 Hi everybody and welcome to today's barn's takeout. Today we're going to go upstairs into the corner room number 17 and look at this teeny little picture right here. Souvence somewhat entitled um light focus done prior to 1949 by a German artist who went by the name Vols and you can see on this wall it's um displayed well immediately next to this painting that Arnie Matisse had done in the 1940s in Los and I do love this wonderful like tangerine color near another work by Vols um a lot of other watercolors by um by Chagall over here we can see many by um Albert Prens his very good friend Charles Demith I particularly like this one of a woman in a punching bag as well as other artists like say George Rowe over here and so many work many little works on paper that we can see and before we start to zoom in closer to light focus I do want to pivot in this room 180 degrees to look at this is the north wall we'll look at the south wall here we go because um let's go in more closely two more works over here by Vols but here we've got many done by the artist Paul Clay like here and here and here and here and here here um and I think that's important because Clay was a major inspiration for Vols actually and um Vols give you a sense of who he was called Clay like an angel recreating the wonders of the world and art whereas he um Vols was a poor devil he said okay so with that said let's let's take a closer look at at light focus here it is um it's done in a style that we call um art and formel meaning basically a post-war style of painting that's abstract but not geometric it's got this kind of quivering central motif zoom in a teeny bit um it's mostly gouache watercolor but you can see there's pen um ink pen we've got some kind of scratching some dabs we can even see fingerprints from Vols like here over here up here um it looks the central motif looks almost like it's being compressed but at the same time expanding maybe kind of moving if we look at these lines here or perhaps it's even almost like a flower on the stem um and to me it looks like it could be cosmic as much as it could be um like almost something depicted on like an atomic or on an atomic level and then you can also see of course the on the wallpaper emerging through the canvas and I mentioned a minute ago that it was done in the late 1940s and down here we've got the name Vols in the year 1950 which seems like it would be very helpful but it's not but we know it's done prior to that because Barnes had purchased his set of Vols watercolors in during a trip to Paris in 1949 and we know that on a basis of a letter that I'm going to read to you that he wrote to his friend and um and colleague named Mel Mullen at the Barnes and so what he wrote what Barnes wrote was I didn't get any old masters but I got a fine redont oil um one that you can today see in room 14 two early rule of watercolors one that um one of which I showed you on on the wall of 17 four clays one oil by a new man Van Halvevelde one by a Spanish woman De Silva six gouache watercolors by a German Vols living in Paris the last three artists named are the last three artists named are the only painters whose work I saw that are worthwhile very modern but good in individual they help our collection and I think this is just a wonderful statement from Dr. Barnes toward the very end of his life and collecting career where he always is interested in what's modern what's new saying that he he thinks it's going to help his collection um and and anyway I just think that's kind of a fascinating glimpse into his mindset to Barnes's mindset so with this Vols for a bit of perspective on it um one one thing that like I kind of mentioned Vols was looking to were earlier images by Paul Clay one of which was Clay's twittering machine painted back in the year 1922 and to decipher this a bit we've got this kind of platform um with this vertical element that's crank that seems to operate these birds which themselves seem to be alive and so for Vols um what fascinated him was the kind of synthesis that clay got brought together between the mechanical and the organic and maybe if we look back for a sec to light focus we can see the the kind of um organic but very abstracted energy that we're getting from it and something else that um that's important to engage with with Vols partly vis-à-vis Clay was his engagement with different intellectual trends and what I'm showing right here is um actually a a photograph taken in Paris of the existentialist philosophers Simone de Beaufort over here on the right um and Jean-Paul Sartre I'm sharing a cup of coffee at a cafe I think this wonderful encapsulation of post-World War II French existentialist philosophy now Sartre was somebody who after World War II um was kind of a benefactor of Vols even wrote about him and so to an extent the works of Vols have gotten to be associated with what Sartre said about him and what Sartre was writing was essentially here let's go back to the Vols that images like light focus showed this kind of existential like horror rejection of the quiddity or like the thinness of the world and were kind of revolts and for Vols's life at the point at that point it would I suppose in its way make a certain amount of sense in as much as um Vols at the beginning of World War II have been imprisoned in France because of his German citizenship um after that fell deep into alcoholism a problem that was major by the time um he knew Sartre and ended up basically leading to the end of his life prematurely in the year 1951 but we know from Vols himself who wrote often that the philosophies that did intrigue him were manifold he was really interested in the fusion of art and music like Paul Clay and so perhaps we can see a sort of um I don't know almost stringed instrument like vibrancy to this he was interested in Chinese mysticism and how images could um could promote that he was interested in the ideas of Freud and how art might be able to manifest something interior and he was also really interested in um in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche which was not really nihilistic but asked in a world that's kind of devoid of meaning that's been kind of blasted apart how do we make our own and so in a lot of ways I think that an image like light focus might there's a torment to it for sure um both individually as well as culturally at the time this was painted in 40 49 probably on the other side there's a kind of hope and I think part of that can do with an individual engagement with the image and there's one last thing I'd like to show which is actually this um early medieval manuscript a carpet page that opens the book of John from the book of Kells and I want to put forth the caveat that as to the best of my knowledge Clay was um the Vols was not religious I do not believe that he made specific reference in his own work to the art of the middle ages and yet something that he wrote um let me find this quote for you um Vols wrote that a tiny sheet of paper can contain the world and I think that the kind of looking he was going for was something like this where it um begins the book of John here's it spells a big I N and then P you might be able to see over here the Latin is in Principio or a Rot Verbum in the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was about God and the word was light and in the world and zooming in um you can see the way in which the word and the world wrap together in a way that you just have to immerse yourself in the transcendental and the abstract um to see how it all does come together and that indeed a tiny sheet of paper can contain the world and so I hope that you'll take a chance to see this work let's go back this fascinating I think very stimulating work by Vols when you come back to the Barnes Foundation and I look forward to seeing you there and that's it for today's takeout and thanks so much for joining 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 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