 For being here, it's so nice to see a full auditorium on this beautiful day, and I am delighted to welcome our guest speaker, Jeremy Braddock, and I will introduce him in a minute. But first, I should introduce myself. I'm Martha Lucy, Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation, and Education here. And I am going to take this opportunity to plug our classes. If you don't know about our classes, we offer a lot of classes both on-site and online. We have new ones that come out every month, four-week classes, and I am going to be teaching one called In Defense of Renoir. That starts in May, starts May 3rd, and we are going to argue about the virtues of Renoir. So even if you don't like Renoir, please come. Join us, yes, we're going to have fun. So Jeremy Braddock is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. He specializes in the production and reception of literary modernism in the United States with further interest in media studies and African American literature. He is the author of many articles and books, including Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic, which he co-edited with Jonathan Eburn. And as I learned today, he is currently at work on a book about the Fire Sign Theater, which was a surreal comedy troupe who performed in Los Angeles, is that right, during the 1960s. It should be interesting. His book, Collecting as Modernist Practice, and if you don't have this book and you're interested in this area, it's a now classic. Collecting as Modernist Practice was awarded the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize in 2013 and was named an outstanding academic title by Choice Magazine. The book looks at modernist culture before it became institutionalized at places like the Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1929 and in the Academy, and so Albert Barnes and his collecting practice and his particular expression of modernism figures centrally. Professor Braddock's talk today focuses on an important exhibition held here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in April of 1923. So exactly 100 years ago. The show presented 75 recent acquisitions made by the rebellious Dr. Barnes and it caused quite a stir, as you will see. Professor Braddock revisits the cultural politics and intellectual debates surrounding the exhibition as well as other events that had long-term consequences for the arts community in Philadelphia and for the institutionalization of modern art more generally. So please join me in welcoming Jeremy Braddock. I forgot to say welcome to everybody who's tuning in from home. It didn't mean to forget you. We're grateful for you tuning in and we will have time for questions and answers afterwards. So if you have questions, if the online people have questions, just type them into the chat and I will read them. Thank you. Thank you, Martha. I have nothing to say about Renoir today. Thanks very much for coming. So before I get started, I'd like to thank Martha again and Elia Palumbo for inviting me back to the Barnes Foundation. I want to thank also Robin Creran and Carrie Annas in the Collections Department who provided me with some images of works still owned by the Barnes, but not on display, which we'll get to see. And one of them I think is very, very interesting and they're all interesting, but one in particular. And I also want to give special thanks to the director of the archives here, Amanda McKnight and her assistant, Rob Jagiella, who made available to me letters and clippings, which I will also be discussing today. As someone who began working on the Barnes Foundation in the late mid, late 90s, I just want to say what a huge service it is to have these materials available for researchers. And some of them you can access from the website already. The Barnes is doing a wonderful job cataloging and digitizing this material. So as Martha mentions, I've been invited to speak on the hundredth anniversary of the exhibition of contemporary European paintings and sculpture, which opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at the corner of Broad and Cherry on April 11th, 1923. This is Thomas Hart Benton's annotated copy of the catalog of the exhibit. And as Martha also mentioned, the show was made up of 75 pieces all from Barnes's collection and was the first major exhibition of this collection in the United States and the last time for 70 years that it would be seen in a place other than Mary in Pennsylvania. The exhibition was drawn largely from a major series of acquisitions Barnes made from and through the dealer Paul Guillaume, who was later established as foreign secretary of the Barnes Foundation. He bought these from Guillaume in Paris in December 1922 and January 1923, most notably 54 pieces from the then unknown Haim Soutine, but also canvases by Giorgio Dicureco, Amadeo Modigliani, sculpture by Jacques Lipschitz, and paintings by André Duran, Marie Laurent-San, Alain Padriat, and Henri Matisse, whose Joy of Life formed the centerpiece of the exhibition. Barnes asked that his name not be revealed as the owner of the works, but he did contribute a short essay for the catalog. And in that essay, Barnes pointed out that all of the artists represented were living, except for Modigliani, who had died in 1920. And all but Matisse Duran and Picasso were younger than 35 years old. So Barnes's new purchases had powerfully oriented his collection towards contemporary artists as the title of the exhibition suggested. Significantly, it was also on this same trip December 1922 that Barnes made his first major purchases of African sculpture. And all of these purchases were made in turn immediately after the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted a charter for a new educational institution and gallery to be called the Barnes Foundation. It would of course not open until 1925, but Barnes had begun commissioning plans already for the buildings and even sourcing its stone by the time he had left for Paris in December. And he was also beginning to think about the long term disposition of his collection and of the Barnes Foundation itself in prospective arrangements either with the Academy of Fine Arts or with the University of Pennsylvania or both. In all of these contexts, it's significant that Barnes had originally hoped also to exhibit the African pieces alongside the contemporary European work, as of course he would later do at the Barnes Foundation, but he was apparently rebuffed both by the Academy and by Penn, both of whom refused to even acknowledge the offer. And I discussed this further in my book, Collecting His Modernist Practice, available at Fine Bookstores everywhere, and I thought it might be helpful just to briefly talk about the origins of this book and how I came to be interested in the Barnes as a way of setting up what I have to say about the 1921 and 23 exhibitions. Spoiler, I'm talking about a 1921 exhibit as well. I came to Philly in 1996 to go to grad school at Penn and I had been aware of the mysterious but important institution, the Barnes Foundation, as well as some of its vagaries, the restrictions on photographs and so on. And so one of the first things that I did was to go to the Barnes Foundation, but I was especially interested because I had already seen or recently seen the name Albert Barnes appear as one of the few white contributors to the epochal 1925 anthology, The New Negro, edited by Howard University philosophy professor, Alan Locke, a book that is understood as one of the founding documents of what would later be called the Harlem Renaissance, as you might know, and this book is still in print, it's never been out of print. And I myself became interested in a wave of anthologies, including this one that appeared in the 1920s as another kind of collection that might be in dialogue with art collections like Barnes's. Barnes both contributed a short essay on African art, The New Negro, and he allowed photographs of the collection to be included in it, most notably alongside County Cullen's great long-column heritage, and I'm sure if you know the Barnes well, you'll recognize some of these pieces. And I should mention that these two particular pages are reproduced from a special issue of a journal called The Survey Graphic, which was later revised and expanded also with the reproductions of these photographs in The New Negro. In my book, I talk about Barnes's collaborative but also sometimes and increasingly competitive relationships with Black intellectuals in the 1920s, but I mention it because the connection of Barnes to the Harlem Renaissance, which then have been called The New Negro Movement, signals a general point about institutional culture in the United States between the wars, and that context in a more general way informs the two exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts that I want to talk about today. What I want to suggest is that it's possible to think about the singularity of the amazing collection here at the Barnes Foundation, more singular because of its arrangement, I would say, and also about the singularity of the prodigious, autodidact, eccentric, irascible figure who formed it, and also to understand that Barnes's ambitions were in some ways entirely characteristic of a general moment of institutional flux, institution building, and transition that was appearing at the moment that it was also clear that modernism would be represented in cultural institutions, though it was not yet decided how this would happen. So as Martha mentioned, Museum of Modern Art doesn't open until 1929, but it doesn't have its famous international style building until 1939. As the recently digitized letters show, Barnes is repeatedly remarking in 1921 and 1922 that modern art, by which he means in these letters art from the mid-19th century on, was now commanding prices that far surpassed those of the old masters. And in this sense, we can see the origins of an art market that is still familiar to us today. Certainly modern art remains among the most economically valuable commodities in the world 100 years later. And also in these letters, Barnes is also speaking, especially to his foreign interlocutors, that ground has been broken on the building for the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the end of the parkway. I guess I want to gesture is it this way? It's near, you know it's near. The ground had been broken in 1919, but the PMA wouldn't open until 1928, and Philadelphia was far from the only city for whom this would be true. My point is that it was no longer a question of whether modernism would be represented in cultural institutions, but how. But at the same time, because institutional culture was in flux, and especially in the US, in the process of development, that the debate about modernism's coming institutionalization also to an unusual degree became about the nature of the institutions themselves. Which is to say that the debates were not always only about the art itself, but about the meaning of art, culture, and society in a broader sense. And for Barnes in the 1920s, these were often concerns of race and democracy, education, and psychology. And I'll be talking most about the last of those today. So in order to understand the meaning of the 1923 exhibition, we need to have a look at an important predecessor, the exhibition, sorry this is not the most enchanting image, but it is what we have, another exhibition that took place at the Pennsylvania Academy, the exhibition of paintings and drawings showing the later tendencies in art, which opened almost exactly two years before the 1923 show on April 16th, 1921. Though this was also a modernist exhibition, it differed from the Barnes show two years later in some key respects. First of all, it was much larger. It comprised 280 paintings that appear to have commanded all of the Academy's exhibition space. The works were chosen by a committee of artists and collectors from Philadelphia and New York, which included the instructor at the Academy named Arthur B. Carls, Thomas Hart Benton, the artist Joseph Stella, whose painting, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, and Mardi Gras was centrally figured in the exhibition, and the gallery owner, photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz. The works drew from a number of other collectors, including John Quinn and Catherine Dreyer of the Société Anonyne, from whose collection this painting came, which is now owned at Yale. As opposed to the famous armory show of 1913, these works came entirely from American artists, and they represented a broad diversity of what could be considered modernist at the time, from the figural realism of John Sloan and Albert Barnes's friend William Glackens, to more abstract work associated with Stieglitz's 291 gallery, artists like Charles D. Muth, John Maren, and Giorgio Keefe, to the avant-garde is associated with Walter Ehrensburg, whose collection is now at the PMA, I should say Walter and Louise, Ehrensburg's collections at the PMA, and Catherine Dreyer's Société Anonyne, and artists associated with this collection include Stella, John Covert, and Man Ray. The show was enthusiastically reviewed in the magazine The Dial, which is not surprising, because they were, by this point, powerful supporters of modernism, but it also received generally positive, if bemused or condescending notice in the Philadelphia newspapers. So, I hope you can see this, you can see this pretty well. On the left, the Philadelphia record says modernism invades Academy's gallery, damage is but slight. The inquires, his boredoms banished by the modernists, and the Philadelphia ledger includes reproductions of Stella's painting and John Covert's brass band with sort of whimsical cartoons, and the headline, art that looks crazy on display. Barnes, for his part, bought eight paintings from the exhibition. Oh wait, sorry, one more, this is actually important. Dorothy Grafley, who is the critic for the Philadelphia North American, writes, we cannot escape a feeling that beneath much that is extraneous, there is a relevant and vital advance in artistic thinking. So, Barnes, for his part, bought eight paintings from the exhibition, including these two, and he wrote an effusive letter of congratulations to Arthur Carls, which was published as an open letter in the Inquirer. It seems to me that your present shows the first real move to shake Philadelphia out of the lethargy, which has been the approach to us from artists and collectors. In contrast to the tenor of these Philly reviews, and here I want to underline the playfulness of the ledger's headline, which I've already hammed up, art that looks crazy on display, came a more histrionic review from the New York critic Alice Avon, which was picked up in papers in Philly subsequently, which recast the themes of craziness more literally. She wrote, every canvas shrieks loudly, I am in the last stages of insanity. Avon's hyperbole, far more consequentially, would then be authenticated as a literal diagnosis, when a group of senior neurologists led by the Jefferson Medical College's Francis X. Durkham staged a public symposium on the later tendencies exhibition at the Art Alliance on Rittenhouse Square. Modernists insane say these medics. The purpose of the symposium was to present works from the later tendencies exhibit as evidence of the artist's insanity. The neurologists diagnosed various forms of mental illness on the basis of painterly style and technique. W.R. Wadsworth's lecture, Abnormality in Art, found the paintings to have their origins in, I'm quoting, ghastly lesions of the mind and body, which usually land people in the hospitals and in the asylums. Charles W. Burr spoke of the degenerate pleasure represented in and produced by the canvases, and Durkham himself argued that the paintings exhibited, quoting again, disease of the color sense and the disease of a great many other mental faculties. So these might seem quaint or even funny today, and I actually was wondering if I was going to get laughs up until this point. I admit that I myself have gotten lots of pleasure out of this clipping. Dr. Barn says modern artists are not insane. If the gift shop offered this as a t-shirt, I would definitely buy it. But I think we might also recognize its resemblance to a slightly later exhibition of modernist art, the degenerate art exhibition organized by the Nazi Party in Munich in 1937. Whether or not you consider that to be an overstatement, it's enough to observe that the literally pathologizing symposium at the Art Alliance concerned an exhibition of art by living U.S. artists and that the neurologists or alienists who presided over it were powerful and influential men. Before going to Jefferson, Durkham had taught at Penn where he collaborated with Edward Moybridge on early cinematic experiments. He had been chosen to oversee the treatment of Woodrow Wilson in the White House following his stroke in 1919. Four years after the Art Alliance adventure in 1927, Durkham would be elected president of the American Philosophical Society. I should also mention the last time I went to the Mutter Museum, I noticed that you can see Durkham's collection of epileptic brains in a large jar on the ground floor of the Mutter Museum. All of this makes especially noteworthy. The fact that when the New York artist and publisher Hamilton Easterfield invited Barnes to comment on the symposium, Barnes's response did not concern the quality of the art, but instead called into question the legitimacy of the psychological claims made by Durkham and his colleagues. And you can see in my long quote here, Barnes says they are old hats, men who have arrived at positions of eminence by conforming to the traditions of a bygone age. To such men, Barnes goes on, the monumental work done by Freud, Jung and Adler is a closed book, but to men like Professor Holt and Professor Dewey of Columbia, the work of Freud and his colleagues is of fundamental significance and importance to normal and mentally diseased society. So this minimally is evidence of Barnes's intensive reading outside the specific field of aesthetics. And besides the audacity, but also I would say the legitimacy of Barnes's claims, I want to observe that all of the names mentioned here are not usually taken together today. Barnes's general interest in all of them would be collectively called and would have been collectively called then the new psychology is one that emphasizes subjectivity and experience about the physiological pathology of normality and abnormality. Barnes is mainly citing psychoanalysts here, Edwin Holt was an important early U.S. popularizer of Freud. And in general, and this is a point that I'll return to and make some hay of in my book, Barnes would be much more likely to cite American pragmatist psychology as associated with Dewey and William James while citing and employing European psychoanalysis in his private letters. And in my view that this sort of publicly pragmatist privately psychoanalytic approach is how I understand the collection that the Barnes itself. But the larger point here is that for Barnes, both psychoanalysis and pragmatism were not only advances in psychological thought, but they were of a piece with progressivist developments in the arts thought and society more generally. Of the people named in this open letter, the