 Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I'm Tom Collins, the Newbauer Family Executive Director and President of the Barnes Foundation. I am pleased, as always, to welcome you this evening to a little celebration for our newest publication, Cezanne in the Barnes Foundation, a landmark volume that was edited by Andrei Dombrovsky, Associate Professor of 19th Century European Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Nancy Ierson, our Deputy Director for Collections and Exhibitions and Gun Family Chief Curator. And from Paris, many of you will remember, I hope very fondly, C.V. Patry, who was with us for three years before assuming the role of Chief Curator at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. So it's thrilling to have C.V. back as well. Welcome back. Before we begin our conversation, a bit of background. The Barnes is, as many of you may know, home to the single largest group of Cezanne's in the world, 61 oil paintings and eight works on paper, a collection that spans every stage of the artist's career and includes iconic pictures, like the card players and the large bathers. As you may also know, access to this collection was very much restricted during Dr. Barnes' lifetime, and the works in the galleries therefore went largely unstudied. Cezanne in the Barnes Foundation is the first publication to present our Cezanne holdings in their entirety. And like our volumes on American art, on Renoir, African art, and Matisse, it represents our commitment to advancing progressive scholarship on the collection. This new volume is born of many years of research and collaboration with colleagues from around the world. It contains entries by renowned scholars on every one of these paintings and works on paper. Essays about Dr. Barnes' collecting and writing on Cezanne and findings from the technical study of key paintings by our own staff conservators Barbara Buckley and Anya Shutov that illuminate Cezanne's working methods. And I would say that this marriage of art historical and conservation research is, I think, one of the most exciting aspects of this publication. We are grateful to all of the authors who contributed their time and expertise and to our director of publications, David Updike, for steering this complicated project to completion. I also wanna pay special tribute to someone who was integral to the success of this volume, our dear friend, Joe Rischel, former curator of European painting and sculpture before 1900 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who agreed to work with us on this project five years ago. Joe passed away just about this time last year and those of us that were close to him miss him very dearly and hope that in bringing this project to completion, we commemorate our collaboration and recognize all that he did to advance Cezanne's studies through his exhibitions and scholarship. And when you have a chance to peruse the book, you will note that it is dedicated to Joe Rischel. Cezanne and the Barnes Foundation is made possible through the generous support of Aquavella Galleries, John Alchin and Hal Marriott, Edward and Glenda Aspland, Lois and Julian Brodsky, the Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Foundation, Catherine Sacks, Joanne Thalheimer, Margaret and Tom Whitford, the Honorable Constance H. Williams and Dr. Sanky V. Williams, Robert and Wilson and Michelle Plant and other individual donors. All of the publications at the Barnes are supported with the generous grant from the Lois and Julian Brodsky Publications Fund. And now I'm gonna hand things over to our speakers. We are very fortunate to have the volume editors Andre Dombrovsky, Nancy Ierson and Sylvie Patry here with us today. And we are very much honored to welcome Jodi Hauptmann, who is Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art and Jodi will be moderating for us this weekend. It's lovely to see you. Jodi and I were colleagues many years ago at the Museum of Modern Art and she is a rocket ship in the field. If you have not had the opportunity to peruse the catalog from her exhibition, most recently says on drawing, I can't recommend it enough at one rave reviews and represents a truly critical contribution to the field. So she is a wonderful moderator for us to have this evening. So Jodi, thank you for being here as well. And with that, I'll ask you to join me in welcoming all of our speakers. Thank you so much. From that more than generous introduction it's such a pleasure as always to be here at the Barnes. And I'm especially delighted to be here tonight to celebrate the publication of this really epic book and with colleagues, art historians, curators who I so admire. So just really a pleasure for me all around. The publication is a truly exciting moment for all of us who love the Barnes. And I think all of you here are in that group making this collection available to anyone interested in Cezanne and really with enormous resonance and reverberations in the field of art history and conservation. So it's just gonna spark so much. So that's really, I think, an exciting part of it. So as a plan for this evening, I'm going to get things started asking my esteemed colleagues a few questions for the first part of our evening about an hour. And then we'll turn to questions from all of you and also to those who are watching this virtually. So you can participate as well. So as a start, before we get to the book, I wanted to ask who was Paul Cezanne at the times Barnes built this collection? Who was Paul Cezanne for Dr. Barnes? And I want to turn to Sylvie to start us off. Thank you, Dodie. Good evening, everyone. So when Barnes started to be interested in Cezanne, it was in 1912. He made his first purchases this year. So Cezanne was already died. I mean, he died in 1906. And I would say that Cezanne at the time was starting to be famous and recognized by artists and collectors. But Barnes belongs to this generation of collectors who really built a modern collection based on Cezanne. But it was quite new. I mean, Cezanne during his lifetime had a very few group, a very intimate, I would say, restricted group of collectors. So there was a first wave of really avant-garde and avant-garde collectors. Then a second wave starting from 1895 when a dealer in Paris, Ambroise Volard, organized a first solo show dedicated to Cezanne. And really it was a shift in his career. So this was the second wave of collecting in a way. And especially, I mean, Cezanne was really sort of stir by young generation artists, artists such as Picasso, Matisse, et cetera, really discovered Cezanne at the time. So when Dr. Barnes started to be interested in 1912, it's the third wave of collector and he was able to benefit from a large amount of works that were on the art market, especially in Paris, because Cezanne has sold very few pictures during his lifetime. I mean, there were many, many works available on the market at the time. And the first generation of collectors died, so they were big sales. So Barnes started in this context in Paris. And he recognized pretty quickly that of the importance or the experimentation or what was it that... Hello, is that better? Sorry, so what I was saying is I'm trying to understand what Barnes saw in Cezanne, why he wanted to take