 Hi everybody and welcome to another Barn's Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette, I'm a collections researcher here at The Foundation, and today I'm going to go with you into Room 18 to look at what I believe is one of the most beautiful paintings in the entire collection displayed right up here. So let's go on in and take a closer look. So the title of this picture is Two Women by the Shore Mediterranean, painted in the year 1896 by Henri-Edmond Cross. You see it here, you can actually see right down here, the year 96. Now Cross was a French painter who'd gotten his career going in Paris in the 1880s but actually moved down to the Mediterranean coast in the south of France in Provence in the year 1891 and this painting even has a sticker on its back that gives the other title, alternative title Coast of Provence and so I believe that's what we're seeing here. Let's take a look down here. We've got the Two Women, this one gazing out toward the sea, this one sitting on this wonderful purple rock thinking it seems. We've got these low shrubby green bushes, some fabulous orange trees over here. Out in the water we've got this sailboat gliding across the water with its edge I think catching the sun just sort of picked out in gold there and across the water actually I'd really like to think for a sec about this shape up here which seems to be a trail of smoke from a passing ship and so in this painting that smoke along with the dress of the Two Women tell us that we're in the late 19th century and this isn't some vision of the idealized past for example and on top of being present focused, it's actually a painting that's very future oriented and I'm going to read to you something that Cross wrote. He said, I want to paint happiness, happy beings who will have become humankind in several centuries. Once I have to be honest when I first saw this picture I thought it was beautiful and perhaps an ornamental way and was very surprised to find such a rich quote from the artist and so I'd like to think a little little bit about what he means about painting a happy future of self-willed humanity and much of that was the technique that he used. He along with some other artists that you might find at the collection are known as Neo-Impressionists. It was a term coined by the famous and very influential critic and reporter Felix Fenyon and what that meant was they took some of the techniques developed by the Impressionists a little bit earlier like showing the brushwork very gestural open-air painting and rationalized it and so what exactly does that mean? Let's take a closer look. He's applied all of these discrete spots of color in ways that create very harmonious color, color-cording relationships between color and so for instance if we look at how he often sets up yellow and purple together those are complementary colors so when you put them together they they both kind of pop and orange and blue if we kind of look over here at their pairing do the same thing on each is brighter by its relation with the other can see as well over here on the sailboat this wonderful pairing of of the kind of golden yellow and the purple up here and so you know altogether we've got the harmonious hole on the one hand but made up of each of these discrete parts and I'll read you another quote from Cross who wrote I think very lyrically when one has conceived of the ensemble study separately each fragment in order finally to foresee how each detail is itself a pretty thing um so this painting technique um actually quite purposefully dovetailed um molecular theory um the belief that um a lot like the quote that I just read you from um from on Redmond Cross um that there's the ensemble and then each autonomous fragment um molecular theory held that um an atom itself is autonomous but like the different um dots fragments details um within this um kind of coalesce into an organic coherent um cohesive hole and um on top of that I think um I think I might have mentioned that the overall effect um of all all of these dots um that Cross has provided us that um that create these color cords that stir up joy that kind of echo current theories of um of the fabric of nature um also in some ways did look back to um techniques of um of ancient and medieval artwork such as mosaic making um holding up the idea in this um Cross was living in a very industrialized society um with um huge gaps um between the rich and the poor um looked back to craft work um artwork architecture of the past because um they people really believed that um when people have been working in together in guilds for instance back um and say the middle ages each craftsman had his own creative freedom um and self agency and so um now I'm going to give a quote from um one of the social theorists to whom um Cross and the other new impressionists really looked to guidance when forming their own kind of social political theories um and he was writing about um um how we see he wrote in the marvelous time of ancient Greece um another um Mediterranean place that people thought was an awful lot like friend frivols and in the age of the cathedrals sculpture painting music and dance works of the individual artist were born by free generation and not less by collective labor such as architecture or the construction of a city in this manner one saw surge the temples of um of cities and the churches of the middle ages whole populations animated by the same spirit swapped along by the same desire collaborated on a common work which would be at the same time the glory of all and the particular joy of each one of the citizens and so we see this um Mediterranean idol one of the paradigms that Cross has provided us and I'm going to go back to the ensemble to look one more time at its display in room 18 by these cathedral cityscapes um that his friend Paul Sinak painted of um Geneva over here on the right hand side and of Rua over here on the other and so he's given us the cathedral and a city paradigm there we go and so what we've got is a painting full of joy and um and hope for humanity um rendered by the whole as well as every detail um is beautiful so thank you so much for listening um that's a wrap for today's Barnes Takeout don't forget to hit subscribe and um we'd love it if you'd leave comments thank you so much and be well 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 thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation