 And welcome to Barns Takeout. My name is Nancy Eisen and I'm the gun family chief curator at the Barns. I'm working at home at the moment as so many of you are, but I'm really missing the collection and in particular works by Mordigliani who's one of the artists that I've looked at most within our holdings. So today I want to take you to look at one of the more unusual paintings by Mordigliani at the Barns Foundation and you'll find it upstairs so that's where you see in front of us now. It's a view of room 19, the south wall and we've just come in off the landing and we're just going to focus in on a picture that's to our left hand side just balancing out this wonderful wall arrangement and it's nestled in just by the door here. It's in the center of your screen now and it was made in 1916 and it's Mordigliani's portrait of the author Beatrice Hastings. Now I'll just focus for a little minute on the overall setting now you can see it balances out another portrait by Mordigliani on the on the other side of the wall but let's not waste any more time let's just head straight to looking in at the work really close up. So who was Beatrice Hastings? Well she's a really interesting character she was born in 1879 so she's a little bit older than Mordigliani who was born a few years later and she was born in London so she's one of my people and she was raised in South Africa but by the time she met Mordigliani she was living in Paris and the two of them were very much part of a Bohemian world and the way that Mordigliani paints this picture really gives us that impression you see that he has really really stylized Beatrice Hastings face to the extent where her features are really just kind of very cursory lines very angular features and that little right eye there reduced almost nothing and she just has that one eyebrow giving a real suggestion of character. Now Hastings and Mordigliani were lovers but Hastings was a very Bohemian character she was bisexual she had many partners and she also had many different pen names she wrote under about 20 different pseudonyms so really somebody who was very very hard to pin down and his opinions could you know go from one extreme to the other at the time Mordigliani knew her she was interested in in the cause for for women's voting rights but she would write articles both for the the rights of women and against the rights of women so again somebody who enjoyed the the mechanics of an argument somebody who was highly curious intellectually who was very competent in French and who was writing for publications in in London and you know really had an international network of contacts and it's interesting to think of what attracted Mordigliani to Hastings and really you do get a sense of an intellectual curiosity there they they enjoyed the same books they were interested in the same poets and if you look at the top right hand corner of the canvas you'll see that there are traces of newspaper actually within the materiality of the work and this is something that my colleagues in conservation at the Barnes Foundation have been looking at very closely and how did Mordigliani actually make these paintings so what we see here is him not just using paint but also using elements of collage which was something that his contemporaries were doing people like Picasso and Braque in their cubist explorations were taking little bits of found ephemera little bits of you know everyday material and putting them into their pictures really testing the boundaries between the everyday and and the realm of fine art and then atop of that newspaper we see that Mordigliani has written the letters of pictures in the first name there just spelling it out and it's it's hard to tell you know maybe he's almost scraping in those letters you can see that the the black has seemingly pushed the white out of place somewhat and there that are he's had slightly more trouble placing it down than than some of the others perhaps you can also see here the variations of texture across the surface um this is a painting where there's a lot going on and it certainly isn't smooth and polished Mordigliani doesn't seem to be worried about the fact that in some areas he's using the paint almost as if it's if it's a drawing material and just look at that wonderful flash of red on the year as we're close up there and it really does give you a a sense of his vibrant palette you read a lot of things that were written about Mordigliani in his lifetime you get the sense that he was a bit of a you know a kind of um well I guess like a bon vivant somebody who enjoyed a good time um had a lot of lovers uh experimented with drugs drank a lot um Hastings was very much part of that same world but it's not to say that there wasn't something more serious going on behind it all and in a way this this sort of popular image of Mordigliani distracts from the fact that usually the people he chose to spend time with were intellectually challenging it's interesting that he chose to date somebody who at that time had a more prestigious three reputation than he had an artistic one and he would have challenged him who would have been able to discuss art and literature and philosophy in in quite nuanced ways so as I say do have a close look at this picture when you're back at the barns um think about some of the people you know who challenge your ideas who who you miss exchanging with in this rather strange moment that we're in and please keep carrying on tuning in for some more barns takeout you can subscribe to our youtube channel and there'll be more of this tomorrow thank you very much 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