 Hey everybody and welcome to Barns Takeout. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barns Foundation and I'm excited to talk to you today about this work by Henri Matisse called Le Bonheur de Vieve. It was painted between 1905 and 1906 and here it is hanging at the barns on the second floor just off of the balcony and you can see here that it's got a wall to itself which is unusual for the barns. Usually paintings are surrounded by lots of different objects. You can also see here I think you can tell that it's a big painting. It's about eight by six feet which is much larger than what Matisse had been producing. Le Bonheur de Vieve is one of those watershed paintings in the history of art, in the history of modern European art I should say. It's one of those paintings that kind of changes everything that the other members of the avant-garde at the time kind of sort of take notice of and say like wait a minute and one of the best examples of this is when Picasso saw this work it was one of the things that prompted him to start work on his on his watershed, Le Des Moines d'Avignon at MoMA. This work was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1906 in Paris and that was an unjuried exhibition and it was the only work that Matisse showed at that exhibition and this happened about six months after the famous exhibition in 1905 at the Salon d'Automne also in Paris where the word fauve had been coined to describe the kind of beastly work of Matisse and his colleagues so it was a derogatory term so as you can imagine that had happened in 1905 and in 1906 so there were a lot of there was a lot of kind of curiosity about what Matisse was going to do in 1906 at this exhibition and as it turned out it was the scandal of the 1906 show and so what I want to do is you know there's so much to say about this work I want to focus on what some of the things that bothered the critics because it's a good way of getting at what Matisse was doing in 1905-06 that was so different from what had come before him. Before we get into that I want to let you know that not everybody hated this painting when it was first done you know a lot of artists were very taken by it. Gertrude and Leo Stein the great American collectors who were living in Paris they bought this out of the show and they hung it in their apartment at 27 Rue de Floreuse. Now the other thing to know is that their apartment in Paris was the was the first place that Barnes would have really looked closely at Matisse. He traveled to Paris and saw the Stein collection in 1912 and in fact his first to Matisse purchases were from the Steins. So what's going on here the the subject Matisse is representing here some sort of it's it's an earthly paradise or a mythic golden age. Sometimes we refer to these kinds of subjects as Arcadian and the term Arcadia or Arcadian dates back to antiquity. In Greek mythology Arcadia was an earthly paradise inhabited by gods and nymphs but more generally Arcadia conjures a vision of a lost state of innocence a state that is irrecoverable. So what you see here what Matisse is giving us here is it's an unspoiled landscape. There there's no hint of of modernity in sight it's hard to sort of determine what where this where this is happening or when it's kind of timeless. You see people in harmony with nature kind of just lying in the grass sort of without a care in the world you know looking very comfortable very relaxed there's music this figure here this sort of shepherd like figure playing pipes this shepherd like figure playing the flute and then there are kind of these amorous couples all over the place. So it's it's a painting that celebrates sensuality the pleasures of the body the freedom in nature it's a vision of a time when when pleasures were simple and sensual and expressed through the body and you can you know when you start looking at this you realize that many of the senses are engaged it's not just vision but it's also it's also your your sense of hearing right the music the sense of touch that happens with with this little moment over here maybe even smell maybe you sort of imagine what a scene like this kind of smells like paintings like this nudes in a landscape scenes of the golden age these they had been popular during the Renaissance but the the subject really picked up steam for European painters in the early 20th century everybody was kind of producing these these these Arcadian these sort of pastoral kind of idyllic scenes and it was probably a reaction to modernity and technology and industrialization you know this kind of longing for a time that was kind of pre-modern when when the body was in harmony with nature and it's got all the traditional iconography of these scenes the pipe players the nudes the dancers art historians have done a lot of detective work trying to uncover sources for this painting you know who was Matisse looking at who were the older painters that would have inspired something like this and there are you know there there are definitely quotes from artists like Aang or Antician his concerto champetre so it's it's a painting that's traditional and subject and that makes all these references to classicism but here's where it gets really interesting because what he does is he gives you this very kind of traditional subject with all these classical references you know that that traditional iconography but then he turns everything on its head through his use of color and line and space and through his representation of the body so looking first at space you can see that there are these bizarre shifts and scale you know when you start to look at these different bodies and these different kind of passages they don't all kind of quite add up to a single coherent space this figure should be larger it's in the foreground than these figures there seems to be a really drastic kind of shift back here these figures seem sort of too small so that's just kind of one thing that unsettled critics you will probably not be surprised to hear that it was color that was Matisse's use of color that was that was the most shocking here I mean just look at these pad these bright yellows and hot oranges and reds and these lavenders and greens and they all just kind of come together and they're they're sort of clashing into each other there's no subtle kind of gradation from from lavender into green it's just they just bump up right against each other and this was not this was this was this was not the way that it was done traditionally and also just the way that you know what is this form here what are these colors describing you know these colors don't belong to specific objects you can't look at this and say oh this is you know the trunk of a tree you don't really know what it is the other interesting thing is that is the way that Matisse uses color and line together here or I should say the way that he pulls these things apart what I mean is that traditionally color and line in Western illusionism were used together to create the illusion of a solid form in space here he's kind of pulling these things apart right I mean look here at this passage there's just this line this color here opens up into this line it's it's just very really interesting and bizarre and then there's so many little details of the way that he's using color here look how this tree kind of changes colors as the trunk goes up another thing to know about the color is that you can see that there are a lot of yellows but there were even more yellows originally Matisse used a kind of yellow called cadmium sulfite and it produced these really vivid yellows and but over time some of the areas where he used the cadmium sulfite started to degrade and this is one of them right up here see how it's kind of brownish gray and then also underneath these figures and our conservation team has has studied this in depth and we have taken measures to make sure that the degradation kind of arrests where it is but the point is that just imagine originally this thing would have been even brighter bright bright yellows you know no kind of areas where your eye sort of gets to rest from color the way that it does now now the bodies were another thing that critics pointed to critics said you know the scale doesn't make sense I don't understand what's supposed to be going on in this painting it's incoherent it doesn't hang together and what's with these figures a figure like this was simply too androgynous for critics in 1906 you know it's it looks like it's supposed to be a male shepherd but it's also kind of curvy and this was upsetting this figure here what is this pose the critics said these bodies look kind of just sort of emptied out and then over here you know this figures this woman's head and this male figures head look like they're kind of melding together so are these there are these kind of strange anatomical distortions and I think that one of them the the most interesting things to think about when you're looking at this painting again is the way that Matisse gives you he kind of hooks you with these pieces of tradition you know these these these bits of sort of iconography that are recognizable like oh yeah this is a pastoral this isn't an Arcadian painting but then he he just kind of he just kind of pulls the rug out from under you and and kind of denies all of the the other elements that traditionally go along with that subject so it's a really complicated painting it is a it is lyrical it is big and airy and beautiful and there's so much to look at please come look at it when we reopen on July 25th just stand in front of it and sort of get lost in it and remember how upsetting it was to audiences in 1906 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