advantage so immediately to those available works. Okay, I'll take it. Thank you, Jodi. And thank you, it's so nice to see Sylvie again after the season, be on the stage with Nancy. So welcome everyone. I think Dr. Barnes had a very particular version of what modernism and modernist painting is, that it is a way to give life to form itself, to make form alive in painting. And he understood for a while by 1910 in the first years of the teens that there are different versions of that. And one of them is the sensualist version. And that's why he liked Renoir and Matisse and that aspect of bringing life into painting through a sense of sensual pleasure, erotic pleasure. And then there's the more cerebral version, the Cezanne version where we are looking at the world just as intimately and directly as those other painters, but we are arriving at a more structural, fundamental account of the picture and of the world in turn. So I think he liked that combination. He wanted to bring both of those tendencies, an almost equal measure onto the walls of his foundation eventually. So I think Cezanne came to stand for that material investigation that's very thoughtful and structuralist in a way. And so he bought Cezanne accordingly, I think. And it's very much a Cezanne that's starting to emerge in those years as well, where Amy Danar makes similar arguments, Moïse Douny. The symbolist critics are developing a language to describe that aspect of Cezanne. That doesn't mean that there are still plenty of critics around who say, oh my God, what is this? This is all a big mess and chaotic and we can't see anything. There's just endlessly misplaced brush marks. Those critics are still there as well by the teens. But those other voices are starting to be anthologized, be heard more loudly. And so Barnes is at that moment when that happens right there and selecting among the best things there are. What did it, one of the things that the book brings up is the way that Barnes really collected with exhibition in mind, with display in mind. Can you talk about that, maybe Nancy, take up that question? For sure. What does it mean to collect that way? Well, I think collecting that way really tells you a lot about Barnes as an individual and how I think it really gives us a sense of theme, social meaning, social meaning, everything else being secondary to Barnes's overall vision. And you still see that in our galleries today. For instance, we know that he was less keen on still lives than he was on landscapes. And the galleries again tell us that there's something about format. He clearly likes that sort of straight linearity. They are filling a purpose that is more than the artist's desires, if you like, or the artist's intentions. I think with that question, who was Cezanne for Barnes? I quite like to think this as a, Cezanne was progressive for an audience in 1912. Barnes isn't the first American to buy Cezanne, but he's certainly amongst the first. And if you think of what else is being made in 1912, this is, if you were in Paris and you really had your finger on the pulse, you would have been seeing cubist pictures. Barnes is not cutting edge, but he's still very forward thinking. But he is, as I say, you've got to put those kinds of caveats in there. So knowing all of that and with that kind of background that you all have in Barnes collecting and what his ambitions were and what the display looked like or what he hoped to display. I'm just thinking about this fantastic volume and maybe Andre can hold it up to give you a sense of the heft of this thing. I mean, it's just- Can I, can I though? It's just exactly, exactly. And it's just, for those of you, for those who've actually seen it, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but for those who haven't, it is just an absolutely fantastic mix of deep dives into individual works, essays that take up thematic categories, conservation studies, documentation, a chronology, long form overviews of Barnes collecting and scholarship and then a kind of addendum with all of the catalog information. So this thing is just, I mean, astounding. And so I couldn't help but wonder as I looked at it, what was your approach? How did you, I mean, this is a massive collection of things. How did you decide what to do? How did you, you know, what was your strategy here? And Sylvie, you wanna start with that? Maybe I can start. I mean, I don't know if it was a strategy, but I think that's what we wanted from the very beginning and Tom mentioned earlier, the marriage between curators, art historians and conservators. We wanted really something really object based because we had this possibility to really look very closely at the works and what we did was really to mix conservation and conversation. I mean, when I was typing my notes, I mean, I made a mistake and instead of writing conservation lab, I wrote conversation lab because what we wanted to do is read to bring. So we had a kind of ritual every Tuesday when I was at the Barnes and Joe Richard would come every Tuesday afternoon. We would bring a painting in the lab with Anya, with Barbara, and then we invited the author of the catalog just to look very closely at the work. So the first phase was really a visual examination and a discussion. And then there was a phase two, sequence number two with Anya and Barbara looking also very closely to the works, but also making some technical investigation. So we really wanted to anchor the project in the object because it's a catalog, it's a catalog of a collection of material which is available. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful description of how this got off the ground. And then eventually I think it became important for all of us that this is also a very readable book because when you are, I don't know how many catalog resumes any of you have read from page one to page 439. I, my money is on not very many. So we were invested in bringing a group of the main Cezanne scholars together and giving them the task to sometimes write on a single object, sometimes on a group of objects in part because we wanted to have the entries read a little bit more essay-like to have essays at the beginning, to have the conservation, I almost said conversation. Also very readable. So I think that very quickly became also a topic of discussion amongst us that how do we get a catalog resume into book form and into readable book form? And that was one way for us to do that, to sort of group things, to give the essays to a very different kind of scholars, more established scholars and some very young scholars like Fabienne Ruppen who is participating, received her PhD just a few years ago and just bring a variety of perspectives on this material and a variety of voices. So I think those were our starting points. I think that this was very much at the heart of the project. I mean Nancy explained earlier that it's a very formalist approach from Barnes viewpoint and what we wanted to bring in the book is really to broaden really the approach to Cezanne, especially I would say in this specific context of the Barnes collecting. So having scholars who are much more interested in, I don't know, social history, cultural history. I mean, every kind of approach that you cannot experiment at the Barnes when you