 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barns Takeout. I'm Amy Gillette and a collections researcher here at the Foundation. Now today we're going to travel into Room 19 at the Barns and focus on this painting at the edge of the wall entitled Acrobat with Two Dogs by the French painter Georges Rourot who was born in 1871 in Paris. And before we zoom into this particular picture let's take a look at how it fits into this ensemble at the Barns. So as you might know Albert Barns when he was arranging his paintings didn't display them according to when they were made or where they were made but really just on the basis of formal relationships and we can see perhaps most immediately the figure of the acrobat echoed in Picasso's own acrobat and Harlequin over here. Her frontal pose you can maybe see again iterated up here in this image by Henri Matisse who studied under the painter Gustave Moreau actually with Rourot. Perhaps we can see even the two dogs one here one here in this image up here by Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico of his dog named Baby. And then this idea of formal relationships did continue into objects as well where perhaps in this chair down here we can see the rather like rigid or erect pose and the splayed legs and our acrobat are likewise for the angier and down here. And so with that being said let's go in and take a closer look of acrobat with two dogs. So here we are the acrobat in question you can see she's standing upright downcast eyes hands on hips two straight legs. I say that it's a she because the alternative title when Barnes purchased this painting was given as clowness or female clown and if we zoom in well let's look at the dogs first. Here's one sort of curled up maybe sleeping down there in black another one sitting upright almost perhaps like a guardian in white. We can go in and see her costume I love these areas of red up here at the top of her leotard with this gold kind of picked out almost as if it's light shining through stained glass or perhaps even like gold glinting on a mosaic icon or something and we can see again her heavily made up eyes perhaps a bit of rouge on her cheeks over here and then going over here we can see the artist's signature twice Giro up here down here plus the year 1924 so we know precisely when he did paint it. Now in terms of how it looks Rua has a very distinctive style that he's applied to this particular picture and that took shape according to a number of different conditions first he was born in Paris to a working class family and when he was still a young man prior to the turn of the 20th century he trained a sustained glass maker and that gives a lot of context for how we see say these black outlines around her costume around her face and her legs even in the dog the interior probably backstage room where we see her standing it's like the lead that would surround the panes of glass that constitute a gothic window in a cathedral but as I mentioned at the beginning of this talk he did also train with the symbolist painter Gustave Moreau along with Henri Matisse in the 1890s at the Occult de Beaux-Arts in Paris and Moreau was a symbolist painter which means that he and his symbolist colleagues Odell and Rodol for instance sought to for their art to give kind of this visible cloaking to invisible ideas with a big eye and so art was really supposed to be a visual manifestation between the transcendental the personal broadcast to the world and so this combination of medievalism and symbolism which were bunched up categories is what we start to see coming across in Rueau's clowness here now Moreau passed away in the year 1898 and Rueau was devastated and ended up turning increasingly towards his Roman Catholic spirituality and this development was given it was pushed into full force it seems in the year 1905 when Rueau was wandering around and he wrote that he saw an old clown sitting in a corner of his caravan in the process of mending his gaudy and sparkling costume so this exhausted performer really putting on his own kind of veil in order to perform for the crowds and Rueau and this old clown saw a humanity and inner light nevertheless shining forth a lot like to his mind the marginalized people to whom Christ ministered in the gospels in the biblical tradition and actually also quite a lot like a poem entitled the Old Acrobat by Charles Baudelaire who was a famous commenter on modern life and at this moment in 1905 Rueau wrote I saw quite clearly that the clown was me was us nearly all of us this rich and glittering costume it is given to us by life itself we are all more or less clowns we all wear a glittering costume so we have the stained glass references to Byzantine icons as forms of art that can kind of image forth this essential spirituality and I should note as well on kind of on the same topic that it wasn't just the western tradition that Rueau and his contemporaries were looking to but works of art from sub-Saharan Africa from Islam from Oceania that they believed also were able to give particularly articulate shape to inner force vitality a kind of authentic spirituality so Rueau is working with that but do remember that 1905 was when he had this revelation of the of the old clown and actually did paint this particular painting later almost 20 years later when he was over 50 in the year 1924 and the massive humanitarian crisis of World War I in which whether modernity was a good thing was certainly put to test did shape his art thereafter as it did pretty much every our artists I would say and another component that we can now see in his acrobat with two dogs was his friendship with a philosopher named Shashak Maratam another person who took his Roman Catholicism very seriously and indeed worked in the tradition of the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas a scholastic philosopher and it was active in the middle of the 13th century and 19 the year 1920 Jack Maratam the philosopher published a book that he'd really formed in conversation with George Rueau among a couple of other artists it's called Art and Scholasticism and in it Maratam said that modern sacred art really ought to look modern and he wrote and I'm going to quote there are many references in art and scholasticism to the middle ages they're legitimate because the middle ages are relatively the most spiritual period to be found in history but time is irreversible and the example will best serve as an analogy the same principles will have to be realized today but in an entirely new manner which is very difficult to foresee so I think what we've got in the end is an exaltation of the figure here Clowness as an agent of unveiling hidden truth roughly in terms of the light of Gothic glass or Byzantine icon that updated for perhaps people who might find themselves on kind of a wash in all of the upheavals of modern society whether they're on the fringes of it or even sort of interior kind of on the fringes as well and Rueau did write and I'm going to read you his own words a truth hidden at the core of our being sometimes makes us have a premonition of true beauty true grandeur the most noble subjects are humbled by a low spirit while modest and simple realities are raised up and magnified and what he writes actually you know thinking in terms of giving modern form to sacred art a contemporary artist Gehinde Wiley who works in paint as well as stained glass and one of whose works was actually featured at our recent exhibition 30 americans and as his subject matter he picks usually use of color young men and women of color that he finds on on city streets and puts them in stained glass windows as well as huge heroic paintings and he wrote about his glass the resplendent light is about being powerful in the world glowing literally and if art can be at the service of anything it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to see busy in that way so that's it for today's takeout thank you so much for watching and may your own light shine i'm tom collins new bower family executive director of the barns foundation i hope you enjoyed barns takeout subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art thanks for watching and for your support of the barns foundation