 Hello everyone and welcome to today's edition of Barnes Takeout, your daily serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernard C. Watson director of adult education and today we're going to go for a little sale of sorts. The work I'm interested in us considering today is in gallery 16 and we're in that gallery facing the east wall. This is one of the galleries on the second floor that's just filled with stuff. Paintings and objects including works from pre-modern and antiquity. So in the case below you'll see that there are objects from Greece and Rome and other traditions. We have Persian miniatures, we have illuminated manuscripts and then we have more modern works. But the work I'm interested in us considering is this one here. I'll show you. It's called Movement Bermuda. It's by the American artist Marsden Hartley and it and the two companion works, also by Hartley, were all painted around the year 1916. As I said, Hartley was an American artist. He was one of the American artists with whom Albert Barnes had a connection and this work comes for Hartley in a particularly interesting moment in his life and in the development of his career. It's part of a body of work as the other two pictures on that wall suggest that are sort of grouped together and they were, as I said, they were painted in 1916 in a summer that was called the Great Provincetown Summer. This is a summer that Hartley spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts on a kind of arts colony with fellow American artists Charles Demuth and William Zurich. Also the journalist, writer, and communist supporter, John Reed, who documented the Bolshevik Revolution in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. If you're interested in learning some more about that, in 1981 Warren Beatty made a movie called Reds of which this period in Reed's life and consequently in Hartley's life is portrayed. Also amongst that was the feminist and journalist Louise Bryant and Eugene O'Neill, the American playwright who debuted two of his plays that summer of which this group of artists participated, including Marston Hartley. But it preceded, or these follow rather, a very formative period in Hartley's life when he had spent three years in Europe, leaving in 1912, going to France, Paris in particular, where he met and went to the studio of Pablo Picasso. He also met the artist Robert Delane and became friends with the American expatriate writer and collector Gertrude Stein and then in 1913 Hartley moved to Berlin where he lived for the next two years and there he created a body of work sort of grouped under the title of the German officer series. I show you an example of that here. So this is portrait of a German artist. It's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and these works are characterized by Hartley's unique synthesization of elements of both collage and cubism. Hartley was one of the earliest American artists to adapt qualities of cubism into his own work and this period in Berlin was leading up to the outbreak of World War I. At a time when Germany was already highly militarized, Berlin in particular, there were frequent military parades. So this is pre-war that Hartley found really captivating with their pageantry, the uniforms that the officers wore, the flags and the music that accompanied these parades and it was during this period that Hartley befriended and potentially was lovers with a German lieutenant by the name of Karl von Freiberg. Freiberg was unfortunately killed in an early skirmish on the western front and this body of work, portrait of this painting in particular, reflects Hartley's response to that. So we have elements of it that directly call to mind and symbolize elements of the German army, including the German cross, the epaulette with its fringe and then the flags and then there are elements that directly reference von Freiberg himself, including his initials down here and 24, the age that he was when he was killed. The outbreak of World War I forced Hartley to flee Europe and return to the United States and it was there that he really dramatically changed his form, continuing to work with elements of cubism but really shifting to a very different modality, which brings us back to movement Bermuda painted in 1916. So you can see how dramatically Hartley changed his palette. Gone are the highly decorative patterned color areas. Gone are the stark contrasts of colors and the bold vividness of those colors and instead his palette changes to something that's much more muted. The values of the color, the contrasts between light and dark are brought into sort of closer harmony. There's no sense of and no interest in shading to create volume but instead we have these flat panels of color that overlap each other and whatever sense of space we get is either by way of that overlapping or by sort of hints of scale so the way that this panel of color is larger than this panel is larger than this panel suggests foreground, middle ground, background and then the setting is completely nondescript. We don't have water, we don't have a horizon line, we don't have a landscape but instead it's this form on its own but it's highly suggestive of a boat and the name movement I think is particularly evocative because of how Hartley has oriented these color areas. You'll notice that he puts many of them on a diagonal and those diagonals such as the bottom of what we read as one of the sails or the hull, what we read as the hull, the diagonal of that suggests a kind of tipping or swaying, the sort of gentle rocking of a sailboat and if we look closely or more closely we'll see that Hartley delineated these areas with graphite lines but that he wasn't concerned about adhering strictly to those lines so sometimes the color stops short of them, sometimes it laps over and it gives just a sort of gentle merging of those color areas. As we look closely here you'll see that he uses single colors in an area and applied the color quite thickly so we see the swirling of brush strokes that give it a kind of texture. One thing unfortunately that's lost in this reproduction is the surface quality and one of the striking things about these pictures is that they have a very matte finish, there's no sheen or gloss to them at all. It has a kind of velvety quality to that to it and that's in part because of the medium that Hartley chose not only oil but the support. Now this is not painted on canvas but is instead painted on what's called beaver board. It's a kind of masonite, it's a composite, a pressed composite board but it had much like the the rougher side of masonite, if you're familiar with that, masonite has a smooth side and a rough side. That rough side has little fibers that stick up on it, again a kind of velvety quality and it's also very absorbent so that when Hartley applied his paint to this even though he likely primed it ahead of time it's retained that soft velvety quality and so that the surface of this has this wonderful matte finish to it. This body of work occupied Hartley, these themes occupied Hartley in the summer as I said in Provincetown and then as the name of this picture suggested he continued working on them over the winter, that winter that he spent in Bermuda. When he returned his form, what he painted and how he painted evolved yet again. These works were Hartley's really last prolonged engagement with cubism and abstraction. When he returned from Bermuda he returned to more figurative and illustrative work, figures and landscapes, never really going back to this engagement with cubism. So I'll show you the wall again. I hope you'll consider looking not only at these three works by Hartley but also taking time to look at the works that surround them either when you return to the Barnes Foundation as we all hope we're able to do soon or on the Foundation's website where you're able to call up a given gallery or wall and then look carefully as we did here at objects on that wall and maybe consider some of the relationships between these works. Nothing in the Barnes Foundation is accidental or coincidental. Everything was intentionally arranged and chosen by Albert Barnes to suggest interrelationships between things. So I hope you'll consider looking at them and joining us again for another installment of Barnes Takeout. Please feel free to leave comments below. We're always curious as to your thoughts on these. Maybe suggest a topic. We certainly are interested in what you're curious about. And above all, stay safe. Thanks. Take care.