 Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Barnes Takeout. My name is Kaelen Joule. I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to spend some time discussing a painting that is on display in gallery 23 on the second floor. It's a painting done in 1906 by the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. It's simply called Girl with a Goat. Before we get into it though, I do think it's useful and sort of helpful to understand its position within the larger ensemble of the north wall of gallery 23 that we see on the screen right now. When we zoom in a little bit, one of the things that we can see in terms of a connection based on the visual qualities of all of these paintings and furniture and the metalwork is that Barnes is asking us to look at these objects in terms of their formal similarities. So he would ask us to look for things like similar color palettes, similar compositions. And one of the things that I noticed is that on the left hand side of the doorway, we've got this large Matisse painting, which anchors the ensemble on the left side, and that Matisse painting has in its background a very prominent motif of these curtains being parted in front of a window. And then if we look at the Picasso painting on the other side, notice the curtain or the fabric in the background that is parting in a similar sort of way that we have the Matisse picture. So it's interesting that Dr. Barnes pairs these across this ensemble for us to think about these relationships between the two artists. There are many other ways to look at these kinds of ensembles and these relationships, but that's kind of the main thing that I see when I first look at this ensemble. So let's take a closer look into the painting Girl with a Goat. Let's look at a detail of it. So here we have it. As I mentioned, it was painted in 1906 by Pablo Picasso. It was painted in the Spanish town of Gozel, which is deep in the Pyrenees Mountains. This is a painting that was one of many that Picasso did while he was spending time in Gozel. And this was just after he had sold an enormous amount of paintings for him. He had sold somewhere around 20 paintings and had profited pretty handsomely for the time from the sale of these pictures. And so he was financially stable for the first time in a while. And he was particularly happy in terms of his mental state at the time. This is a period that follows the so-called blue period, which is characterized by paintings that were predominantly blue in their color palette. And we don't see blue at all in this picture. Instead, what we see are these lovely rose colors, these peachy tones, this kind of light ochre color of the background, and some creamy color whites. One of the things that I really love about this painting and being able to zoom in on it with this great viewer is that we can start to see what it is that Picasso was doing when he was initially composing the painting. So one of those elements that we can see this kind of vestige of the past is this element right here, which I'm tracing with my cursor. And what we're seeing is a ghost, sort of, of the arm that had been there, and there was an arm holding around mirror. So we know that, if we zoom out, we know that Picasso had initially composed this painting to include these three figures, the goat, the girl, and the young boy. But the girl in the center originally had been a little bit taller, her head was located right up here, and her arm was extended away from her body, and she was holding up a mirror that she was looking at. And that quality, or that little detail there, is something that Picasso chose to sort of leave a vestige of. And so when we zoom back in, now that I've pointed it out, I think you can probably see here the edge of the arm, and the crook of the elbow, back part of the arm, and the elbow here, and the forearm, again holding on to what would have been a mirror. But why is he painting this? What does this reference? The proportions of the girl in the center are pretty unusual. She has a fairly large head in proportion to the rest of her body. Her torso is moderately sized, but her legs are exceptionally long. Her long legs are sort of echoed in the lengthy quality of the curtain that is open. And notice how the front part of this curtain is sort of billowing in a way that gives us a sense of a little bit of implied movement. Notice how the bottom of the curtain right here doesn't line up with the bottom of the curtain behind the goat. So it's an interesting sense of space that he is creating here. It's as though this girl has just walked through this curtain, and she's doing something with her hair. She seems to be playing with her hair, perhaps ringing it out. And so that has led to people trying to understand, well, what are the references here? There is something very monumental about this. There is something very classical about it. And with good reason, we know that Picasso was interested in ancient art from Spain, from the Mediterranean. And this is an example of one of the heads that is on display in gallery number 16 at the Barnes Foundation. And it's an object that I've talked about before in a previous takeout, but it's a head probably depicting the goddess Venus. Picasso wouldn't have seen this head, but he could have seen objects like this. And he didn't actually see the one that you see on the screen right now, which is at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, or I guess Malibu. But it's a very distinctive pose. So this is an ancient Roman statuette of Venus. She is carved out of alabaster, and her arms are partially broken off, but she's in the middle of ringing out her hair. We see that, again, in other types of objects from the medieval world. So what you have here is a pendant, it's a necklace made out of lapis lazuli with gold. And the gold figure of Venus here, she is engaging in that ringing out of her hair. And this is related to the story of the birth of Venus, where she was believed to have been born as a fully grown adult goddess out of a seashell. So she was born from the sea. And so we can see this here in this seventh century Byzantine object. We can also see it in paintings from the so-called Venetian renaissance. So this is a picture that is at the Scottish National Galleries in Edinburgh. And we see here Titian painting this theme. So when we return back to Girl with a Goat, Girl with a Goat, what we can see here is a long tradition of paintings of these images of Venus. But she's not necessarily Venus. We have no inscription here. The only text on the painting is this signature at the bottom in the lower left corner. And also when we look closely here, and this will be sort of the last thing I point out, you can see that there is a sense of an edge of a canvas here. And if we zoom in even closer, we can see that there are little nail holes here, here, and they go all the way around to this kind of ragged edge. And that ragged edge is telling us that Picasso had to rework this canvas. Not only was he reworking it in terms of the composition of the central figure, but he was also reworking it in terms of making the canvas a little bit larger down at the bottom. So when you see this work in the gallery at the Barnes in gallery number 23, spend some time with it and think about the antiquity of it, think about the modern aspects of it, and how it might fit into the rest of the ensemble. So thanks for joining me today, and be sure to stay tuned for another Barnes Takeout. Take care. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer 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.