 Thank you. I was just going to explain. My name is Karen Catherine Butler. So Kate is short for Catherine. And actually, when I got here, I decided everyone calls me Kate. I'll just be Kate. But then I wanted to officially be Karen, because my dissertation was. And then it was on my. It was a lot more complicated than I thought. And once you do it, you can't unravel it. So I will answer to both. And just a minute or two before I start to talk. So I just went to the galleries. And it's been a while since I was in the galleries. And all I can say is, wow, what are we doing down here? I mean, it's beautiful. And there are all these innocent people up there who have no idea that we're all down here. So Claudine, you gave such a wonderful thank you. And I have to say the same thank you to everyone who made the book happen. Claudine, Martha, Ivanan, without Ivanan, we would have nothing. Barbara Buckley, Jennifer Mass, Jennifer with her ray gun, Angelica, Rudenstein, Wanda. I mean, Derek, Tom, I know Tom. And Johanna, you mentioned Johanna. I mean, I don't know. Again, and our editor, David from MoMA. I mean, I'm surprised David has hair left. I saw him last night. Just thank you for everything. And I'll stop there. So perhaps what is most difficult to understand for many of us who consider Matisse to be one of the most significant and radical artists of the 20th century is Barnes's ambivalent relationship with the artist's work. For while Barnes called Matisse, quote, the most important living painter whose work displayed a wealth of plastic achievements unequaled by those of any other painter of his generation, he was also often critical of the artist's work in his published writings. He wrote, for instance, that Matisse as a painter failed to live up to comparisons with old masters such as Giorgione, Giotto, and El Greco, as well as modern such as Cezanne and Renoir. More specifically, Barnes often wrote negatively of the artist's tendency to reduce objects to mere decorative schemas, noting that his work was lacking in qualities such as human value or human significance. And yet, between the years 1912 and 1949, Barnes accumulated 59 works by the artist, including some of the artist's most important paintings, Le Bonheur de Vivre and the Dance Mural, and amassed what became, in Barnes's time, one of the single largest and most significant collections of the artist's work in public or private hands. My talk today seeks to shed light on this discrepancy between the collection and its interpretation, if you'll give me that. Moving chronologically, I will examine a few moments in Barnes's early introduction to Matisse, The Grafton Show, The Steins, Armoury Show, then I'll move to his published writing, so it's on the artist, so the two early essays, then the art and painting and the book on Matisse, and lastly, provide a brief analysis of how Matisse's works might function within some of the ensembles on view at the foundation. I will say this is a kind of shortened version of my essay in the catalog, and I'm grateful that some of you have told me you haven't read it, so. So good. So the beginning. In the early years, there were likely three significant events which solidified Barnes's interest in the work of Matisse and his belief that he was the most important living painter of his day. The Grafton Gallery's second Impressionist show in December of 1912, his visits to the collections of Gertrude and Leo and Michael and Sarah Stein in Paris, and The Armoury Show in the winter of 1913. The Grafton Gallery's second Impressionist exhibition, which was on view in London from October 5th through December 31st, 1912, was the second in a series of two exhibitions organized by the British art historian, Roger Fry. It was significant for its introduction of French, English, and Russian avant-garde artists to England and to many American visitors. Are you guys waving at me because you can't hear me? You can hear me. For instance, Walter Coon, Arthur B. Davies, and Walter Pack, who organized the 1913 Armoury Show, saw the Grafton Gallery Show in London. It was doubly significant for Barnes. On the one hand, it offered a view of the development of modern art that reinforced his fledgling collecting tendencies, placing Picasso and Matisse at the head of a group of living artists emerging out of post-impressionists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Sarah. And on the other, it provided Barnes with a method for interpreting these artists that appealed to his scientist's need for objectivity. A whole room of the show was dedicated primarily to Matisse. Among the 19 paintings on view were Red Studio, Luke's Two, Young Sailor Two, The Dance One, and Red Madras-Headress, a work lent by Sarah and Michael Stein, and of course a work that he would later come to own. And I just, this is a photocopy, I think, from Microfiche. But here, this is the large gallery, the Matisse section. And then I just highlighted the Stein paintings that were in the show. As an introduction to the work of Matisse, the show put some of the best works by the artist on display and Barnes's taste as a collector, not only of Matisse, but also of Picasso and Cezanne, must certainly have been impacted by what he saw there. His marked-up copy of the catalog remains in a London collection today. And thanks to Richard Wattenmaker, we know that Barnes made notes in the catalog, taking specific note of Picasso's composition, The Peasants of 1906, and it's here, painting lent by the dealer, Ambrose Bullard, and that Barnes would