one with whom Barnes had the strongest association was the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Barnes had befriended Dewey in 1917 after discovering Dewey's book Democracy in Education. He sat in on his classes at Columbia and eventually gave him the title of education director at the Barnes. And Dewey's major work on aesthetics, Art as Experience from 1934, which is a book very much worth reading, was dedicated to Barnes. And Dewey says in the preface that these pages were gone over one by one with Barnes. In 1920, Barnes would give Dewey a copy of William Carlos Williams' experimental novel, Chora in Hell, writing to him, it seems to me we have in such books the dawn of a new art that will line up better with your thoughts, Dewey's thoughts on democracy than what most artists are doing. I believe it transitional to something big and important is the new spirit of the new times we are entering in the spiritual field, which will later be manifested in social and political spheres. Now what I want to suggest here is that in this context spiritual should be taken as a synonym for psychological spirit, as a synonym for the psyche. And the larger point of this letter is to suggest how art like Williams is, is to be understood as being both a marker and an instrument of social and institutional change. In the summer of 21, Durkheim and company repriezed their gambit with events and a pamphlet which appears sadly to be lost to history, attacking an exhibition at the Met in New York this time of European impressionist and post-impressionist paintings from the collection of John Quinn. Barnes took this renewed opposition as an occasion for a last, carefully staged response to the Philadelphia Alieness, placing items to run consecutively in the magazine The Arts where it immediately followed a report on the New York protest and in the American Art News. Barnes promised, note the subtitle here, to donate his entire collection of paintings valued at millions of dollars and a gallery to house them to the city of Philadelphia if Dr. Durkheim could prove himself qualified in the science of normal and abnormal psychology. And he goes on, I think you can see, to append a series of eight questions dutifully reprinted in the pages of American Art News which he invited Durkheim to address and he's included fifth, please point out in any authoritative work on psychology the principle that makes common sense is applied to art out of any quote something from the pamphlet and also Durkheim is meant to provide a working and authoritative definition of normal art, presumably a phrase that Durkheim also uses. As was true of his response earlier in the year, Barnes ostensibly framed the argument with the Philadelphia Alienists according to their comparative authority on psychology. But in these documents Barnes's authority was also supported by what he presented as the acknowledged value of his art collection and a significant and determining bequest to a city that did not yet have a major art museum. The magnificent proposal nevertheless has as I'm sure you've noticed a perverse logic since it offered as a gift to the city of Philadelphia an institutional home for modernist art precisely the thing the psychologist most feared thereby ensuring in advance that they would not attempt to answer the questions and by the way who was going to adjudicate the answers anyway it's precisely because Barnes's proposal could only have been meant rhetorically though that we can appreciate its interventionist logic. In this which I believe is the first public indication of its future institutionalization the collection was not merely advanced as a form of cultural capital but fashioned as an instrument in the service of the struggle for the cultural validity of the new psychology an instrument that we come to know today as the Barnes Foundation or we would come to know it in the 20s. Seen in this light it is surely not coincidental that these exchanges transpired both in response to the later Tenancies exhibition and the exhibition at the Met but also at the very moment that Duncan Phillips established his collection as the Phillips Memorial Gallery now the Phillips collection in Washington DC. The full stakes of this gesture would become clearer after December 4th 1922 when the Barnes Foundation became officially chartered as I'm quoting from the charter here an art gallery founded as an educational experiment under the principles of modern psychology. As I said at the outset the Barnes Foundation was the context of the extraordinary purchases that Barnes sorry the chartering of the Barnes Foundation was the context of the extraordinary purchases Barnes made in Paris in December 1922 and January 1923. Before returning home Barnes placed the first public announcement of the Barnes Foundation in the January 1923 issue of the Journal of the Arts the editor Forbes Watson heralded that the United States was to have at last a public museum of modern art and clearly paraphrasing Barnes's correspondence went on to add Barnes is convinced that art has a universal appeal and that appreciation of art can be developed in almost any intelligent person art need not be in the mind of Dr. Barnes I'm still quoting here the exclusive privileged of a few specially endowed individuals whose main use of it is to flatter their own egotism by a display of their superiority thereby indicating the alignment of modernist art the new psychology and dual democracy. Opening in April 1923 the Academy's exhibition of contemporary European paintings and sculpture comprised 75 works recently purchased by Barnes including The Joy of Life Picasso's Composition to Peasants and 19 Works by Soutine 7 by Mudiliani and here we are really fortunate to have photographs of pretty much the whole thing I think and I'm going to talk a bit more and we'd be interested to know your thoughts about the painting in the large painting in the corner here which is still owned by the Barnes but not on display this is Helen Perdriot's idol but moving clockwise I guess here is The Joy of Life with framed by most framed by two Matisse canvases a Soutine portrait on the left and Mudiliani portrait on the right and I presume two Soutine landscapes in between and the famous excellent but weird Picasso painting of the child and then continuing along the Picasso's The Peasants would have been facing the Perdriot both of these moving back are framed by Lipchitz sculptures there