visit the collection. So the book was really designed and conceived to shed new light and as a complement to the display in a way. And just to push that a little bit further, how did some of the results that the essays and what people learned from studying the works either follow what Barnes had shared earlier or depart from it. And also, I think related, I'm curious about what it means to work on a collection. When we do an exhibition often, we can go out and get any work that we want in a way and put together a story from works from the whole global world of collections. But here, you're in a sense bounded, even though this is an enormous collection, how did those boundaries also impact? Did the collection tell you something about an individual work? And did the individual work tell you something about the collection? I think that one of the interesting things with a collection, and in particular, the Barnes collection, is that this process, I think, for everybody involved, makes you realise how much we learn about works of art through the exhibition process. Ordinarily, if you are a museum that lends its works, you send a piece out and you have colleagues in an institution like, for instance, MoMA. Although these wonderful says and drawings went to MoMA, and Jodie thought about them and wrote about them. And people saw them because they were in another publication. So you find that your colleagues in the field are doing that work for you. That didn't happen with the Barnes collection. As many of you in this room know, because you're such good friends of the Barnes, the collection didn't travel. Access was restricted. That process of seeing, learning, looking, and even seeing a picture under different lighting. Or in concert with Comparative Works. The catalogue that Sylvie began, and that we've all sort of pulled together to produce, really gave the opportunity to liberate those works and to have them breathe individually, actually pull each piece out, explore it, see it as a standalone work, and then actually try and tease out the relationships that those pieces have with other pieces. That they've never been seen with. That was the really wonderful opportunity that this book offered. I was interested, to that point of the groupings, the different kind of thematic categories, like the corner. Or they were just very evocative titles. Maybe you could say a little bit more about that too. Thank you. I mean, yes, it's something we did. It was in the summer of 20, I don't know, 15 or something like that. I remember with André making these groupings, and we wanted to have some visual or quite unexpected categories, such as corners, or as you said, or tables and things like that, but also more traditional categories, such as bedders or still life. I think maybe for us, it was also a way to escape from the very strict frame of the collection, and to really to open the windows, and to have more freedom to operate. Yeah, I agree. I think for us, it was important to mix this up a little bit. And there are a variety of ways to do that, in part what became clear to me, working on this for these five, six years is how, and this is true for anybody of scholarly knowledge, how much it can repeat itself, can become a bit of an entrenched form of speech and discourse. And so I think we just wanted to assign authors topics where we weren't exactly sure what exactly they would come up with, and the results were pretty much entirely fantastic. And so I think what we wanted to do was engineer some of those surprises into being. And I think that worked quite well. For me, at the end of this, what was maybe one of the bigger surprises was actually to learn a lot more about, not just about Barnes as a collector, but also as a thinker and a writer, and it's actually a lot more complicated and evocative itself than what I had thought was there before I actually took a closer look. And his language itself, when he writes about Cezanne, is full of metaphors that are quite astonishing in many ways. So I had to talk about the card players as mountains or I think at some point he calls them a fortress or something and so just the whole panoply of things he has to say about these pictures is quite something. And there is an essay in the book by John Elderfield that brings many of these issues to the fore. So I think it was important to us to invent a framework that was open enough to make some of these surprising readings possible. And I hope we've gotten some way towards that. I have a question in mind, but I just want to follow up on something you said about how the language that Barnes used to describe Cezanne's and I was the chance to be in the galleries a little bit before this evening. And I always find when I'm here that I want to try to break the code and figure out why the card players are below the big Sura models or why one thing is next to another. And I'm wondering whether that language gave you any kind of clue or a key to what we see when we're in those galleries. Don't all jump at once. Well, I think definitely anybody that's taken a Barnes class or has sort of thought about the Barnes method will start to have some ideas about this. But as much as you think, well, when we see something like the card players in the gallery one and it reiterates the balance of that work, we see qualities in Cezanne that sometimes we might miss in another context. So I think some of that is there, but also, and I don't think Barnes would thank us for saying it, but like Barnes himself and his contradictions, I think that the hang also helps us to see Cezanne's contradictions. These things do not operate uniformly. The still lifes throw things out. Cezanne's aren't always well behaved in the ensembles. And so I think there is that wonderful tension. And there is, for all the theorizing, for all the times we can see, well, there's this sort of rhyme between this color or this shape across the rooms. There's always something that's elusive. There's always that extra guessing. And maybe that is the, perhaps that is the rationale that it just keeps us looking and it keeps us guessing. But I agree, I do often wonder why the puzzles is above the card players. One of the many questions. One of the pleasures I think of reading the texts in the catalog is this kind of weaving back and forth between us looking at the object and trying to understand it, but also hearing the story of how it was collected. And so that's included in almost all of the essays, it's acquisition story. And so I'm wondering about that in terms of, that's not typical for a catalog resume to go into that at each moment and really give us the texture of that purchase or the chase. And so I'm hoping that maybe Sylvie, you could speak to that as part of this project. I mean, yes, it was very much part of the project because I mean, to me, I mean, it's the kind of the book and the collection is really an encounter between an artist and a collector and a vision. I mean, the book is not about Cezanne, it's about Cezanne at the bounce. So it's really a vision which was very much oriented towards Cezanne. And in addition, I would say that there is, I mean, the bounce has many, many resources and it's not always the case when you work on a collector because we have kept the bounce as