 Hello everybody and welcome to this week's Barnes Takeout, your weekly serving of art from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. I'm Bill Perthes, the Bernhard C. Watson director of adult education, and today we take a vicarious trip with the American artist Charles Demith. In the summer of 1916, Demith, who was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, not far from Philadelphia where the Barnes Foundation is, Demith spent the summer in Provincetown in what's come to be called the Great Provincetown Summer. It was a remarkable time when Provincetown attracted artists and intellectuals to a kind of artist's colony. Along with Demith was fellow artist Marston Hartley. Demith and Hartley had met in 1912 in Paris and become close friends, also William and Margaret Zurich. Along with them were people such as the writer, historian, and communist activist John Reed, Louise Bryant, the journalist and feminist, and sort of rounding out the group was the American playwright Eugene O'Neill, who that summer, along with the help of these other artists, several of whom actually participated, O'Neill debuted two plays and you may know that Eugene O'Neill went on to essentially be the founder of the American School of Realist Theater, and Hartley were part of that group. After that summer, Hartley and Demith had planned to stay in Provincetown until November, but the weather turned and instead they Hartley went on to Bermuda and Demith went to New York for a while and then joined Hartley in Bermuda where the two of them spent the winter rather of 1916 into 1917. And I say all of that because the picture we're looking at was painted in that time. So this picture is called Trees in Architecture as I suggested it's from 1916, 1917. And it's part of a body of work that Demith worked on through that summer and into the following winter that are really transitional works in Demith's form as he was developing his modernist form or what would become to know as his precisionist work, which is the work he's most well known for. So this time period is really developmental for Demith as he's sort of maturing as an artist, very much so prompted by the encouragement of his friend Marston Hartley. I mentioned in a takeout I did earlier this year, I looked at a sort of companion work to this created by or painted by Hartley, again called Bermuda, Bermuda movement. So this sort of interchange between artists was really essential for the development of both of these American artists. And what we see Charles Demith doing here is in many ways adapting what he saw in Cubist works, particularly that of Pablo Picasso and George Brock. Cubism was relatively new. And Demith rather than simply repeating what Picasso and Brock had done was looking for a way to sort of reshape it to suit his own interests. And for one, he's using watercolor, which gives a particular quality to the color. And if we look carefully, the way that Demith applies color gives it a wonderful sort of light translucent in many places, translucent quality, you'll see that it has this dappled effect to it, where he would lay down a color and then sort of blot it and it would give it this this variety of of opaqueness and transparency. And you'll see that he very strategically deploys these areas of color across this vast field of open paper. So all of the white that you see here is the actual paper on which the picture is created. And you'll see along with with the color, the important use of line lines that have varying qualities to them. They're both curvilinear as well as rectilinear. And they're suggestive of sort of organic shapes and constructed shapes. So they're kind of squared off as opposed to the rounded. And he's he has composed this and the sort of suggestive quality of this is also I think quite profound is that he's giving us just sort of snippets of elements, perhaps the most that what is clear if there's anything that's really clear here is the suggestion of a beam or a post that centers this composition. So running vertically right in the center. And then to our left, what seems like a tree, although again, it's very sort of suggestive of tree with again, carrying on or echoing the the vertical quality of that central beam. And then you'll see that that verticality repeats again. So it's creating a kind of structure as well as a rhythm. And then as it repeats, you'll notice that it begins to angle a little bit. As we again as we continue to move to our left. And then it's the the composition sort of culminates in this dissipating again, curvilinear or organic forms on the on the left on the left and then going out into the off onto the white white paper to the right, the compositions slightly different. Rather than a repetition of the vertical units, we have in very light interspersed curvilinear and linear units. And those linear units are moving both diagonally up and down left and right, but also horizontally. And the combination of these the vertical to the diagonals creates a kind of tipping quality as our eye moves across it. Our eyes sort of goes from one side to the to the next. The way that he that Demith has graded these colors again from areas, we go sort of to the top here, areas where where it's darker, such as here, and then fades out to light or darker here and fades out to right to where it's light. This is a technique that we see Picasso and Brock doing but Demith is using it quite differently. Picasso and Brock would you often use it in early analytic cubism to suggest a plane receding in and out of space. Now, Demith is not interested in that. And instead, these great graded forms remain oriented to the to the frontality of the picture plane itself. So it's really flat. The picture space itself is fairly shallow. Really the only suggestion of depth of space is either through those tipping forms a little bit through the opaqueness or the solidness of some color