are also two Lipchitz sculptures in the center and then facing one of the famous Matisse's more portraits by Mudiliani Jewel Pascans portrait of the nude and is there one more yes so this is the the collection as it stands and and I I also produced a slightly sloppy but I also think some of interesting a reproduction of what the paintings would have looked like in in in situ and that we were unable to identify the Soutine landscape that would have been the second from the left but I took the liberty of imposing one there as well but maybe we should just be as factual as possible um okay uh there were two other exhibitions that opened the same day uh also at the Pennsylvania Academy um which was significant because as you can see this was only took up one room one of them was a very large exhibition of 300 canvases by the early Philadelphia artist Charles Wilson Peale and his brother and son which included 50 portraits of George Washington um and uh and there was another exhibition devoted to contemporary Japanese paintings and this is important to see as as to know as you'll see it was in the exhibition's catalog that Barnes introduced the pragmatist principles that he hoped would guide visitors to the exhibition and would also guide the work of the Barnes foundation as he made a more measured case than he had done at the end of his fight with the Philadelphia alienists he began by aligning himself with the director of the Philadelphia Orchestra Leopold Stokowski who had premiered Arnold Schoenberg's commerce symphony to some discomfort in 1915 but then had performed it again to acclaim and acceptance in 1922 Barnes goes went went on to argue that the artist's social vocation was to foster the viewer's psychological growth by introducing new forms of art the artist experiences the world this is a simplification but you'll you'll see the artist experiences the world through the filter of his or her own perception then translates that experience in the formal invention of their own art it is our obligation and opportunity as as viewers to receive this sympathetically drawing upon our own experience but learning and growing as a result from our encounter with the forms invented by the artist we can see how this can also be a kind of historical argument one that conveniently meshes with the master theory of modernism that we would recognize today artists first met with a hostility and incomprehension and then familiarity acceptance and maybe canonization because the clippings from the Philly coverage of the later tendencies exhibit suggest a critical establishment at least partly on its way to this result it's very remarkable to note that the 1923 exhibition was in fact received with uniform hostility in the Philadelphia press as can be seen in this survey of clippings oh oh we will i'm i'm i'm sorry that my my slides got a little bit out of order this is the paragraph panel which i think is quite interesting to see and i'll return to this in a minute and you'll see that the critics will talk about this okay so the Philadelphia Record writes it's that the 23 exhibition was debased art in which the attempt for a new form of expression results in the degradation of the old formulas not in the creation of something new the pictures shown are best described as nasty with full realization of the exact meaning of the word the public ledger Kalman public ledger says if this be art then a butcher shop is an academy they must be talking about soutine here i would think a visit to a mord may well replace a salon and then Dorothy Grafley who we saw offering uh uh positive words about the 1921 show writes the modernist artist must warp both life nature and life to meet his craving for the stimulus he cannot find the doctrines of so-called free love are here applied to art each man for himself and let no man stand as censor of his neighbor's actions there wooden necked monstrosities by modigliani uh barns had talked about the about about the modigliani specifically in the catalog passion say the artist and it is fevered passion for unclean things there are two women artists in this extraordinary collection ellen pardrette and mary lonson the former has produced a large canvas of apparently unrelated figures wandering about amid fishnets and a varied menagerie so we'll we'll come back to this but this is the painting that she's that she's discussing and then finally and most triggering to barns is uh edith powell's uh review in the public ledger one cannot help conjecture in what the peels would have said about the soutine portraits of the dregs of humanity they would have pronounced them very probably the creations of a disintegrating mind with a cheated abnormal outlook are we willing to look at the world with his eyes are we willing to give careful attention to what actually exists for him even if it seems to us diseased and degenerated in the pardrette panel madame poire the wife of the famous designer of women's fashions is said to be depicted in the figure to the left and in the other three figures the artist herself or what would they have said what would they have thought of the lack of reticence generally apparent in modernistic art the unabashed presentation and even flouting of the unmentionable that is formally is a desirable we do not encourage every impulse to self-expression we may elect not to swear or murder sneer or complain the psychoanalysts are right confession in paint or in stone may be as good for the soul as confession to a priest or a Freudian but should public confession be countenanced I wonder if Barnes is going to agree why are these responses so intensely negative and why are they negative in this way we maybe the influence of Durkheim and company had encouraged the association of modernism with insanity maybe the other exhibitions the peels and the Japanese canvases invited this kind of comparison maybe it's significant that the artists are not American as they were in the later tendencies exhibition and the critics felt freer and and less obliged to be nationalistic the art maybe it maybe it's has to do with the art itself which was not cubism and not abstract in the way that let's say the style of painting is but in fact experimented with representations of the body as we as we notice with a modigliani's routine the frank frankly and joyfully erotic joy of life by Matisse as well as by the period panel which as we see is also apparently a self-portrait I think all of these are