later buy from Bullard in June of 1913. But just as importantly for his understanding of Matisse were the catalog essays. For Barnes insisted that passages from Frye and Clive Bell's essays in the catalog be reproduced in an exhibition of the works of the American painter Alfred Maurer, held at the Folsom Galleries in New York in January 1913. And early foray into art criticism for Barnes, he wrote the introduction to the catalog of the Maurer show. This is significant in our context for the ways in which the methodology and approach to modernism found in Frye and Bell's essays came to condition not just Barnes's publications of Matisse, but his entire method of aesthetic appreciation. Notably, the catalog introduced a formalist approach to art, a method of understanding and analyzing the stylistic elements of individual works of art using such terms as design and expressionism that would greatly influence Barnes' own writings. I should just say that I'm not the first to note these associations. I think Colin Bailey was probably the first. Richard Wattenmaker has remarked on them. Martha Claudine in her essay to the catalog. There's a dissertation by Megan Barr. And the most extensive nuanced account is really Neil Rudenstein's probably most recent book called The House of Barnes. And if you haven't read it, it's an amazing introduction to the whole history of the collection. Not just, but it has these wonderful passages on Barnes's relationship to formalism that were really helpful for me. So perhaps even more significant than his visit to the Grafton Galleries exhibition were the collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein and Michael and Sarah Stein. It was most likely during Barnes's second visit to Paris in December 1912 that he was introduced to Leo and Gertrude Stein again by Alfred Marr. We do not know precisely when he visited the collections of Sarah and Michael, though it had to have occurred before or during his last visit to Paris in early 1914 and the start of World War I that's in Claudine's essay. Although Barnes had already begun to acquire work by impressionists and post-impressionist, his collecting approach was up to this point still somewhat eclectic. And Leo and Gertrude's more focused collection on the left served as a practical model for him. The collection centered on post-impressionist artists, particularly Leo's preferred artists, Cezanne and Renoir, and on Matisse and Picasso, of course, the Bonheur there, extended to 19th century artists such as Delacroix, Duomier, Toulouse-Le-Trec, Manet, and Gauguin, and to contemporaries such as Maurice Denis and Pierre Bonard. It was supplemented by Florentine Renaissance works and by Japanese prints, which Leo and Gertrude considered important antecedents to many of the modern artists they collected. When Barnes left Paris, he purchased his first two works by Matisse, The Sea Seen from Collier on the top, and Justice and Mellon from Gertrude and Leo. And then, of course, the third significant factor in his early appreciation for Matisse was the Armory Show, which was on view in New York from February 15th to March 15th, 1913, and came on the heels of his visits to Paris and London, where it would likely have reinforced what he had seen and heard there. An exhibition of over 1,300 works of art, mostly by European artists. The International Exhibition of Modern Art, known today as the Armory Show, for its location at the 69th Regent Armory in New York City, dramatically altered the aesthetic playing field in the US, opening the eyes of many American artists to the importance of French modernism. Barnes himself would make this observation in his 1915 essay, How to Judge a Painting, writing about the international exhibition that it had, quote, a tremendous influence for good upon the live American painters. And then, observing the attacks upon the show by conservative critics and the popular press, Barnes also took note of the negative reception received by Matisse and Picasso. Writing to Leo Stein about it, he stated, quote, academic art received a blow from which it will never entirely recover. The works of Matisse, the critics said, did not indicate that he is as great a painter as he has been acclaimed. Picasso and the autres, this is the kind of French word that falls in there, Cubists got more attention than all the rest of the show, but the public attitude toward them was largely that of amusement, curiosity, and derision. That Barnes did not agree with at least part of this statement is made clear when he continues in the same letter, the Matisse still life that I got from you is now one of my favorites and grows daily in your liking. Tell your sister that I am mighty glad that she could sell the two Matisse's but not one. It seems likely, however, that his appreciation for Matisse was still developing, for Barnes would not purchase another work by Matisse until 1921. Barnes's earliest essays, How to Judge a Painting and Cubism, Requiescat in Pache, my Latin isn't so good, published in the American Journal Arts and Decoration in 1915 and 1916 respectively, set out the fundamentals of his aesthetic program. Many of these ideas remain constant throughout his later writings. The first essay on the left already identifies Matisse as one of the most significant contemporary artists of the time, and the second addresses Cubism without speaking of Matisse. More importantly, it is their general approach and structure which will condition Barnes's later writings on Matisse and influence how he is presented