 Hello, and welcome to this week's Barns Takeout, your weekly serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthys, Bernard C. Watson, Director of Adult Education, and today I take you to Gallery 18 on the second floor on the west side of the collection, and we're looking east at this ensemble that's anchored by this remarkable Pennsylvania German chest, which a colleague of mine, Robin Creran, has talked about in an earlier Takeout, and I encourage you to look that up. It's an ensemble that demonstrates works from Amadea Medigliani, Henri Matisse. We have these sort of typical in the collection pieces of iron work. Just to our left, if we could see it, is The Ascetic by Pablo Picasso, but the work I'd like to focus on today is right over here to our right on the second row. It's this picture, and it's by the American artist Charles DeMuth, painted in 1919 called Piano Movers Holiday. DeMuth was born in 1883 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, just a little more than 70 miles west of Philadelphia, so he's a local painter. Although he traveled a lot, Lancaster was very much his home base, and he often returned there, and it's possible that this subject is drawn from Lancaster itself. I'll say a bit more about the sort of enigmatic nature of the subject in the second. But also, and I've addressed a couple works by DeMuth already, but DeMuth and our founder, Albert Barnes, were close personal friends, and this picture demonstrates it as Dr. Barnes acquired it directly from Charles DeMuth. So the picture really focuses on the planes created by facades and roofs of the buildings, as well as the angular intersection of sides of chimneys. So these chimneys here, the angular sides of those chimneys. And then over and through, between and across, we have these diagonal prismatic shards that radiate from the top of the image and have the effect of almost like beams of light that sort of cut through the image. So there's a couple effects that this has. First of all, the abundance of geometric shapes is strongly linear, and the planes tend to be either vertical or horizontal, so verticality in the chimneys, in the smokestacks, or this band here that's a kind of mast, or horizontal, as is emphasized by the intersection of the facades with the roofs. And then interspersed with these and carrying on the very strong geometric shape are the inclusion of these rectangular windows, rectangular windows on several of the facades. And these are only slightly varied with one sort of very delicate area over to the right that has a more curvilinear quality and reads as perhaps smoke coming out of a distant smokestack. But otherwise, it's strongly linear and strongly vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. And the effect particularly of these diagonal prismatic shards is quite remarkable as they, as I suggested, as they come over top or sometimes between or behind, as this one seems to do, seems to go behind this, this chimney, it affects the plane and the spatial location of aspects of that plane. So for instance, if we look at this area here in this facade in the back, the angular shard comes across, and as it does, these areas like this one here seems to lift off of the plane of the building, of the facade of the building, and come forward. Not quite as far forward as this band that you'll see more or less establishes the foreground, but certainly far more forward than the plane of the facade itself. And the effect of that is that as our eye moves across the picture, it's pulled in and out of the picture space. So even if we just go across a small area like this, we go from the sort of middle background to the immediate foreground, back to that background, and then a kind of midway and then back again, and then again a kind of midway. So we're moving very abruptly in and out of space. As I mentioned, this picture is painted in 1919, and it's really just as Demith is resolving his mature visual language, what will come to be called precisionism. And in the development of that, Demith draws on his very intimate knowledge of both the traditions of art, as well as more current developments. From the sort of traditions of art, this picture is very much informed with Demith's deep understanding of the water colors of Paul Cezanne. In Gallery 20, we have the juxtaposition of Demith water colors with Cezanne water colors just to demonstrate that point. And in an earlier takeout, I talked about one of those. And what is it about Cezanne that we see coming out here? One is the abundant use of white, which in Demith's water colors would be the paper on which he's painting. In this case, he's painting on board, so it's a primed surface, but he's allowing a lot of that primed board. So this white that we see really encircling the composition is that open support. The other is a very judicious use of color. Oftentimes, in these pictures, creating a sense of opaqueness, so there's a solidness to the color. But also, as we look up in what we read as a kind of sky area, very delicate, translucent, and transparent colors. So if you look at the variety of colors that come in this area here, as we move from delicate blues to greys to pinks or sort of peach colors, and oftentimes they're even intermixed with each other. I probably don't have to mention that the more current development that Demith is also drawing on is the cubism of Pablo Picasso and George Brock in particular. There are the sort of early phase of cubism called analytic cubism. But unlike that analytic cubism of Picasso and Brock where a subject is broken down into small planes that are sort of scattered across a picture, but never seem to sort of recombine or coalesce back into a subject. It always remains very shattered. Demith's subject remains apparent. We continue to see the building aspects and the architectural elements of it. But again, something that Demith is drawing from that and indeed that the cubists themselves drew from Cezanne is the focus on this architectural nature. We see this coming out in Cezanne's architectural landscapes, for instance, something that Picasso and Brock turned to as they were beginning to develop cubism. But what we see in Demith is not a repetition of either of those, but rather a unique and individual synthesis of aspects of all of those of both Cezanne's watercolors as well as Cubist ideas. And it was this development that really distinguished Demith as an artist in his own right and really established, as I suggested, his own or clarified his own visual language. As I suggested earlier, the subject could have been from Lancaster, the sort of industrialized aspect of Lancaster. Though in 1919, Demith also spent time in Gloucestershire, Massachusetts. So it could also have been drawn from his experience there in the mass-like quality of this unit, even the kind of sale-like quality that these angular prismatic forms shape are suggested of this. It might also very likely be a combination of both instances or both experiences. So what about the title, Piano Movers Holiday? Demith was very often fond of adding or attaching poetic or enigmatic titles to his pictures, a later picture that the subject of which is a grain elevator in Lancaster he called My Egypt, a very evocative title. Demith had a deep interest in literature, so Nain in a picture gave him a way of sort of fusing his interest both in the visual arts as well as in the language arts. And in some ways, it's probably the case with this picture. And we have some evidence in the archives of that. In a transcription by Dr. Barnes' associate, Nell Mullins, we have a kind of poem that was transcribed from Demith himself that contained titles of other paintings that Demith made around the same time. And I'll read this to you and just to get a sense of both his Demith's playfulness as well as again the kind of evocative qualities of his titles. It goes like this, Piano Movers Holiday, The Sky After El Greco, Pyramids in Amethyst, in province town number seven, The Rise of the Prism, in province number one, for W. Carlos W., Chimneys, Ventilators, or whatever, and this was recorded on August 4th, 1921 from Charles Demith. Several of these, The Sky After El Greco, the province, in the province number seven and number one, and for W. Carlos W., which refers to the American poet, William Carlos Williams. These are all titles of other works by Demith. And this line that reads Pyramids in Amethyst very much again connect to this picture in the way that these angles create, these angular units create a kind of pyramid shape. Oftentimes that seems to act as a canopy over the picture, but here, as I suggested, really cuts through and between many of the other pictorial elements. So again, this is a work that I think has multiple visual levels as well as its title sort of extending its suggestiveness beyond that. So I hope that you'll take the opportunity to come to Gallery 18 and look at these works by Charles Demith. We're fortunate to have many works by him throughout the collection, several of them, many of them are small, but these are of a good size and give you an opportunity to really explore this mature language of Charles Demith. So join us next week for another edition of Barnes Takeout and please leave us a comment. We're always very interested to hear your feedback and your ideas about these weekly offerings from the Barnes Foundation. Until then, thanks and goodbye. I'm Tom Collins, New Bauer Family Executive Director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.