plausible but as you can and undoubtedly there are other possibilities I'd be interested to know your thoughts but to me as you maybe you can tell I think the last of these points is the most interesting in particular because it seems to be a point that Barnes should have anticipated in fact he did anticipate here is a letter that he wrote in March on March 22nd so two weeks or so before the exhibition opens to Arthur Karls who had been a patron or had helped broker the the show in 1923 dear Mr. Karls I had never thought of nudity in connection with my pictures until Mr. Myers asked me about it yesterday so I looked at the photographs and find that some of the best of them are very nude for instance Ellen Padreot undoubtedly the greatest woman painter of this age is so shameless that she painted herself stark naked hair and everything in a group of which Madame Paré is one I never noticed either the ladies trimmings or what they might suggest to any person until Mr. Myers put the idea in my head the big Matisse you like so much which is great art has several nudes in it and especially young man and young woman stark naked and in each other's arms it never occurred to me until Mr. Myers sprung his idea that that young man and woman are not to be trusted together in that condition they might do what some of your officials and faculty probably would like the opportunity to do all and then he extends this to his African sculpture and concludes of the academy wants to respect dirty minded people the mat's there right if we read this pretty funny letter against the catalog essay that that I cited earlier from Barnes and which he was probably at this very moment writing we can see how Barnes's public philosophical pragmatism was leavened by private Freudian readings sardonically reacting against Myers's concerns about the nudes Barnes is sarcastically naming the theme of Myers's unconscious repressed desire which he would invoke in all of his private responses to critics and newspaper editors about the show of which there are many this is most starkly represented in his reaction to Edith Powell maybe I'll call this up again whom he attacks presumably queued by her citation of Freud on the question of obscenity and degeneracy and he repeatedly insinuates that her review was itself evidence of her own repressed sexual desire and I'm being judicious in the following quotations which are short on april 16th Barnes writes to Powell your criticism is more than a confession of sexual hunger it is as flagrant an example of exhibitionism as any clinical record the psychoanalysts can show compared to it Padreots revelation is a Sunday school document impurity he takes time to write to Guillaume saying I would like nothing better than to be arrested but then says if I in another letter perhaps I will go to jail for libel but it doesn't stop him because two days later he writes three letters to Powell and in the second of them he notes since I wrote you the first letter of this date my messenger came back from New York with a report embodying the results of a conference with several of the best psychiatrists in that city is the consensus of enlightened opinion that if a woman will publish her secret sex life and use it as a weapon she has no cause for complaint if the scientific facts of that history are put in plain language for purposes of explanation which of course is a thread of blackmail and by the end of April he's writing to the public ledger editors in which he's asking them to retract or be specific about quoting their free and loose public use of the words degeneracy fraud madness and perversion all of which culminated in a more systematic letter that resembles the one published in the American art news in 1921 asking them to respond to a particular to a series of charges what can we observe here first of all intense male aggression let's say right and and and at a degree of hostility that would make many cultural institutions quite wary about collaborations with the barns also I think a certain degree of disingenuousness let's say strategic disingenuousness because of many the many things that the barns foundation is it is quite an erotic collection and this is not a part of the official narrative of the barns but seems important to point out and maybe martha will address this as she talks about Renoir with you later but also the particularly difficult position that women writers may have found themselves in responding to these works in particular the eccentric but amazing I think triple self-portrait of a land parody art beautiful but not idealized as barns rightly points out if it's hard to excuse the abuse that he heaps upon edith powell impossible to excuse that abuse it's important also to emphasize what he recognizes and promotes in parody art and here it seems to me that one final piece of context may help us understand why this shakes down the way that it does the year of the barns charter 1922 is also celebrated as the anus mirabilis of literary modernism ts le it's the wasteland is published in 1922 virginia wolf's jacob's room james wildin johnson's book of american negro poetry claude mckay's collection of poems harlem's shallow shadows it's also the beginning of english language serialization of proust's a la reshance a la reshers to tom's perdu kathar man fields the garden party and of course james joises ulysses a book with a special connection to philadelphia as you know since it's the only complete handwritten manuscript is at the rozenbach library it was banned at the time of this exhibition and had been banned since an obscenity trial in 1920 when the modernist magazine the little review was prosecuted for publishing the novels nalsika episode as the chapter concerned the depiction in stream consciousness writing of a very imaginative girl in girdie mcdowell um the charges brought against the little review were concerned with um and i'm quoting corrupting the minds of young girls and this law of which presumably could be extended both to an audience but to the character represented and this law of gender extended into the courtroom itself where it was at first suggested that the women who edited and published the little review margaret anderson and jane heap should leave the courtroom when the offending passages were read as evidence into the record the lawyer defending anderson and heap was the collector john quinn who attempted unsuccessfully to defend them and joise with reference