 Hi everyone and welcome to Barns Takeout. I'm Martha Lucy, Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barns. And today we're going to be looking at a painting by Oralon Redon called Saint George and the Dragon. And before we get into it, I'm gonna show you the painting in the gallery at the barns where it hangs. This is room 14 upstairs, and here it is over in the corner. Saint George and the Dragon was painted in around 1909 or 1910, and it's done in oil on paperboard. And it's relatively late work in Redon's career. He would have been about 70 years old when he painted this. Redon was born in Bordeaux, France, worked most of his life in Paris, and he's associated with a group that we call the Symbolists, which began as a literary movement in the 1880s. But very broadly speaking, the movement represented a philosophical break with the prevailing trends in modern art, especially those represented by the Impressionists, which had focused on the idea that observation of the external world was the most important thing that you could do as an artist, that the idea that the artist should work directly from nature and capture its fleeting effects. The Symbolists were more interested in subjectivity and inner vision. So capturing what could be seen in the mind's eye rather than what could be seen in the external world, what was visible around you. It was a concern with inner vision or a vision beyond the realm of what was actually visible. Redon's work is often characterized by dream-like settings and it's often populated with strange hybrid figures, figures that are often described as monstrous. They are often half man, half human, half plant. There are often giant kind of disembodied eyeballs floating across the image. And these are beings that he invented. He sort of invented his own iconography and a lot of his works. But other times his subjects or his iconography comes from specific mythological or biblical or literary sources. But he always, even when his works do come from a traceable source, he always delivers that subject with some sort of twist, makes it strange somehow. And I think that this painting is a good example of that. So the subject, again, is St. George and the Dragon. And St. George was a Roman soldier who lived during the earliest period of Christianity. He died in the year 303. And the story, as it was written in the Golden Legend, goes like this, there was a dragon that was terrorizing a town, demanding human sacrifices and the dragon had its sights set on the daughter of a pagan king. George comes along and saves the princess by subduing the dragon with his lance. The princess then led the dragon to the city where the saint killed it with his sword, which is presumably what we're seeing here. And in doing so, he prompted the king and his subjects to convert to Christianity. Now it is St. George and the Dragon was a popular subject in the history of art, popular during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. You had artists like Raphael depicting it, Paolo Uccello, Rubens. And in those more traditional images, the story, the action is always right up front, right in the foreground so that you see the dragon, you see the dragon's claws and its teeth, you see the spear going into it. The horse and the dragon in those works take up most of the composition. And there's often an element of violence and gore in one of them, I think it's the Paolo Uccello, there's blood dripping on the ground. Very, very dramatic. And also in all of those, the princess is also included. You see her in the background, sort of looking on. Raidon's treatment of the story is much different. The focus is not so much on the action. I mean, he is in the process, it looks like, of spearing the dragon with his lance, but it's not up close to you. It's not even really the focus. It's almost hard to tell what's going on. It's even sort of hard to make out the dragon. But the main subject here, what I think is interesting about this is that the main subject is shifted off to the side. You don't see the gore, you don't see the action. But it's still a dramatic picture. There's still a sense of drama that Raidon creates, and he does that through the landscape and through the setting, through the forms of the landscape and the setting that the scene takes place in. Look at these turbulent clouds coming in, dark underneath. And I'll take a minute to just point out the shape of them, this sort of S-curve that rhymes with the shape of the serpent and also the kind of back of the horse. Of course, drama is created through the colors, most of all, that blazing red, orange red sun right up against these emerald greens of the ocean. And then the kind of turbulent and uncertain use of space, the way that the land just kind of falls off over here and the waves look like they're about to kind of come crash on you as the spectator. Color is used here for expressive purposes, rather than mimetic ones, and zooming in a little bit. You can see how even though this is a shift, away from Impressionism kind of theoretically, he still is taking, he still has learned, all of these artists have kind of taken a cue from the Impressionists, just in the application of paint in the brushwork. It wasn't until the 1890s that Redone started introducing these brilliant colors into his works and working in pastels and oils. Before the 1890s, he worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithographs, so his works were much kind of darker and more just mono-chromatic. But again, the iconography here is really, I don't think Redone's concern. I mean, he does not include the princess. He sort of uses the subject of St. George and the Dragon as a point of departure to do something else, to sort of engage with bigger themes of good versus evil, of sort of the spiritual realm, I think, versus the earthly realm. And I think that that is represented by the sort of earthbound serpent right up against the much more kind of ambiguous space represented by the ocean and this kind of shifting sky. He's always interested throughout his work in the subjective experience of spirituality in the idea of the unknown. That just fascinated Redone. The themes of sort of uncertainty and what's beyond the world that we see immediately around us. And so his work is often imbued with this sense of mystery. And I will close by reading you something that he said about his work. He said, my works inspire and are not meant to be defined. They place us as does music in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined. So that's all for today. Thanks very much for listening. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer 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.