 Hi everybody and welcome to today's Barnes Takeout. My name is Amy Gillette. I'm a collections researcher. Today we're headed upstairs into room number 17, a small corner room. And I think one of the most fascinating, it's got a lot of smaller works, works on paper, some of which were among the very last that Dr. Barnes collected, such as these little watercolor washes by the German artist Vols, who looked at last week. And today what we're going to be looking at is this image over here entitled Place Signs, painted in the year 1926 by Swiss born German artist Paul Clay. And it is in this room amongst a bunch of other paintings by Clay here and here. And well here, of course, it's dependent to this one by him entitled Cecilia and Landscape. And well this one and this one and this one and this one and this one too. So definitely a Paul Clay intensive wall and I quite like the arrangement because this artist Vols and was definitely inspired to a high degree by Paul Clay. So headed on in let's take a look at Place Signs. And another thing I thought I should point out is I think this image right here of a cat would make Paul Clay very happy because he loved cats. So here's Place Signs. And it's like we said a watercolor on paper. It's arranged basically into a grid. You might be able to see the sort of patchwork effect that he's made some washes, some that might remind you a bit of water perhaps or stone. We've got these little tufts of grass and then some apparently pine trees that honestly remind me of those cell phone towers that are dressed up to look like trees and there's seems to be a ladder over here the negative of a ladder a bowl. And what looks like a building facade and then this rectangular area this patch with with what seemed to be eyes checkerboard on all of these with halos around and then I suppose these are the signs of the title this kind of spade and this cross or or plus sign up here. We've got Paul Clay's signature the date as well as the title in German or second. So we know that the title is his own place signs. So what is happening in this picture and let's go ahead and start to dig a bit a bit further into it. So first, here's the artist himself. Clay with his wife Lily and I mentioned he loves cats and this was his favorite is his favorite kitty named Bimbo actually. And I wanted to bring in these two images over here to introduce the style that he's working in with place signs and so I've gotten his career started as I'm just working as in drawing in black and white, but he and he struggled with color for a long time until he took a trip to Tunisia in the year 1914 with some of his artists buddies and they're the bright Mediterranean light, the, the buildings, the light the shadows opened his eyes to color and this is a painting that he painted there you might be able to see the date 1914 and its view of camera on the city there that he did figure out how how to use color in terms that he described as almost spiritual and I love the very warm almost honey like glow that we see in this image and we can pick out the the domes of the building against what's resolved basically into a patchwork of of these almost like vibrating colors in their warmth and on this same trip is when clay also discovered what he called his square paintings where the square in an image can describe a place like a physical place but he also liked their planar quality for being partly imaginative and and cerebral in addition to physical and then down here we've got a notebook that he was working on on color theory when he was during the years when he was working at the Bauhaus 1920s into the 1930s and so at the same time that he painted play signs and again we've got these grids and lots and lots of very theoretical ideas about the ways in which these patches of color work together in order to mimic music and to give to give the picture in shape both in itself as well as in the eyes and minds of its viewers and so to move on a bit with that another thing that clay really did want to bring to his work of art is to to wet it with music and so I mentioned as well that his wife is in and here he is with his very good friend Vasily Kandinsky that he worked at he worked with during the Bauhaus years before the Nazis shut that down and labeled clay and many others degenerates but I love this picture of friendship and you may know Kandinsky one of his paintings entitled composition is down here also really did try to wed visual and the musical arts and for me the Kandinsky's are somewhat easier to see as somebody who's not who doesn't understand the music very well but I can almost hear like a musical wave here the way that you might think about like dragging the bow over the strings of a violin and we've got a lot like in play signs we've got these circular areas here maybe a bit like the checkerboard here that seem to have these halos that remind me perhaps of musical reverberation and then maybe these are musical lines that Kandinsky himself has turned into grids and looking at clays he did as I mentioned a minute ago tried to work this out partly with respect to color theory and I think he was probably kind of going for a light gentle major key for the way in which he's paired complementary colors colors that sort of make each other pop like the the peach over here against this blue maybe if you sort of squint at it you can see like a page of sheet music or something like that. Maybe the signs as well can operate almost as as musical signs. And yet I don't think there's really supposed to be a one to one relationship with any particular music, just in rather Bauhaus terms he was trying to weld them together for this like totalitizing artistic impact and another another major inspiration for claim that I want to show you for just a sec to before we pivot to looking again at at play signs and what it might really be showing is he loved landscapes by Paul Cezanne. This is one by Cezanne dancers and remember to entitled a view of the city in France and what clay admired so much that I think you can see to great effect here is the honey combing that says on had created by basically taking things in space fracturing into all these squares and cubes kind of like pushing them up against the picture plane. And I think with play signs with looking at a landscape like this I want to come down on the place because I think it does actually show a place. So, starting in the year 1924, when clay had painted Sicilian landscape over here. He did visit the Mediterranean every summer and got to be fascinated with the archaeological sites that are everywhere in the region and here I wanted to show you this Roman city Tim Gad in Algeria because you can you can probably guess but we see the grid pattern, both of the streets as well as the buildings that have been excavated showing us these different rooms in all of the structures and I think that the patchwork that he's giving us in these Mediterranean pictures Sicilian landscape as well as play signs could make reference to to these ancient cities to archaeological sites and maybe also to mosaics that were uncovered in these archaeological sites like I here's a checkerboard pattern that you might recognize from play signs. That is from the Roman port city, Austria, and here's a lady Roman mosaic showing their, I guess real flair for putting things in grids. In this case it looks like a lot of dinner items like this bore mushrooms, vegetables, chicken and eggs and stuff. So maybe maybe as images looking to mosaics and another thing that I think to go with that is I think that the picture itself is supposed to operate as a kind of archaeological site where here let me actually show you an image that my friend and colleague sitting in an archaeological square right here has has shared with me having worked in the past herself as an archaeologist and and the process of digging and so on the left hand side here you can see the archaeological grid lines that they've used to mark and organize the site and say where things were found, which again reminds me so much of these grids and then systematically digging the holes to she says this. This is a two by two hole with a one by one cube that the resting against in here and she assures me that archaeology is just like minecraft if your children like to play that game. So it's a very structured way of discovering strata of what may be below the surface and archaeological site and also a kind of guest alt of making sense of the whereabouts and patterns of what you find in order to create a narrative and I think that clay really is saying that the visual arts are not just like music but like archaeology to where in the interface between the artist, the image, and you, you're looking at it trying to put the pieces together and I think we've got these signals to show our own agency in signification as a way of as a way of taking the work that is there with whatever inherent meanings. It may have but also realizing that we ourselves are always going to be part of the process of of constructing meaning for art for places for any other things that we encounter and try to comprehend in our lives. And so that's it for today's Barnes takeout and thank you so much for for watching. 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