to freud in deciding against them and in banning the book for the next decade the lead justice mackinnerney wrote anticipating the terms that durkin would use in 1921 that the book was and i'm quoting like the work of a disordered mind thanks there's some time for questions if you have any or yeah do you think that a lot of this um plays off world war one um um this disillusioned uh people that had to deal with the outcome of it and um that's why all the psychology people were having to face traumas that they had never talked about or seen before hmm i mean world war one is definitely a context and it's and it's and it's it's a complicated one so i mean in general i think your the answer is yes that you know that there's um certainly in the in the psychological field um there's uh increased thought about um things like shell shock all right um the uh long-range psychological disturbances that um that soldiers would have been would have been exposed to um uh i'm hesitant to say there's a direct connection in part because in in most of these paintings and even it even in the 1921 exhibition where where this did it explicitly come up there are very few representations actually of violence or war so there's so that if you want to yeah go ahead yeah i see yeah urbanization yeah i see what you mean so so international exchange yeah um um yes sure yeah i i i i i i think so uh this is uh a period around the jazz uh age and there's more permissiveness that's emerging with music and people and how they dress and undress i'm wondering if you have any thoughts about why the you know how this plays out in in that context what they um i get i will i'm i'm going to punt on that question but i'm but but but but um but i think in an interesting way which is to say that barns was also a prodigious collector of blues records um and uh as far as i know no one has done work on that collection but that would be extremely interesting to know because that i would say is one of the sort of locus loci classic cusses of uh of of precisely the kind of um uh sexual expression that you're that you're referring to and i and and and barns would have been as you can see highly alive to double entendres yeah so um but i don't know his collection well enough to comment on it but i but um i think i think somebody needs to find out wonderful yeah thank you do you know how many uh paintings did barns have at at that time and um how did he finally make the decisions of which ones to use um and if this one he still owns it so it's still in our collection did you say i did so that's just in storage somewhere yeah right sun god okay yeah thank you i don't know um i mean i i although i think the first part of your question is answerable right because the because the the the acquisitions are numbered and um and so we there would be a reasonably accurate record of what barns bought and when right martha would you say yeah especially because we've looked into what he how much he had acquired around the time that he was that he had chartered the foundation so i want to say it's it was like at least 500 paintings yeah and uh and i don't know why he chose these except that they were the recent acquisitions so and he was excited about them and i think he was he was buying really you know significant i mean he was always buying some significant things but in that year leading up to the opening of the foundation he was um working with paul geome and just excited to get big you know big things like the joy of life hi so i was actually thinking something very similar because why he chose the particular pieces is pretty relevant because yeah um putting i forget what you said 14 or 17 suitines into the exhibit is a pretty high percentage right and there is a sort of obvious provocation yeah grotesqueness to those those paintings and all of that so there's the curiosity for that context is kind of apparent um i think it's sort of hard to not sort of look at things here we are 100 years later and we are in you know we have certain states that are banning books and anything that is other is considered perverse or degenerate or whatever it is so 100 years later we're kind of the pendulum is swinging back as it were yeah for sure i mean this is this is sort of old work for me i mean i there's new stuff in here but i last looked at this about 10 years ago and the type the point that you have identified is one that um jumps out to me much more now than it did in 2012 yeah there's an online question did Freud himself comment on any of this brouhaha either either about the philadelphia shows or the match show yeah don't you wish he did i don't think so i don't think so this may not be a fair question but i keep thinking about the context of prohibition and other um we call it uh social uh issues that were we're coming out of or jim crow era there's all sorts of suffrage everything and and how sort of threatening that is to individuals um and i i just i'm also a little surprised from the context of the europeans are accepting these works remember there had been an exhibit i think that uh barns had shown some of his paintings in in europe is that correct yeah he it was again i'm not sure all of the works but as many of these is that geomes gallery right and it was you know they were accepted but then you think about you know 50 years earlier what the impressionist dealt with degenerate crazy it's it's it's interesting isn't it i mean anything that's a little bit new for some um is threatening yeah no i think so and i i mean it's uh barns at least reports that the show at geomes gallery was a huge success but i think one also reads in the letters that you know he's maybe managing the media in a particular way but but i i i wonder if in just sort of the large narrative of the history of art we can see this painting in relationship to money's decision is to learn um for example and that um uh but but what really strikes me is coming out of the sort of limited limited response that we see in the in the newspaper articles is that uh the fact that these are self portraits is uh is seen as a kind of a third rail and and i think that that's something really worth thinking about i mean i and not only one but three right so so there's so there's something quite audacious and amazing about this painting i think so yeah um okay my question is since there was an exhibit of american oris in 1921 that there was such criticism about i was wondering i'm surprised that in