 I'm Cindy Kang. I'm a curator at the Barnes Foundation. And now that I'm working from home, I wanted to show you and talk about a painting that I really miss. It's one of my favorite paintings in the collection. It's Matisse's Red Madra's Headdress. This one right here. This painting is the one that gives me the most joy, I would say, whenever I'm having a bad day or whenever I need to remind myself of why I went into this line of work, I go into the galleries upstairs to room 15 to see her. So this is a picture of Matisse's wife, Amélie, playing dress up, essentially. She's got on a patterned dress with lace trim and she has this head scarf wrapped around her head that is supposed to be vaguely exotic. And when Matisse showed this painting, the reaction was very mixed because a lot of people couldn't place her. They couldn't figure out who this woman was. They said she was Creole. They said she was Maori. They said she was Kanak. So basically, they were placing her or categorizing her as an other kind of person, as an other kind of race and conflating all these sorts of peoples who lived in European colonies. But I think part of what makes this painting so interesting and so modern still is because of this racial ambiguity that you can't place her. You can't categorize her. You don't know who she is and as our world becomes more fluid and racially mixed and diverse, to me it feels like a really modern painting still and it feels relevant to my life still. What I really love the most about this painting though is how it hits you immediately with really vibrant color. I love the way this punchy red sits against this really rich, rich blue in the background. The blue is actually quite variegated and as you move from right to left across the painting, you can see that it changes and that the left there's this hint of green underneath which actually shows us that Matisse originally had the background is green and then painted it over blue as he was changing his mind about the color relationships. But then there is also this fantastic yellow on the head scarf. This meandering line that's like a really crazy maze. It reminds me of the mazes my son draws. So like many of you, I have been stuck at home with my son and or my child and we've been doing a lot of mazes. We've been doing a lot of drawing. We have not been playing a lot of dress-up. And this also reminded me that when Matisse was working on this painting, his sons Jean-Pierre were about eight and nine years old and in fact, their drawings served as a likely source of inspiration for this work. If you look at the graphic simplicity of her face, it's like a coloring book and her expression is one of the most powerful parts of this picture. I loved her arched eyebrows. There's a sly humor in that and her pose conveys this wonderful casual intimacy. So she's sitting sideways on a chair and her hands are resting on the chair back and her head is cocked slightly to the left as if she is sympathetically listening to whatever it is you're saying. And then she has this faint smile that looks like she's taking all of the craziness of the world in stride. I love that she has such an expansive presence. The painting cannot contain her. You can see she's bursting out beyond the edges of the frame and I hope her energy is bursting out to touch you and give you a little bit of joy in your day. So thanks for listening and tune in tomorrow for another Barn's Takeout Art Talk.