all the archives. So you are really able to tell the story and it's so fascinating to see because it's really the beginning of the art market for modern art. So you can learn a lot about, of course, bounce and his taste and what he wanted to buy, what he missed. I mean, there were many missed opportunities and what he was able to resell. I mean, because he refined the collection so it's not like if he started in 1912 and then stopped in the 1920s, in the 1930s. I mean, sometimes he hesitated on some paintings. I mean, he was looking for some works for many, many years. So there is really a good story to be told. And I would say that it's really a part of the project because we need, I mean, it's also a question of being aware of the material you're looking at. I mean, it's assembled by a collector in a given historical context with choices but also a part of chance. I mean, when a work is available or when a work is not available. So it tells a lot about Cezanne but it tells a lot about history of how you look at art in a way. Yeah, that's very true. And just to give one very concrete example, the card players that Nancy and I worked on, there's probably almost two pages of acquisition history because it reads like it has novelistic overtones because Barnes tries to buy a card player's painting for six years, makes Volard various offers, the kind of offers that are like, you scribble something on a piece of paper, you push it over to the other side and they're looking at it and they're like, no. And so Volard refuses to sale a couple of times and this goes back and forth for years. And we have all those numbers, right? And so we know how much he offered for the first time, then we know how much he offered two years later, which was a little bit more than the price goes down again and then it goes up again. And eventually he actually gets it, I think even for a little bit less than what he initially offered six years earlier. And we have a sense of what he eventually paid, right? And the equivalent of $1.5 million in today's money for the card players. I don't know if I remember roughly. And I cannot imagine that many circumstances in early modernist collecting where we have this information to this kind of detail and back and forth. And it just painted for me a much more vivid picture of the labor of collecting and really the business finesse of it all, which was in many ways fun to tell, but also just very, very illuminating about the art market a hundred years ago. Even there was a moment where he has to acquire more than what he wants in order to get the things that he actually has focused on. So, and then the things come in and he's a little on the fence about it. So even that kind of level of texture and the chase is really fascinating. Cindy Kang, who as again, many of you know our associate curator and did a really wonderful job of writing an essay on Barnes collecting Cezanne. And I would just encourage you to read it because it's a great story. I mean, it really does have that very compelling drive. And I think it's a nice consideration to if you're not an art historian, to understand how you kind of get gripped by something and that drives your writing process as well. Like it's such a, it's a wonderful story to unpack. And I think that Barnes is such an engaging figure. Really, he is fascinating. And so we also found in this book, to Sylvie's point, it's Cezanne in the Barnes Foundation. It helps to really kind of bring out that very particular aspect. I'm interested, Nancy, that you brought up writing and writing these essays, I guess both of you, Andre too. And you're very honest in the introduction to the catalog about how difficult it is to write about Cezanne. And that's something I've experienced myself. So I'm kind of with you all on that. But I'm just wondering about the idea of difficulty that we often hear about with Cezanne and how does it, how did that impact your take on these works, your take on the history of the works? How do you wrestle with that difficulty? Anybody want to take that up? Yeah, Jody, such a nice question. And so, yes, in one, a moment in the introduction that we have us sort of say, oh, there's a difficulty here to be overcome that is just intrinsic into this project. And for me, the difficulty writing about it is that whenever you try to pin a word or a sentence on something, it will never quite get the gesture of Cezanne right because Cezanne's gestures are always doubled and they are speaking about the world out there and the atmospheric effect out there at the same time that they are a brushmark. And no sentence, no string of words is ever going to exactly get all that endless doubling and bifurcation in Cezanne right. But once you have acknowledged that to yourself, then at least you can pull it into two sentences behind one another or into two paragraphs and start that kind of back and forth. So that's my way of writing beyond or through that impasse. I'll also say that that gesture has become a little bit of a cliche in Cezanne studies. This goes back to a famous sentence that T.J. Clark wrote. I think maybe even in response to the Card Players exhibition, I'm trying to remember where I think he writes a review for the London Review of Books and it starts with the sentence like, Cezanne cannot be written about any longer, period. He had something very particular in mind, but as social media and the internet does, it likes to take a sentence and spin it out of control and that sort of happened with it a little bit, right? And so now we're at a moment where we're figuring out what can we say, right? How can this complexity actually be translated into words? And I think there are just, there's not one strategy in how to do this, but there are 15 strategies of how to do that in this book. And I think that's the pay of for me of reading it collectively. So either of you have a strategy that you use to kind of start making some progress with the blank screen or the blank legal pad. Well, I mean, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Jodie, because I know that Andre and I and Sylvie have, you know, battled these things around in our heads. I think he had to, and that you're right, that that review was about the card players, not that I take my reviews too personally, but yeah. But I do think it's not to be, to be different from what you're saying, but I think it's not to be different from what you're saying. To be defeated by that, actually, to find the energy to actually say, well, one note, you know, not everything has been said. And actually one of the purposes of doing a book like this is to make sure that people keep reading about the artist and being introduced to the artist. And, you know, who knows where those new perspectives are gonna come from? This is not the last word. And I think that's kind of the wonder of it really. So that kind of, that's also a liberation, I think. But as I say, it'd be lovely to, yes, Sylvie and Jadie, to hear from you. Oh, so I don't have any strategy to write on Cezanne. And I mean, to my eyes, I mean, it's still a very demanding artist and it's very imposing. So I think that when you write on Cezanne, you have to, you have the feeling that you have to leave it up to his, you know, quest to his, yes, his holistic