like two years later that paffa would allow this exhibit to take place knowing i mean barns knew he was going to be getting pressed like this if that's what happened in 1921 so it was kind of interesting that they allow this exhibit to take place yeah for sure although as it strikes me that the that there is some positive reception to the 1921 show um and uh and and i guess the other thing that that strikes me as important is that um they're aware that that this might blow up in some way but it's also clear it's it's clear that this is an important art right that that that that's not at a certain level that's not in dispute the question is which institutions are going to take the risk of uh of displaying them but i think that i think that the 23 show was was the last of the modernist exhibitions to take place at the academy for quite a long time so yeah i've never heard of this artist before uh can you tell us more about her and where else some of her artwork is currently hanging i wish i could um uh i will admit that i discovered her in preparing this talk as well and there and so for example there's you know database of of paintings called art store which you know if you have access to university library you can you can access there are no paired works there online you can see that that there are there are a number of paintings that sold recently at an auction within the last within the last 10 years i don't know where they are um but i think that you know on the basis of this painting it's really worth knowing the story i wish i knew more what were born's full expectations for this exhibit and was it compared to the armory at all i i um with respect to the second half of your question i i didn't see any uh any specific comparisons to the armory show uh and there were as you have you as you've seen a number of other sort of famous exhibitions in the intervening years for example the 1921 show is often seen in relationship to the 1916 society of independent artists exhibition in the u.s. which is a lot of american artists famous for the uh for the du champ uh urinal for example right that um which you know which in some ways is um is more avant-garde than barns's collection would would end up being um and what were barns's expectations well i think i think he's really hoping to form uh a relationship with an educational institution he's founding an educational institution but he wants uh uh both the authority but also the resources uh of of an association either with penn or the pennsylvania academy so you can see in letters from around this period he's he tries to uh get the pennsylvania academy to appoint thomas hart benton as an instructor that will also teach classes at the barn so i think that in short that's really what he's thinking about that he he wants to um he wants to use this exhibit as um to advertise the collection but but more importantly that the educational program that he's in the process of of developing and wants to situate both at the new barns foundation and either at one of the established educational institutions like penn or the pennsylvania academy if we won yeah or or the way in which it was negatively received yeah i mean he had to right yeah yeah yeah for sure if you wanted to um think of what was happening at the time of these works world war one was significant yeah we just went through coveted we're a scientific organ you know society and very intelligent um perhaps they went through the flu epidemic at that time which killed more people than in world war two felt like into the black death so what significance do you think that had i don't think it's insignificant uh um uh well i'm not quite sure what are you how what do you see people would resort to more basic erotic thinking um with the threat of death surrounding them yeah yeah i mean let's say it's got to be significant that the key work in in this in this in this exhibition is the joy of life yeah i'm going to make a little observation see if i can turn it into a question the one real world uh background people aren't talking about is the period between like 1917 and 23 was known to be the most repressive in american history yeah i mean these this fight wasn't just in the art world i mean there were lynchings all over there were murders they were any any labor organizers they chase people that thought were foreign uh we had way more concentration camps in world war two so was a all i'm saying is there was a basic conflict in the way i almost feel like barns is just almost provoking them yeah i totally agree yeah um could you speak a little bit uh to the role of arthur carls in setting up the 23 exhibition um a little bit um but because you're asking the question uh do you do you know from carls i know his work yeah yeah um so i don't know much i know that he had worked in paris and his and he was uh uh an artist but also a commercial illustrator and and his work uh was you know bore the marks of sort of you know peresian abstraction so he was one of the instructors at the pennsylvania academy who was um uh very open to uh to to this new art uh he was um so he so he both he both um well as you saw he was on that he was on the on the committee that selected works in 1921 and he was also the person who was uh designated with being the sort of liaison between the pennsylvania academy and and barns as this as the as the as the exhibition was being staged and uh and i don't know enough to say precisely what the cause was but he was fired from the academy a couple of years after this exhibition so um so he so that it's possible that that um he was uh uh uh that that that was a that was a consequence of the of the reception of the show but but he was certainly generally a supporter of uh of of the art and quite interested in in barns's collection probably not a question for you but i've often wondered if my understanding there was a relationship between barns and carls yeah apparently quite a good good one at least for some period time and i've often wondered why there are no carls paintings in the barns collection yeah i know well also uh uh uh like jacob loren studied there and barns doesn't have any jacob loren's painting so it's yeah it's uh he may have owned one at one time but i i i don't know but it's i mean that that's that's a question that is not uh it's not exclusive to carls but it is certainly worth asking thank you yeah erin douglas i should say not jacob lorenz thank you for a wonderful thank you