 Hi everybody and welcome to Barn's Takeout. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research Interpretation and Education at the Barnes. And today we're going to be looking at a painting by Pablo Picasso called Acrobat and Young Harlequin. This painting hangs in Gallery 19 at the Barnes. It's upstairs and it's right here. It's this one in the center of the wall. Let's get close to it. This was painted in 1905 during a period that art historians call Picasso's Rose Period. So it's it's it's early in Picasso's career before he starts working with Georges Braque to develop the language of Cubism. The Rose Period, as the name suggests, it's characterized by pinkish tones and by figures that have a kind of classical elegance and that tend to be long and attenuated as these are. Forms during this period are whole. None of the splintering and fracturing of space that you get in the later later Cubist works. You can see here that the faces are classically modeled. They have and shade to make them look three dimensional, but overall the painting is very thinly painted. And you can see this especially, you know, with a very liquidy paint. And you can see that especially in the ground and look at the way that this the brown paint kind of just drips over his foot. So what's going on here? We've got two figures on us on a shallow stage. They are performers and they're called Sultan banks. Sultan banks were traveling entertainers who went from town to town traveling in groups, setting up their stage and performing light theater acrobatics and juggling. This form of theater grew out of the Italian comedy comedia dell'arte tradition that dates back to the 16th century. And the word Sultan bank actually comes from the Italian word Salty Banco, Saltaire in Italian means to jump. One of the figures, the smaller one, where's the costume of the Harlequin, who was a stock character in these traveling performances. The Harlequin character was a servant and he was known for his acrobatics and his wit. And he always he's recognizable in Picasso's paintings and other paintings in the history of art by his diamond costume. Originally in the plays Harlequin wore a servants coat that was made of patches, but it evolved over time into just this diamond patterned costume. The Harlequin was kind of comic relief. He was a comedic character in these performances. And so it's very one of the things that I love about this painting is the way that it's supposed to be kind of comic and funny. And you can tell that by the sort of goofiness of the costumes. But there's also something here that is so melancholy. And I will return to that in a minute. Behind them is what's probably a painted curtain. So here's where the stage ends. Here's where the curtain comes down, it seems. And there's some scenery in the background. And we're going to look at this again in a minute. The two figures look out at the audience as if to receive applause. They look relaxed, like they've just finished a performance. And there's a tenderness between the figures. This one's got his hand on the shoulder of the littler one. And they're probably from the same family. They look as if they could be brothers. Picasso painted this when he was living in the Montmart neighborhood of Paris. And back then in 1905, it was not the Montmart that we know today, but instead a rundown village on the outskirts of town that was famous for its seedy bars and hard-living bohemian artists, including Picasso. Picasso and his friends would have seen these kinds of itinerant entertainers performing in the public squares, you know, doing gymnastics, juggling, acting, doing plays, and vaudeville. And the Salton Bonk figures became a very big theme for Picasso during the Rose period. He became sort of obsessed with these figures. There are famous paintings of Salton Bonks at the National Gallery in Washington and at MoMA. But it wasn't just Picasso. The Salton Bonks were a big theme in modern art and literature in general. Baudelaire and Apollinaire, for example, both described Salton Bonks in their writings. So what was the fixation on these figures? Well, they had a certain appeal for the Parisian avant-garde. Salton Bonks lived on the outskirts of society. They traveled around. They were kind of outcasts, but they were also extremely creative. They didn't quite fit in anywhere. So for an artist like Picasso, such figures stood in a way for his own marginalized status. And so in a lot of Picasso's paintings, he deals with the Harlequin and later works, too. The Harlequin is often thought of as Picasso's alter ego. And Picasso liked to paint alter egos into his works. A later alter ego becomes the minotaur. So the melancholy tone here is perhaps meant to convey that sense of marginalization that was associated with these figures. But I think that that melancholy field does something more than that. I think pictorially it creates a very interesting kind of tension. It adds to the ambiguity to the strangeness of the scene that disjuncture between the funny, joyful costumes and the melancholy expressions, it stops you in your tracks, at least it stops me in my tracks. What's going on? It's kind of hard to understand. And then when you start really looking at the space, the space becomes a little confusing. It's hard to tell actually if the background is real or painted. And just notice the way that Picasso here doesn't show you the edge of the curtain on the sides, which leaves open the possibility that they're just on a stage and the scene behind them is actually real buildings behind them, not a curtain. Now this is deliberate ambiguity in Picasso's work. He's deliberately trying to make things sort of uncertain in this painting. And this kind of ambiguity and sort of playing and this uncertainty becomes one of defining characteristics of Picasso's art and even more generally in modern art. It's even part of what defines the modern era. There's a famous quote by Carl Marx, all that is solid melts into air that describes the societal upheavals of the modern era in the late 19th century. But it also pertains to the way that meanings no longer seem to be stable and straightforward. Things we thought we knew are now unknowable. I think that Picasso plays with ambiguities and uncertainties here in this painting and then to a much larger extent later on in his career. Now this work Barnes collected along with 45 other works by Picasso. He tended to like these earlier Picasso's. He has a lot of work from the blue and rose periods, not so much from his cubism period, a couple, but mostly he really loved the early works. So come see them at the Barnes along with everything else when we reopen. Not sure when that is at this moment, but hopefully not too long from now. I hope that you have enjoyed today's takeout. Please join us again tomorrow. Thank you. 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.