and his complex research. So it's a, yes, I mean, I find him always really imposing and impressive. So I admire you because you've written extensive on Cezanne, which is not my case. I just wrote for this catalogue, but yes, it's a, but maybe you're right, just having in mind that it's not the last word and that, I mean, people will write again and after us, so it's a kind of liberation when you think this way. I completely agree. I think one of the things in my project is that there was a moment when I thought, okay, I'm, we're part of the benefit of bringing works from all over the world is that you can set the table and you lay all those things out and people can scholars and artists and viewers and philosophers and poets can come and look at those things and they can take what they're going to take from it. And I think that this book is going to serve that purpose. It's a kind of like, you kind of, it's like the spark that's going to start the fire that's going to make a whole other set of scholarship and other art. And so I think that that's one of the amazing things about this volume that we should be all so grateful to the three of you for. And then I think the second thing for me in terms of the difficulty is back to how you started this evening, which is close looking. Is it, I just think if we can sit in front of these things and really look closely and with the partnership of our beloved conservators and really look at these things, we can, I mean, that's really, I think where you can kind of where, and you're never going to beat the difficulty or the challenge, that you can make some headway in understanding. And so I'm going to use that as a kind of segue to the very beautiful close looking in this catalog. Because one of, again, another pleasure of it is the most of the authors begin their essays by inviting you into the painting or into the watercolor and take you on a kind of visual journey before they begin their kind of analysis or the history of the picture. And it's so generous, it's so welcoming. So I'm wondering if we can do a little bit of that tonight. Maybe we can put up a work or two and have these three talk about, do some of that analysis for you all, how they approach these work. So maybe should we start, maybe with Boy with Red Vest, if we can call that up from the booth and maybe that was one of the works that Andre wrote about. And it's companion painting is at the Museum of Modern Art. So it's a work that I love very much. Yeah, there he is. Yes, this is a work I chose to write about myself. It was a pleasure to assign these works to others. It felt very nice to hand over the work rather than write them myself. But that one I chose to work on myself. So I started with, again, like Jody said, with a close look. And I think some of our mandates actually to the authors were to combine a couple of different things in an essay. A close looking, the collecting history, the history of interpretation for each object. Or we did give them a little bit of a roadmap. So for, and for this painting, I wanted to get something that I think is deeply profound about Cézanne just right. And that is the mix of painterliness and paintedness of a figure who is there as a weird, strange, painted presence. And I wanted to articulate those features of his strange face, of the expression that it has, that we are a part of his hair, the way in which this figure is endlessly pressed into formal requirements. How that dark brown line above the scaffolding is holding his head in place. All those features, I think, needed saying first. Then, and this is where I think my particular angle of scholarship then comes in. And this is not true for all the essays. I think art history can sometimes luxuriate a little bit too long in visual looking. And to me, that can sometimes end up fetishizing the art object just a little bit too much if you stay there over page and page and page. So I wanted to find out eventually, not just who is this figure who is on the other end of that act of portrayal, who is in that painting. And we actually through some scholarship that an Italian scholar has done about the various Italian models who practiced in Paris. We actually have a concrete name and we know he's age now. And so all that information was there. So I then thought, okay, I'm gonna give this character just a little bit more voice and on the opposite end of this exchange between the two because so often it ends up about Cézanne and Cézanne making an object and a painting. And then I thought, who in the 1880s is wearing a frickin' red vest, right? Who would do that? I would do that. I would probably have fun things to wear. Then a blue crevat with that. This is, I thought, this is an outfit. This is not somebody dressing for the day. This is an outfit. Okay, what do we do with that then? And so I started looking and it actually turns out and from the earliest sort of cataloging of this picture he's always known as an Italian boy with an Italian outfit. Well, what does that actually mean? So I found some prints from the early 19th century where precisely this outfit is depicted and it's a Roman early 19th century outfit. So there's a little bit of contextual history that I wanted to bring to this dress. Then it turns out that the red vest is a kind of icon of romantic self-expression, right? There are stories of the romantic writers going to the theater in red vests and so on. So it has this very romantic heritage in opposition to kind of gray drab bourgeois dress. So I then, so I took this as a picture and as a formal proposition as a picture and as a portrait, but then wanted also to excavate some of the social meanings that this choice of figure, this choice of dress clearly had and get the combination of those two just right because to me that is Cezanne and a grabbing of social details that are then turned into these really strong and powerful forms, right? But that balance I think I really wanted to struck right in that entry. Should we move to the card players for Nancy? And yeah, just that's a wonderful, as we were waiting for the slide, just wonderful to think about the way Cezanne was an artist who responded to his own day and often we don't, it's not something that I think maybe Barnes talked about so much or scholarship in general has talked about so much. Just before we leap into the card players, if I can test the Robin and I earlier in the booth, I think we have a lovely picture of Joe Rischel in the studio at the Barnes with Sylvie having a look at, maybe we could find that because it's just such a nice picture. And actually what I want to really single out is that methodology, thank you, of Clay's looking which was really at the heart of the project at its conception, that wonder of actually being able to be with the objects and so many of the authors did come to the Barnes and they really spent time with the works and that was something that you just, there aren't many places you could do that so it's another reason why this is a really special place to be and a very special place to look at pictures. Ah, okay, okay, too bad. Well, trust me, it's a wonderful picture and we will share it with you at some point to be continued. But what I do want to bring out at this moment is how, they all took place in