on the walls of the Barnes Foundation. Many of the themes which appear in How to Judge a Painting are tied to ideas found in Fry's Grafton catalog, as well as the physical embodiment of the belief which he would have seen on the walls of the Steins' apartments in Paris. And perhaps one of the biggest differences from our notion of modernism today, in which we see modern art as breaking with the past, Barnes insists on modern art's continuity with older Western traditions, from the Renaissance to French post-impressionism and modernist art. Thus he writes, the big lesson of the history of art is that the things worthwhile in the work of the great creators of the past, Giotto, Massaccio, Rubens, Halls, Velasquez, are to be seen by eyes that see in many Cezanne, Renoir, Domier, and numerous others, including the best of the Americans. So for Barnes, modern art is successful when it displays continuity with the past, and also an emphasis on pure form over ideas or narrative and what he calls artistic identity, a vague psychologically influenced notion which connects feeling in art to the painter's individual personality. Barnes finds all three of these characteristics in Matisse, as well as the additional element of design taken from Oriental art. For instance, in a somewhat convoluted statement, he describes Matisse's identity as emerging from both 19th century post-impressionists and non-Western art. So he says, Matisse's art at his best, as one sees it in Michael Stein's house in Paris, has an identity. In spite of the reversion to primeval vision which Gauguin reflected, the fervor derived from Van Gogh, the significant form filtered through Cezanne, his design and decorative sense almost purely ancient East Indian. He is simply a portrayer of the elemental. So of course, he's tying him back to those post-impressionist antecedents, but of course saying he's sort of in his own category. But this is perhaps Barnes's most original contribution to the understanding of Matisse's art and one of the reasons that he found Matisse's art so interesting, and I'm actually, it's Matisse's interest in non-Western art forms and his tendency to adapt their stylistic qualities in his own work. This was, for Barnes, I think, part of Matisse's universal appeal. One small observation in this essay, it is not yet clear that Matisse is the most important living painter. In fact, he seems to come in a close second to Picasso. For while Barnes clearly promotes Matisse and Picasso as the two most important modern artists of the day and boastfully claims to be the first in America to hang Matisse's and Picasso's on the walls of his home, it is Picasso who is, quote, a great artist and a great painter and Matisse who is a greater artist than a painter. It's a little subtle, but I think he's giving Picasso the nod. But then we get to the second essay. Barnes' second essay is, as the title suggests, a rejection of cubism, in particular, the cubist works on view in the 1913 Armory Show. And it's, that's Arthur B. Davies on the cover, but it's illustrated with Duchamp's new descending staircase, Picasso's portrait of Conveiler, and Pecabia's dances at the spring, among others. This essay is an essential state of Barnes's belief in the fundamental link between painting as a representational art, delivering a recognizable subject, and what he called human values or experience anchored in reality. Cubism was particularly problematic for Barnes because he felt it reduced the human elements in painting to mere design and pattern. The essay includes references to philosophers such as William James, George Santayana, Henri Bergson, and Bernard Bozanket, who in his reading conceive of sensation and perception as continuous or homogeneous experiences. Barnes felt that art should promote a psychologically unified subject and thought that cubism, with its fractured planes and removal from the world's appearances as they are experienced, disrupted the perceptual continuity necessary for intellectual and emotional comprehension and identification. Although the essay, in fact, makes no reference to Matisse, and today reads as a misunderstanding of cubism, it does suggest why Barnes would come to hold Matisse eventually in higher esteem than Picasso. Unlike Picasso's cubism, Matisse's work, now I had to laugh with Alastair's presentation this morning, so for Barnes, Matisse's work always conveys something of an experience rooted in reality. For Barnes, an artist's work developed teleologically as a consistent and unified progression that reveals growth both through technical and more vaguely visionary means. Barnes ultimately saw Picasso's stylistic fluidity as a deviation from this progression. Again, a small caveat, this attitude did not, however, stop Barnes from collecting Cubist works. And there are at least two Cubist paintings and three works on paper by Picasso that we would consider Cubist in the collection, though he clearly preferred blue and rose period Picasso. And there are also a number of small studies for the demoiselle, which he incorporated throughout the collection. And they'll come back in at the end of my talk. It was not until the 1920s that Barnes begins, it is not until the 1920s that Barnes begins to solidify his interest in Matisse, going on a purchasing spree and publishing more extensively on the artist. With the publication of his book, The Art in Painting in 1925, Barnes positioned Matisse within his larger aesthetic program. The art in painting was intended to be used as a textbook in the foundation's