 Welcome to another barns takeout, your daily serving of art. My name is Kaylyn Jewel. I am a senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to spend some time looking at some of the objects and focusing on one of them in gallery number 20, which we see on the screen here. This is one of those smaller galleries. It's in the corner of the foundation and it's up on the second floor. You can see here from this photograph of the north wall that it is densely packed with objects. We've got modern sculptures on the floor. We've got a case of African objects. And we also have all of these drawings and paintings and sketches that are on display on the wall. And it can be a little bit overwhelming when you encounter a room like this. And so one of the things that I think is useful is to try to find order, visual order when we're looking at an ensemble like this. And Dr. Barnes was really helpful in his own way when he is arranging these works. So he arranges them according to what the objects look like, not according to artist or time period or material, but it's what the objects look like. And so when we see an ensemble like this and it can be a little bit intense at first glance, especially when you're standing in a room like this because each of the walls is as densely packed as this one. What you can do, and what I always tend to do is try to find a central axis on the wall. And so the central axis that I see here, and I think that you all probably can too, is if we start with this great horned mask down at the bottom and we use that central element of it, this horn that kind of comes out of the top of its head and over its face. We use that as sort of that central axis, the beginning of it. And then we can follow that line up through the mask on the second level of the case, up through the middle of this medieval painting, and then up through these two pictures all the way to the top. And when we do that, then I think we can all see that there's a sense of balance and symmetry across that central axis. So keeping that in mind and keeping that sense of symmetry in mind, let's focus on one of the objects in this case that has mostly African objects. There is one object here, this object here, which is from French Polynesia, which I will discuss also in a second, but we're gonna focus on this mask. So here it is. It was made in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. It's carved from a single piece of wood. And it was made by the Punu peoples who live in what is modern day Gabon. So we're talking about Sub-Saharan West Africa. The mask that we see here has a really nice sense of balance and symmetry, right? We can see that there's sort of the central line coming down from the elaborate hairstyle, serving as an axis that comes down the nose, through the mouth and down to the chin. And on either side of that, we can see again the sense of balance. The slits for the eyes here are really kind of nice arch shaped, a very pronounced arch shaped and they're very narrow, but you can see through them, which is indicating to us that this is a mask that somebody would have worn. We can see that the arch is repeated in the upper eyelid area, and also in these really dramatically arched eyebrows that we have. And notice how we can zoom in here. Notice how those eyebrows are actually carved in and then a dark brown, almost black pigment was applied to it. In the center of the eyebrows, we can see here this kind of diamond shaped pattern that we also see on the temples as well on either side. And these are meant to be kind of visual examples of scarification patterns that you would see on real people in the Puneau Society. And the Puneau Society are not the only group in Africa, Sub-Saharan West Africa that engage in scarification patterning. So let's look at the back image of this to see what it looks like from the back. So here's the Puneau mask from the back and we can see the arched eye slits here. And you can also see, if you look sort of closely where my cursor is, there's a little hole there and there's one as harder to see, but there's one on the other side as well. And so those holes are giving us an indication that that is where a cord or some kind of rope would have been applied that would have allowed this mask to be worn and secured very closely to the head of a person. Let's look at it from the front again. So what were these used for? The thing about the display at the Barnes Foundation is that there's no kind of information that tells you what these types of objects were used for. And we know that this is an object that is very rich in its kind of original context. And what I mean by that is that it has an interesting display aspect to it. So one of the things that I think is really that grabs people's attention when they walk into this gallery is the surface application of this white pigment to the surface of the face. And let's zoom in here. And we'll zoom in on the area of the nose and the mouth so that you can see that it is actually applied on the surface of the wood. And it's sort of rubbed off here on the loaves of the nose. So the substance here is a material called kaolin, which is a type of fine grained clay. It's sort of like porcelain. And it was sourced locally from riverbeds, I mean, all across the world. This is a material that's found everywhere. But it was the kaolin that was used in covering these types of objects with a white kind of cast. You also see it used in body paint applications for different kinds of ritual ceremonies. And this is an object that would have been worn by a performer. It is a representation of an idealized female figure. And it would have been worn by a male performer who was dancing high above the crowd on stilts, which is pretty fascinating. So we can imagine this mask sort of dancing and hovering above the crowd. And the white face that you see here is meant to evoke the kind of authority of the ancestral realm. So whenever you see in Pune society this white cast, it's a specific reference to the ancestral realm. And we know that these masks were used within elaborate ceremonies for visiting dignitaries, also funerary celebrations. So it makes sense, and it's appropriate for the ancestors to be kind of brought into those community celebrations. We also know that this is an object that Dr. Barnes purchased in 1922 from one of his dealers, Paul Guillaume. And when he purchased it, it had already been photographed by the very well-known modernist photographer, Man Ray. And this is that Man Ray photograph. This is a photograph that was given to Dr. Barnes' wife, Laura, and it was signed by Paul Guillaume down at the bottom here. So when we get back to the Barnes and venture up into these smaller corner rooms, keep an eye out for this Pune mask here. And also this little object here next to it, which was made in French Polynesia, and it is a stilt support. So this was used in French Polynesian society to decorate stilts. So it's interesting that Dr. Barnes puts them next to this mask that would have been worn by a performer on stilts, which is pretty cool. So thanks for joining me today. And be sure to check out another Barnes Takeout. Take care. Bye-bye. ... ... ... ... ...