areas to the transparency of other other colored areas so that these more opaque areas seem to be in the foreground and these more transparent ones seem to step back or through overlapping where we have some areas overlapping other areas. And so that overlapping suggests one thing on top of or in front of the other. But again, that's it's very minimal in terms of picture space and that overlapping and particularly the way that he deploys overlapping such as an area like this or see how this area overlaps what we read as the trunk of the tree. That that quality of overlapping is also something that is reminiscent of another sort of modernist development of Picasso and Brock. And that's that's collage of flat planes, newspaper or wallpaper cut out and then actually pasted, laid on top of each other, but remaining fairly, fairly flat. One of the striking things about this is with all of the exposed paper that there's this wonderful brightness to the to the picture. It adds a sense of luminosity of this being a light filled scene. And I mentioned the importance of line of the curvilinear quality to the linear quality. It's difficult to see at a distance, but if you zoom in, we can see that DeMuth deploys line independently. So we have these very light graphic lines and these lines echo and sometimes mirror some of the colored form. So we see it here and then we see the line now not the color just the line deployed as a almost like a kind of memory of that form. Again, as it sort of dissipates and fades off into into the white of the paper. Elsewhere, very delicate and fine lines enhance a given color area. So creating this kind of box and grid like form. Sometimes it line extends a color area. So you'll notice that DeMuth is very careful about keeping colors within the confines of linear boundaries. But then the lines themselves will continue on. So such as here where the color stops, but this line continues on this line continues on. And here the line actually again intersects overlaps this color area. And it's those very subtle relationships of colors and forms and lines to each other that again suggests any and all again fairly minimal qualities of picture space or depth. So I've mentioned the importance of cubism that the work of Picasso and Brock informing DeMuth's choices here and certainly the influence of his friend Marston Hartley. But another artist that was really important to DeMuth's development was the example of late watercolors by the French artist Paul Cézanne. And here now I'm showing you a view of the ensemble in gallery 20. This is the south wall where this work lives and we see it placed here. And to enhance our understanding of DeMuth's connection to the work of Paul Cézanne, Dr. Barnes very helpfully placed watercolors by Cézanne just beneath the DeMuth's. So actually all of these works, these all across here are all watercolors by Charles DeMuth all done around the around the same time this winter in Bermuda. And here we see the works by Cézanne. And if we look at how Cézanne has used, pull it up here, we can see too, both Cézanne and DeMuth above, we can see how Cézanne quite different than how he uses or how he used oil paint where he would often, not always, but often layer the color on fairly thickly. In his watercolors Cézanne has this wonderful light delicate touch of color and color often is used as a compliment to the forms that often are created out of the the white of the paper. Again, this is something we see and this is a drawing by Cézanne. So here's our picture and another Cézanne watercolor of Montsalfatois, a very common and familiar theme for Cézanne. But how DeMuth is so sort of creatively able to combine interests of that he sees in the development of Cubism, but integrating it in integrating into it also his interest in the work of Cézanne. And not to be forgotten, so there's a picture by Alexis Grichenko at the top of this that shares some of the qualities of both Cézanne and the DeMuths. But down here you'll notice, and I'll show you again on both sides, these are 17th century Chinese fans. And if we look at this one, so just on the same side of the wall as the picture we're looking at, notice in this Chinese fan how much open paper there is. And here again Barnes is using the ensemble as a way of suggesting not necessarily a direct connection that is DeMuth to 17th century Chinese fan painting or even to between the Chinese fan and the Cézanne, but a shared creative interest and a shared artistic interest that connects very dissimilar traditions to each other by way of their compositional choices using open paper as a source of light and actually a sense of space and volume. Interesting there's actually more space in the Chinese pictures than there are in the DeMuths. So DeMuth and Dr. Barnes were quite close. Barnes was a strong supporter of DeMuth. Barnes helped DeMuth. DeMuth suffered from often quite poor, healthy, suffered from diabetes, and Barnes was also quite enthusiastic about searching out and finding new treatments for DeMuth. And Dr. Barnes and Mrs. Barnes were also quite close with Charles DeMuth's mother Augusta who continued to live in Lancaster. These works in these corner galleries where there's abundance of work not too dissimilar to other galleries in the collection, but these sort of smaller works can often be overlooked in the Barnes collection. But I encourage you now that we're open if you have the opportunity to come and visit, spend some time in Gallery 20. This is just one picture amongst a wide variety of works on, predominantly works on paper that are worth exploring in Gallery 20 at the Barnes Foundation. So I hope you'll tune in next week for another edition of Barnes Takeout. And please subscribe and you'll get notices when new versions, new editions are added to our roster. In the meantime stay safe. If you can visit us at the Barnes Foundation and we'll see you again soon. Take care.