courses, and it laid out his aesthetic approach, applying it to specific examples from the Western tradition. It is dedicated to John Dewey and aims to give students a method and example of evaluating specific works of art. In the section on contemporary painting, Matisse and Picasso are given their own chapters. And Matisse is now promoted to the most important living painter. And Picasso, we are told, ranks second only to Matisse. He is castigated for failing to achieve a style that is cumulative and develops linearly. About Picasso, Barnes writes, the success of styles seem less cumulative, less like stages on the way to a goal, which has been foreshadowed all along, than they do, for example, in Renoir. For Barnes, Matisse's success is due to his ability to consider what he calls the traditions of painting. His ability to incorporate formal aspects of the Western tradition with the Oriental traditions in ways that Barnes considers unique to the artist's own individual identity. Thus, he writes, quote, in spite of the great diversity of traditional sources upon which Matisse draws, every borrowed element is so adjusted to his individual purposes, fused with elements taken from other traditions that his form is an organic unity, never an eclectic patchwork. And here is just to give you a, this is a spread from the illustration section. And so here is, of course, the music lesson next to a Persian miniature in the Barnes Foundation. And I don't know that Barnes was saying the one on the left is a specific source for the painting, but he's making an association between the flattening of space and the compactness where everything's packed into the frame of the Matisse. Barnes and Demesia's The Art of Henri Matisse was in many ways the culmination of the collector's interest in Matisse, though he did continue buying. He began working on the book sometime in the spring of 1931 and finished it two years later in February 1913. I'll just say, since I'm not talking at all about the dance, that Barnes really wanted the dance to be finished to make it into the book. And he was writing to Matisse. And I think the only thing that does make it into the book is the photo of Matisse with the bamboo stick. So Barnes was, I think, disappointed, but Matisse would not let him look at it, of course, because of the paper cutouts and the fact that it wasn't as far along as he thought. So back to the book and Barnes and Demesia, their goal was to perform, quote, a comprehensive investigation of Matisse's place in the general traditions of painting and his distinctive purpose and achievements as an artist. The book combines a general claim about Matisse's role in art history with what Barnes and Demesia call the experiment of learning to see, a process that Barnes had addressed in the art and painting, but that he now expanded and applied specifically to Matisse. From the outset, the authors indicate their interest in establishing an approach that is objective and verifiable by others, as well as scientific and analytical, as opposed to based on feeling or sentiment, a downfall in their eyes of much contemporary art criticism. This is part of their emphasis on looking closely at the formal elements of a painting that emphasis is pushed to an extreme in the section called Analyses at the back of the book, lengthy formal accounts of Matisse's paintings in Barnes's collection, drawing on the method put forth in the first half of the text and using extensive descriptions of formal elements to stress plastic form and design. Perhaps the most original aspect of the book beyond the lengthy analyses, which though often repetitive and tedious, are some of the first sustained attempts at formal analysis of Matisse's work and are often accurate, you do read them and I cut it. I had a quote, but I cut it for length, but you do read them and they're remarkably right on a lot of the time. But perhaps the most original aspect of the book is that it is the first to speak of Matisse's work in terms of traditions in the plural. So that, I cut the blues to life. In other words, in addition to the Western tradition, Barnes and Demacia list all of the non-Western traditions to which they find that Matisse's work can be compared. In a section titled Matisse and the Oriental Traditions, Barnes methodically identifies specific elements of Matisse's production that can be tied to Japanese prints, Chinese calligraphy, Persian miniatures, Byzantine mosaics and Fayum portraits, among others. These written observations are often complemented by astute visual comparisons in the illustrations that accompany the book in which Matisse's works appear next to various non-Western images, some of which were in the collection of the Barnes Foundation. So there's that same spread which has been expanded on with the addition of the Japanese print on the right. Much as Barnes praised Matisse's integration of Oriental traditions, he also saw this aspect of his art as leading to a tendency to prioritize decorative or ornamental forms over expression, and this seemed to constitute a flaw. In fact, when Barnes endeavors to determine Matisse's standing in relation to the greatest masters in a chapter entitled Matisse's rank as an artist, he finds that on almost every point of comparison with old masters, such as Giorgio and Al Greco, as well as with both Cezanne and Renoir, Matisse fails to measure up. He writes, for example, that Matisse, quote, has far too much insight, too great an interest in the world to be a mirror decorator, but it is impossible