 I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer Family Executive Director of the Barnes Foundation and I'm pleased to have been asked to participate in a special episode of Barnes Takeout on this Giving Tuesday, The International Day of Philanthropy. I want to share a picture that I really enjoy, an under-recognized gem that hangs in room 22 of our permanent collection galleries, Charles Demith's exquisite in vaudeville acrobatic male dancer with top hat of 1920, a small, it's only really 13 by 8 inches, watercolor with graphite and charcoal on woe paper. With fluid, sinuous drawing and expressive washes of translucent color, the artist depicts a dapper, exuberant and seemingly gravity-defying performer doing his dance act in a vaudeville variety lineup. The brown stage, the red curtains, the yellow spotlight forms are all rendered as a flat, abstract field against which his exaggerated figure seems to kick joyously through the picture plane and into our space. Demith was a U.S. artist, scion of a once prosperous business family, born in 1883 in the rural farm community of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His parents were amateur artists who encouraged him to pursue his interest in drawing and painting from an early age, in part because it was a pleasurable but sedentary pastime for the boy who, through childhood illness or injury, was left with a serious mobility challenge, who walked with a pronounced limp and a use of a cane for the rest of his life. Later, his family supported his professional development first at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, from which he graduated in 1910, and then at the Academy Julian and the Academy Colorosi in Paris through 1914. In a pattern that would repeat itself through his adulthood, he traveled extensively thereafter, principally to New York City, Paris and Berlin, but always returned to Lancaster and his family, where his childhood home was his permanent residence and formal studio until his death. Between 1915 and 1920, in the course of his travels through these cosmopolitan urban centers, Demith produced numerous watercolor sketches like this one of dancers, singers, and acrobats of performers he observed on vaudeville stages in nightclubs and at the circus. A gay man, he also produced lesser known private or highly coded watercolor images of homoerotic subjects that he encountered in these and other bohemian gay subcultural milieu, like bathhouses, sailors' bars, and cruising beaches. In a sense, his figurative watercolors of this period can be understood as a form of reportage, a gay artist capturing and celebrating his personal, sometimes quite private experiences in a time before gay liberation and the broader visibility of LGBTQ people and communities. He worked in watercolor and at this relatively small scale precisely because unlike oil paint, the watercolor medium is conveniently portable, quick drying, and inexpensive, all useful to a peripatatic artist. In between his excursions, Demith would return to sleepy, conservative Lancaster, his family home, and the care of his mother, where not surprisingly, he lived a very different life than he lived, painting far tamer subjects like still lifes and landscapes. In the 1920s, he made a break from the figurative watercolor sketches both in style and in subject matter, turning his attention to the built environment of Lancaster. In his home studio, rather than on the fly, he produced a series of much larger paintings, many in the more challenging, but also more commercial oil medium, paintings that borrow the visual vocabulary of Cubism and its offshoots to abstract the geometric forms of the colonial churches, the 19th century cotton mills, and the 20th century grain silos that he encountered every day at Lancaster. These paintings intended for a broad public are as ordered and sober, as his more private watercolors are boisterous, celebratory, and not a little transgressive. Though it was his watercolors that brought him to the attention of prominent New York gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, it was these paintings that Stieglitz promoted quite successfully along those of other artists in his stable, artists like Charles Shiller and Georgia O'Keeffe, who were also fascinated by the built environment of the United States, which they took to be evidence of a certain kind of collective progress, and rendered it in a similarly simplified, linear, and ordered fashion. For this work, they were labeled precisionists by the critical press and successfully promoted as an old American avant-garde. But while Dimas continued to produce very personal, sometimes quite private watercolors until his death in 1935 from complications of diabetes, in the subsequent half century his sometimes revelatory and sometimes provocative, but always engaging watercolors of an emergent gay subculture were almost completely eclipsed by the critical commercial and institutional embrace and promotion of this tamer, and I would say drier, precisionist work. Ever the contrary, Dr. Barnes collected 44 paintings by Charles Deymuth, but only 11 of them are precisionist pictures. Hanging today for our delectation in the Barnes' galleries are also 33 brilliant watercolors like this one. It's fair to say that Albert Barnes was nearly as well known during his lifetime for his belligerent temperament and often vituperative nature as he was for his extraordinary collection, but a close look at the contents of the extensive Barnes archive reveals that the private man in his personal relationships was warm, kind, devoted, and exceedingly generous. Records demonstrate that Dr. Barnes offered substantial, often anonymous support to challenged artists, individual employees in his factory and at the Barnes Foundation and their families, to public charities caring for the economically and socially marginalized, educational institutions dedicated to the advancement of the working poor and people of color, and many, many straddling artists, including a number whose work he never even collected. From his vast correspondence, we know that as early as 1919, Charles Deymuth, whom Barnes nicknamed Deym, was a friend and great beneficiary of Barnes' largesse. Many of his purchases, as well as loans and outright gifts, were made to help tie Deymuth over through lean times. Barnes, a medical doctor, went as far as to advise on and intervene in Deymuth's health care in an era when insulin was not yet widely available to diabetics, and the artist's health was often precarious. As with many, many other individuals and institutions, Barnes was a loyal friend and discreet but generous benefactor to Charles Deymuth. The Barnes Foundation and its educational and social service are just the most visible of his philanthropic legacies. So on this Giving Tuesday, I hope you will consider recognizing and honoring these legacies with a contribution to the Barnes Foundation. I thank you very sincerely on behalf of the Barnes Board and staff, but most especially on behalf of the many audiences we serve. Thank you and be well. We'll see you at the next Barnes Takeout.