loved about this picture. So let's look at it more closely. And again, this is really nice to be able to look at this painting so closely because it's so hard to see in the gallery. We never really get to see it this close. So when we are looking at this picture, we see a beach landscape. We've got a tall, thin figure here who is wearing a loincloth. She's holding on to a sword. He's got strappy sandals on. In the background, we've got a female figure who is wearing a sort of loosely wrapped garment tied around her waist. She's leaning on a vessel, a ceramic vessel here. She's got nice blonde hair that's really kind of beautifully rendered. That's a really kind of nice color. And then we can see it sort of similar to the blonde that we have of the figure. In the distant background, we've got a temple, sort of nondescript temple, the artist's signature up at the top. We also have this group of three, what look to be kind of like gears, but these are actually pieces of ancient Greek architecture. They are column drums. So imagine a column that is toppled over and toppled over in a triangular pattern around this tall, thin figure. But the painting really seems to be all about this horse. This horse is fabulous. He's huge. He's stocky. He's rooted into the ground. We've got his forehobs placed firmly upon the ground. And we can see that here. We also see that his tail seems to be anchoring him into place. We've got his fabulous blonde mane sort of flowing in the breeze. And we've also got a really interesting facial expression. These eyes, and this eye that you can see here, is really quite human-like. And those of you who might be familiar with horses might think that this doesn't really look like a horse's eye. It looks more like a human's eye, sort of a strange inclusion there. So what is going on with this picture? I mentioned the title is Alexandro. So that's a reference to the male figure in the picture. And it's a reference specifically to the historical figure, Alexander the Great, who is most well-known. He's well known for lots of things. But he's most well known for conquering the known ancient Greek world at the time in the 4th century BC. And he made it as far in his conquering. He made it as far east to what is modern-day India. And when we see him here in this picture, he doesn't look like he's a conqueror. He looks sort of thin. He looks like he maybe could blow over. He has very pale. He kind of looks like he is a statue. The woman in the background is sort of curious. People are always kind of confused and curious as to what she's doing here. She's probably meant to be a representation or a personification of Greece, of ancient Greece. But the painting seems to be all about this horse, as I mentioned. So we've got this horse here with this fabulous hair, stocky build, and he seems very still. He seems very rooted into the ground, as I mentioned. And if we look into the ancient texts that describe this figure of the human figure of Alexander the Great, we know that there are lots of ancient writers who wrote about him and made descriptions of him, and especially descriptions that included his warhorse Busephalus, who we think he has rendered here, that Dekiriko has rendered in this picture. So Busephalus was most known to the ancient world and to ancient writers like Plutarch for being a very aggressive horse, a very capable warhorse, one who was hard to tame, one who was almost pretty violent in his physicality. And there is a very well known text written by Plutarch, who was an ancient Greek author writing in the second century, and he wrote a so-called Life of Alexander, and in that he describes Alexander meeting Busephalus for the first time. And in this short passage, he describes Busephalus as really being scared of his own shadow. And so Plutarch says that Alexander took Busephalus by the reins. So let's zoom in here. So we have Alexander holding Busephalus by the reins of his bridle and turning him towards the sun, which is what is described in the ancient text. And that seems to be what we have happening here. So that Busephalus is no longer seeing his shadow dancing on the ground. And it's after this moment that we have Alexander effectively taming this horse and being able to partner with him to conquer the known and sort of unknown parts of the ancient world. So if we try to think about this within the context of Georgia de Chirico, the ancient, all of these ancient references make total sense with what we know about de Chirico's own interest in the ancient world. Georgia de Chirico was an Italian painter. He was born in the Greek city of Volos, and his kind of Greek and Italian heritage are something that you see bubble up into his paintings very often. This is a picture that was purchased in 1935 by Dr. Barnes along with another painting in the collection called Horses of Tragedy, which is in gallery 23. And in 1935, we know that Georgia de Chirico painted a whole series of pictures for a solo exhibition at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York City. And this was part of that. Dr. Barnes actually wrote the introduction for that exhibition catalog, which was only really a paragraph long. So it's not like this long whole thing. But in this picture, we see Georgia de Chirico referencing his ancient past and the antiquity of the place where he was born. Also this idea of travel and of conquest. And de Chirico with this exhibition in New York, this was the first time de Chirico had had a solo exhibition in New York. And it was also the first time that de Chirico himself went to New York City and to the United States. And so perhaps de Chirico is thinking of himself as sort of an Alexander the Great like figure who is getting ready to set off on his war horse, cross the Mediterranean and enter into new territory. It's possible he's thinking this. We don't know for sure because de Chirico does not tell us. So it's an interesting painting to try to think about and try to decipher. And there's all kinds of different things that we can kind of uncover when we spend time looking at it. So thank you for joining me today with this fabulously bizarre painting. I hope that you come back to the barns and look at it in the gallery. And remember it's located over the door. So it's a little bit hard to see. All right, be sure to join us for another barn's takeout and take care. Bye-bye. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer 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.