not to feel that he is interested less in objects for what they really are than in the ways in which they can be woven into decorative designs. What Matisse consistently lacks in Barnes's estimation is such qualities as human value, human significance, or alternatively profound and comprehensive reality. Perhaps somewhat ironically, what today might be regarded as one of Matisse's most significant pictorial devices, flat schematic forms rendered in arabesques of color, Barnes dismisses outright as mirror decoration. Since on the one hand it appears too easy and facile and on the other it does not lend itself to fully expressive form. Indeed in many passages, the book is overtly critical of Matisse's work and at times it is frankly subjective. Barnes, as Neil Rudenstein observes in his book, appears to have had an innate appreciation and understanding of Matisse's role as an artist that he was unable to express or explain in his writings. Then I'll end with a little bit, and this is actually where it gets a little tricky. Barnes demonstrated his educational and aesthetic methods by integrating Matisse's work in displays throughout the foundation that reinforced not only the artist's place in the tradition of French modernism, but his relevance to the work of younger living artists and his ties to the art of non-Western cultures. There are however no guidelines in his published work as to how to understand the specific combinations and arrangements of artworks and objects on the walls of the foundation. They're called ensembles. To read them in tandem with the book is often an effort in broad interpretation and even sort of fruitless searching for answers. I just thought that I would try it too. I mean, there's one of these that's in the book, but I thought I would look at maybe about three of them. To just explain in a way how they work, but this is sort of dangerous because I know there are lots of docents in the audience who all have their own take. So this is room 22, and this is a room I've always loved in part because of these Picasso heads and this room of African art. And then of course, the Modigliani's, this demoiselle, well they're not really studies for the demoiselle, but of that moment. And then this Matisse, the seated figure in an interior. This I find a little odd to put this in the room with African art. But I think there's a kind of similarity in shape. So she's almost like the prow of a boat as she, so this is a kind of formal, I mean I think he's just trying to make connections and this is where a light line color and space in some ways come in as interpretive approaches. So there's an association with the kind of tonality, the grays and the whites, and then with shape. But I think where it really kind of works is say in this room, and this is of course, room gallery 15 with Red Modder's headdress in the center. And here he's really associating her with a number of different moments in sort of the history of art. So whoops, I'm just looking for the pointer. So Red Modder's in the center, this is Van Roy'sdale. This was thought to be, I think Claude Lorraine's after Lorraine at this point. There's a Japanese fan, a Chinese fan, there's two little Chinese paintings here. Jean Hugo at the top, some Pennsylvania Dutch things over here. So he's really associating this whole wall through pattern, so through the floral pattern on her dress, the flowers on the blanket chest, through drawings, so the yellow line on her scarf and the delicate tracings on the fans if you get up close to them. Spatial reduction, so the flattening of space in her figure, and then of course the Chinese interiors up top have that same flattening of space. And it's also in the Hugo landscape, and then color. So this blue that is in almost everything if you go and stand there. And then lastly in gallery 19, this room I think is really about Matisse and his contemporaries. So of course you have the music lesson dominates the room, the greatest living painter if you will, surrounded by, so then you have Soutine on the ends, Modigliani, Utreo here, D'Udwanyel, Rousseau here and here. The dog is gone right now. And Picasso is over here on this wall. To really kind of get at what Barnes is doing here, it's not in the Henri Matisse book as much as it's in the art and painting where there's a chapter called Other Contemporaries, so there's a chapter on Matisse, a chapter on Picasso, and then the other contemporaries are Soutine, Pascam, Modigliani, Rousseau, Utreo, Ruo. So Ruo is on the other wall, Durant and D'Kiracau. So this whole room 19 I think in many ways is sort of Matisse and the legacy of the next generation. Ultimately I will end with Barnes' own words on Matisse. In 1946 he wrote to Leo Stein of his appreciation for Matisse and the relevance of the artist's work. Speaking of the Picasso retrospective that Albert Alfred Barr had organized at the Museum of Modern Art in 1939, Barnes wrote, quote, I was able to judge this exhibition objectively because as far as I know, I was the first to buy Picasso's in America and I have examples of every period of his work that I think is worthwhile. His Cubist pictures interested me for a while but it was never sustained. It was a skeleton that lacked the flesh and blood of real expression in painting terms. I have never felt this way about Matisse. From the first two I bought from Gertrude in 1912, down to the last one I purchased about four years ago, I can always find something that is his own, is not a repetition and is in line with traditions. So thank you.