 Hi, I'm Cindy Kang, the curator at the Barnes Foundation, and welcome to Barnes Takeout. We are in the main gallery, and we're going to look at a painting that is hung rather high up. So it's a great opportunity to look at it a little bit more closely. This is Sera's Posas from 1888. So let's zoom in. It's a pretty enigmatic painting that shows three artist models in Sera's Paris studio, and you can see in the background on the left another painting by Sera called The Sunday Afternoon at Le Conjotte that is taking up one whole wall in his studio. So this is a complex picture with a painting and a painting, and Sera called this painting a toil de lutte, which can translate to battle canvas or a canvas of combat. So he painted this work in reaction to criticism that he got of Le Conjotte when he showed Le Conjotte in 1886 at the last Impressionist exhibition. The critics said of Le Conjotte that this technique of pointillism that Sera was using was fine for landscapes, but it was not good for figures. So pointillism was used a very small, fine dots and dashes of pure color that when placed next to each other would create an optical mixture in the eye of the viewer. That was supposed to be more vibrant than if the color was mixed on the palette and applied to the canvas. So let's zoom in on a little section just to see what that looks like. So if you look at her arm there and the shadow of the skin, you can see that Sera has placed many dots of blue next to orange and an orangey red that shades into lighter colors, even yellow and green. And what happens is that it reads as a shadow on the skin, but keeps the vibrancy of the color. So this style or this technique of painting was based on the latest advances in optics and color theory. So Sera was very much paying attention to the scientists of his day because he wanted to ground his painting practice in science, and this was a direct reaction to the perceived subjectivity and spontaneity of Impressionism. It was Sera's friend and art critic, Félix Fénéon, who coined the term neo-Impressionism to describe what Sera was doing and what Sera and his followers were doing. But Sera himself called his approach to painting Chromo-Luminarism because of his great attention to color and light. So this painting, the Poiseuse, was a manifesto of neo-Impressionism. What he's doing here is tackling the very ancient subject of the female nude. And so he's throwing down the gauntlet. He displays this work in the 1888 Salon des Andependons, and this is a very deliberate repost to this criticism that pointillism cannot be used for the figure. So he says, fine, you think that I'm going to paint three nudes. This is a reference to the classical theme of the Three Graces, in which generally there were three nudes that were viewed from the front, the side, and the back. And Sera has very much quoted various figures from art history and ancient art. The figure on the right that you see with her leg crossed over is a reference to the ancient Greek figure of this binario, this figure that is removing a thorn from his foot. The figure that you see on the left is a reference to one of Angela's bathers from earlier in the 19th century. So this is a painting that is very much cognizant of the weight of tradition and art history. But what he does with this classical theme is turn it into a genre scene of modern life, into this scene of these skinny working class women getting undressed in his studio. Now the composition was very meticulously planned. There are studies, there's sketches for each figure. And to tell you how some things have changed, the sketch for the figure in the middle, she was originally posed so that those rectangular prints or paintings on the wall were right behind her and framing her head. But in the final painting, of course, you can see that Sera has put her smack dab in the middle so that she is kind of this vertical element joining the two sides of the wall together, right? She's right in the corner there. He also changed other details like in previous sketches, the couch that the model on the left sitting on was blue and now it's red. He made the model on the right, her stockings, this amazing bright green. The model was originally wearing black stockings. So you see he's playing with different color harmonies and different color contrasts. So this painting is not about spontaneity and even in the way the figures are so stable and hieratic, you could say, and static, some critics kind of read them as very stiff and very wooden. There's something almost lifeless about them. And what's really interesting is the way Sera contrasts that with the comedy of clothing below them. The accessories below them seem even more alive than the figures themselves. Let's look. I love, for example, this glove, it is so creepy. It really looks like it's crawling out of the painting and in like this claw that's about to grab you. And then there are the shoes, these fun shoes that are also kind of walking out of the painting. They're very lively. These two hats here, these are fun. They are this dark hat and this light hat that are facing each other at this very jaunty angle. They are like in conversation with each other in dialogue. And this is all very deliberate. You can see that all these accessories, the parasol, the ribbons, the clothes, they are all painted with these dynamic lines, which are very much in contrast to the very stable, calm lines of the models themselves. So Sera actually attached emotional associations with lines. And so these kinds of dynamic diagonals were supposed to be more joyous and versus calm, stable verticals and horizontals were about tranquility. So there is a sense that he is attaching emotion to line and color also. So these accessories point back to the fact that this is a scene of modern life. These are not three graces, but they're three working women, modern kind of urban Parisian women. So this is a scene of work. And this brings us to the title of the painting, Poses. It's a pretty idiosyncratic title. It's translated into English as models. But Poses is a really strange word because generally in French, if you want to say the word model, you would say model. Poses has different connotations. In the masculine form of the French word poseur, that can be used to describe a manual laborer, like someone who is laying down brick or laying down your parquet floor or something like that. But in the female version of the word poseuse, it also connotes someone who is striking a pose, someone who is putting on airs, someone who is pretending to be something that they are not. So what Sarah is doing with this title, Poses, is pointing to the artificiality of the painting and the artificiality of these scenes of modern life, that these are constructed scenes, including the grand draught, this great painting that was of Parisian urban leisure. By placing the models in front of the grand draught, he's setting up this contrast here. There's the contrast of the clothed and the unclothed, the interior and the exterior, the idea of real versus fictive space. So one detail that I love to illustrate that point is you see this dog in the corner there on the left. That dog is part of the painting, but the dog looks like it's leaping and about to grab that parasol handle. The parasol handle is part of the quote, unquote, real space of Sarah's studio. So he's really playing these little visual jokes and thinking about these contrasts. And the fact that he is posing the models in front of the painting also, he's inviting this implication that these are the same models that posed for the grand draught, especially that central figure there. You get the sense that there is a rhyming or a parallel between her and that main figure in the grand draught holding the parasol. So Sarah actually identified as a worker, the way these models were also workers. When a collector inquired about buying this painting and wanted to know how much it was, Sarah replied that he would charge the equivalent of a year's work at a model's day rate. That's pretty interesting. And this idea of labor is actually echoed by the technique, the materials that Sarah used to paint this painting. The painting is apparently done on gesso made with plaster. This, well, for one thing, it gave Sarah a very white surface to work on, which was really important for this pointillist approach to painting of applying pure color. This is as opposed to in old master painting, you would start with a ground of a kind of mid-tone, a brown tone, so that you could work up to the highlights and then work down to the darks. But Sarah wanted to start from a pure white surface. But the other thing about this plaster gesso surface is that it is a very hard surface to work on. It made the painting a very slow-going process, and it gave the sense that painting was a form of manual labor, you know, going back to this idea of the posers, this manual laborer. So I guess what I am trying to say about this painting is that it is as much as it is grappling with tradition and history, as much as it is a highly intellectual statement that has inspired many fascinating interpretations that I can't go into in this short video. It is also grounded in the idea of handcraft and in the reality of Sarah's world, you know, the day-to-day of regular people's lives. So I think of it as much as a tribute to art and history as it is to these regular working women who made these pictures possible. So that wraps up today's Barnes Takeout. I hope you enjoy another episode, and thanks for watching. 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.