our conservation studios and Barbara Buckley and Ania Shutova really deserve a huge amount of praise because what we've learned about Cezanne technically in this project really changes the field and that's not an exaggeration because there are so many works at the Barnes, there have been technical studies done on Cezanne many, many times and actually this is a wonderful moment to bring this in because the card players for an exhibition at the Cortell Gallery which we've sort of touched on that I was involved in myself, Charlotte Hale of Eva Bernstock, many people contributed to that project and looked at versions of the card players in different places. Now at that time, it was relatively difficult to actually learn about works in the Barnes collection. That project was in 2010, so before the Barnes came to the Parkway and so although the authors for the catalogue in 2010 could speculate about the card players and where it came within the sequence, we know that in the 1890s Cezanne was really preoccupied with this topic and Andre and I have lots of thoughts about why that is and please read the essay to kind of dig out those meanings but what was really exciting and new in this instance is not only could we elaborate on that meaning and again Andre talks really cleverly about print culture and how that sort of works into the topic but we could look at the underdrawing, we could look at the changes that Barnes makes to the composition and we know that the figure in the centre was originally wearing a hat, yes. So you start to see these things through the kinds of imaging that haven't been done in the past so you're starting to build up a much broader picture of Cezanne as a practitioner. Other things that came out through this process is that we understood how erratic Cezanne is. Some works have underdrawing, some works have barely no underdrawing so there's no consistent way of him working and sometimes it'll add extra bits of canvas to a work like in the Allée et Marine so it's just so interesting to bring this to the forefront and the conservation staff really deserve a huge amount of praise for bringing that because you might just sort of think of it as a slim essay in the volume but it's packed with info. Yeah, really the volume really does reflect that back and forth and those technical discoveries and really exciting to see this kind of thing, those x-rays and you almost feel like you're in the lab so that's very special. So there we have one of the examples of the little alteration so on later in this one he opened out what we call the tacking margin so the sort of edge of the canvas just to sort of make it a little bit bigger on the left so there's lots of little glimpses like that into what he was doing. What about you Sylvie, can we bring up the bathers in repose? Yes, there is a such question so I was allocated I mean this work was assigned to me at the very first beginning of the project by Joe I don't know if it was a consolation prize but you told me you should write on these pictures it's because I mean these pictures were used to belong to Gustave Cabot and it was offered to the French museums at the end of the 19th century and a part of the collection was accepted by the curators at the time but some pictures were rejected and among them there was this one so every time I was, when I was at the bounce every time I said oh it should be at the Orsay but I mean the story ended well because it's at the bounce he purchased it in 1932 so I had the great pleasure of working on this picture with Chris Riopel, a great friend from, I mean from Philadelphia and from London and I think that what we wanted to address in this essay and three to go back to the fact that we wanted to have a different voices in the catalogue et cetera and I think that with this very specific work what we wanted to convey is of course is the complexities mystery and how open a picture by Cézanne can be so what we try to figure out is what are you looking at when you look at such a picture? I mean it's basis of course it's traditionally we say that it's a kind of recollection of Cézanne when he was younger when he was going to the countryside with Emile Zola and you know, take baths but I mean it was painted 20 years after this sortie with Zola to place so is it an opener scene? Is it a recollection? Is it a reconstruction? And we need also in the entry is really to to determine to find all the inspiration the sources that were mobilized by Cézanne when he was painting these pieces at rest so he looked at old masters he looked at sculpture and there is a really interesting dialogue between you know the flatness of the painting and all the sculptures he was referring to so is it a kind of collage of museum references? Is it, I mean are they male bathers, female bathers at some point? I mean you can really identify the gender of the models and to go back to André's point with the young boy with the red vest I mean who are there? I mean they are not bourgeois during a leisure moment I mean their bodies are much more like workers' bodies I mean so I think that what we wanted to convey working on this work is really how I mean puzzling and disorientating it is even now I mean and it's also one of the very very rare works that Cézanne decided to display to show publicly before 1895 before this great exhibition at Volare he showed very few works and this one was exhibited in 1877 in Paris and I mean it was completely misunderstood I mean people really rejected very strongly this picture so it's also interesting in terms of reception and even if we are no longer shocked by the painting I think we are still really yes I mean disoriented by what it means and what is at play in this work Yeah I think that word disorienting is perfect and it's such a fabulous and complex and rich thing and you raise this idea of reception and so it makes me want to raise this question to all of you which is that this is your book comes out at a moment where there's been a kind of resurgence in exhibitions and other projects about Cézanne certainly our project on drawing to the Museum of Modern Art but that followed a host of other things in Europe and retrospective to come and so I'm just wondering this question how can we make Cézanne relevant to our current moment in art history and museum culture how can we come up with a 21st century way of looking at Cézanne was that something that was in your mind like the kind of why now why publish this book now kind of question I know that's a hard one does anyone have a want to start us off Okay I'll take it Jody lovely question Yes absolutely it does strike me and I'm sure everyone on the stage that it is that these are kind of really Cézanne here you know with your amazing show publication of this book the the big retrospective that's coming up next summer in Chicago and then you know next summer in Chicago and then in London so there and many other projects as well so and and what I have noticed in as a slight redirection of how we look at Cézanne is I think that was very clear in your show and it's very clear in this book certainly is that material honing in into process and material transformation they're going to really deep look into into an object right and I think there Cézanne can really help us exemplify somebody who in his day just didn't take the visual world and the world of the spectacle for granted you know wasn't scrolling past something endlessly but but but really wanted to dig into the properties and the meanings of of the stuff of the world and the pictures are just full of that endlessly and and I think this moment in art history through technical analysis close looking and so on really actually takes that challenge in Cézanne seriously and I think that's why people are coming right because of that sustained really deep encounter with with materials and with the world for me in the other way to to make Cézanne relevant is a little bit more you know my bailey wick I'll be very frank and really getting away from some of those 20th century fixations on Cézanne as the originator of X and the and the father of this and that I think the the moment for all of that kind of canon building to me is hopefully more or less over and instead I really wished it that we were more often looking at at a Cézanne that does have something to say about the social and not just about form right I think an exhibition about Cézanne in X that actually takes all the various class positions the workers next to the lady in blue and and a really careful excavation of what Cézanne actually sees is going on culturally in his environment I think it would be amazing and part of this I think the Chicago and London versions of the retrospective are going to do I think they're going to do something very exciting as far as I know they've invited ten contemporary artists to respond to Cézanne and that's going to be largely what their catalog is going to do and and obviously when that happens so many other interesting things are can all of a sudden be seen in Cézanne right I think there's going to be a big section on on the model Scipio who he painted in the 1860s who was a model of African descent who Cézanne shows from the back with almost wounds on his back that the painting process is almost brought about so there are I think whole layers of Cézanne that I think 20th century modernist art history and exhibition making has just never really confronted and maybe this is the moment when I'm hoping that that could be done a little bit more and I think Cézanne completely lends itself to both I think those avenues of inquiry but that is just me That's a wonderful answer Andre I think too and it's something we've touched on this evening is this idea of not being the last word and I think particularly for internally at the barns for people that work at the barns who love the barns the book also functions in an educational sense it is a wonderful place to learn more about works that haven't always been written about to a great extent and that in turn feeds into our classes it feeds into our work in communities with schools groups coming in and some of this is a slow burn when these 21st centuries perspectives on the artist emerge maybe this is in 20 years 30 years time but it's you need the tools to do that with and so I think this book an exhibition like the one that Jody's just done all of this just really helps keep the work top of mind because again we need to see these things in order to be thinking about them so it really is the visibility piece too I think that mention of community and the people who are going to learn so much from this book is a perfect segue to turning the podium over to you all and we're hoping that you have questions for a panel and I know there'll be some questions coming in virtually as well so for those in the room there's a microphone that's going to be passed around and that's important I see there's a question up there I have a question before we see if there's any in the room Amy asks what insights from the collaboration do you think you might apply to future work sorry I think we missed that last bit what insights from this collaboration do you think you might apply to your future work so what insights from this can we apply to other projects I don't know if there's something that impacted Validon since that wonderful exhibition is just right upstairs I think that it and maybe again I speak to Sylvia and Andre is that it reminds us how you are constantly surprised you think you know an artist and there's always something that you've missed or something that you see differently so it's a good reminder not to be complacent and I think it also just it helps us to be really thoughtful about making and that is something that you know again looking at our future projects moving forward we're really interested in conservation research how does that shape our vision of an artist you know how do we think of artists as practitioners so I think for me that's something that I'm you know it's something I knew that I liked but I'm really much more committed to that through this work just speak into this again question for Andre and maybe others I think of Barnes's own aesthetic or interest is more formalist in art and I'm wondering what you would speculate to be his reaction to your and other interpretations that are that focus on social meanings and a broader context to the work I know it's pure speculation but I'd invite you to speculate okay thank you then I'll do that yeah I think there are definitely aspects of this volume where Dr. Barnes would say or even no but I think that's okay I think scholarship needs to evolve and needs to change and needs to move in a variety of directions what I will say though and maybe this is one of the bigger lessons for me from this from this book that Barnes and formalism has come to mean a whole bunch of new really wonderful things to me and actually I think that there can be a kind of patness in that formulation that to me just closes down so many things that are actually interesting and sociohistorical about formalism and I think the whole collection history and the purchase history is actually a social history of a formalist approach so A the book brings those two together in really interesting ways secondly as I said earlier I think even though Barnes was interested in form in the profundity of form in that that does not exclude the fact that his language was endlessly evocative and his writing is a social practice and full of very specific references so I think we just mostly I just want us to complicate that whole notion that Barnes was a formalist you know what is that and isn't that something that is in much more socially oriented than I think the brevity of that comment might might include so those are just some of the thoughts that I have to that to that interesting provocation maybe you would have been pleased to see that we really look close very closely to the work so this is very bounce I mean at least it's something he shares with states on of course who also looked very closely so there's all of those connections there's a I have one more question from online there's a question of for the cover of the book why was rocks and trees chosen for the front cover that's a good question and we did look at various different options you know David Director of Publications really helped steward us through that it was a difficult choice it's always a difficult choice and some of it is practical you want to look at what is on what's on the cover of other Cezanne books that are available you do want your book to stand out but I think this is the one that we fell on because we liked the verticality of the image so again you know getting back to those actual visuals it is a detail that really kind of sings on a cover it has that wonderful sense of that you know that faceted brushwork that we love in the artist so there was so much that's very almost kind of calling card about that work and you know it's well we were spoiled for choice really I mean that was the nice the nice part if anything the choice made it hard it also reflects bounce taste for Cezanne landscapes so it's a kind of representative of what the collection is so there's a question was down for a second so right over here we have been seen so easily okay please can I just speak into it hello everybody I just wanted to address something that Jodi that you asked earlier about Barnes as a collector and as a teacher here I just want to reiterate that he wasn't an ordinary collector I mean he didn't collect just to collect and he didn't collect to sell he collected to teach and you know his whole goal was to teach people how to see and you've been talking all night about close looking and I think you know going to that gentleman's statement provocative question about if Barnes was alive I actually think maybe he would have grown beyond just formalism too and begun to understand I mean I think he understood it anyway I just think that's the way he preferred to look at a painting but I think he would have been delighted in this publication and in the way you've all gone about looking at the work I think he would have been happy because it wouldn't have extended the educational project in a way in the educational ambition helping people helping people to see even deeper into a work of art you know in the whole layering of Cezanne that Andre talked about thank you that's a really important point okay I've been handed the baton so we've talked about formalism I just like to talk about a basic element to go to color Cezanne was famous for his blue and the I think it was Nancy brought up the lighting can vary the perception of his work and when I was at Latch's Lane we opened the window once and the blues and the Cezanne just jumped off the canvas so is there anything in the book that talks about something as simple as the interpretation you might have from the lighting that you see on a work we haven't gone so much into the specifics of the actual light in the galleries although some of the authors have talked about placement within the ensembles one of the things though that I didn't mention which came out of the work Barbara Buckley and Anja Shitova did is we often associate Cezanne with blue I think we see those blue reiterated outlines what have you but green was the thing that really came out Anja Shitova did this wonderful technical imaging that really shows us that Cezanne is using green all over his canvases even when it doesn't look like green and so of course again that really is almost encouraging you to look more closely at what is actually there and you just haven't seen it what's hidden in plain sight and particularly with the great bathers which was there was sort of major conservation treatment for this project and we just learned so much through that so it's not exactly an answer to your question but certainly something that actually it is actually a question about light and we're looking in the sorts of specialists light you can have in a conservation studio what happens with an X-ray with infrared light with raking light and this was the opportunity to do all of that so it's the gallery light plus a great deal I'd also just give a shout out to one of our colleagues Holly Clayson who's an art historian in Northwestern it's a really interesting project about the beginnings of electrical illumination in the 19th century and how that changed artists' perceptions of their own work like how lighting itself had an impact on what they were doing and so anyway if you're interested in that I would look for her book Other questions? Up in the back? I think everybody would agree that not every painting by any artist is a masterpiece it sounds like there was a wealth of material available to Barnes when he started collecting in 1912 so I'm wondering what informed the way Barnes made his decisions and how do our critics and art historians look now at what Barnes collected in terms of what is the importance of those particular pieces or did idiosyncrasies of Barnes lead him to collect pieces that are not recognized as the most important ones today? I mean I would say that generally people agree on the quality of the collection I mean he made very few mistakes in a way I mean he had a very good eye and he was very demanding so I don't think that there is a kind of real valuation of the collection but I mean it's true that he also made very strong choices and for instance if some of you are really interested and passionate about the young Cézanne I mean you would be disappointed at the Barnes because he was not interested in or he didn't succeed in getting some pictures from the 1860s I mean he really focused on the 1880s 1890s so it's also really a vision of Cézanne and he was very much a man of his time André was mentioning that I mean the history of collecting was also a social history and it's very true for Barnes so I mean to answer your question of course the collection could be you know completed and sometimes he focused on works which were not masterpieces but I mean generally speaking I mean the quality of his acquisitions here is really really high I mean it's one of the most prominent collection of Cézanne it's impressive I mean it's really impressive let's see there's okay we're gonna we're gonna call it now Hello everybody I'm Nina Diefenbach I'm Senior Vice President for Advancement and I am just so thrilled to and asking all of you to share your applause for this extraordinary talk I truly think I hope you all feel that in a way you had the curtain drawn if you will so you could get a sneak into how curatorial minds work how a publication of this magnitude comes together it's absolutely intriguing and I think that the many years that went into it and the deep collaboration across so many different institutions and disciplines and the curatorial conservation dialogue is such an important one and I really it's absolutely fascinating and I hope those of you who are online enjoyed it as much as those of us who are in the room I would like to thank all of you both online and in the room you're all members of this institution you all make this kind of project possible you make very many other things that we do here possible all of which feeds into creating projects like this creating our exhibitions creating our community programs doing our outreach creating and nurturing scholarship in all arenas thank you so much this catalog as you are not surprised to hear is available in the shop tonight and it's online for those of you who are online and joining us online it's at barnsfoundation.org it would be a lovely holiday present wouldn't it but I just can't thank you all enough for joining us and for those of you who are here do join us upstairs for the circles for a and I just what a treat give another round of applause