Hey everybody, welcome to Linuxcast. I'm your host Matthew Weber. I'm joined by Martin Burke. How are you doing, Martin? Doing well. Thank you, Matt. How's things on your side of the world? Well, I'll tell you this. There's about a foot and a half of snow beside my door. I guess so much snow. I don't need any more. I'm done with winter. I'm just saying that right now. I'm just done with it. I don't want to see any more snow until like December-ish. Some more around Christmas. And then I'm just done with it. I'm seriously, it's so cold here. I'm just done. Do you guys, I don't even know, does spring get snow? I mean, like a lot of snow. I know, like, I know, like, Scott can get snow, but... Yeah, I think we've had about snow, about five or six times. Usually to be further rain washes away, but we don't get anything major. It depends where you live in Britain, but yeah, I think around here we've got about, I'd say about three inches, if that. Okay. Well, at least you get a little bit of winter. So you don't have a foot and a half outside. All right. So what have you been doing on Linux this week, Martin? Right. I've upgraded my monitor to 4k, but unfortunately I was having audio problems with the HDMI. So I decided just to try a newer Linux distro. So I tried out Geruda Linux. I tried out the KDE Dragonize version. So it's a rolling distribution based on... Oh, I'm quite impressed, actually. Really good looking distro, obviously, out with KDE, but yeah, it's quite nice. I've got to give it a bit more trial. I've heard Jill Butte booting it with Mint anyway, so dive back into it and the weekend. We've got a bit more time, but yeah, it looks all right. And suddenly it didn't solve my sound issues. So I'm guessing it's a BIOS problem because I've moved my main rigging here and there. So I'll have to go through and see exactly who the culprit is. How about yourself? What have you been up to? I've kind of had a really busy week in terms of Linux. So I I mean, some of this was last week, but I've been messing around a little bit back in i3. So I've been looking at different status bars, and I made a video on Bubblebee status, and that's been kind of fun to play around with. It's just a status bar. It's neat. It's kind of noob user friendly, I would say. It's not really anything. I mean, you can get into the code and stuff and tweak it a bit, but it's really meant for people who are just want a bar that just has a bunch of themes with it, and you don't have to do anything to it. So I've been messing around with that. And yesterday I did a video. I feel like I'm always pimping the YouTube channel, but I did the Rice in KDE to look like Mac OS Big Sur. And once you install KDE on a distro that didn't have it before, KDE kind of takes over everything. So it like changes your GTK theme and your other window managers and stuff. And it's kind of a mess. So I've been thinking about hopping again, and I really had a good experience with MX Linux. So I'm thinking about giving MX Linux a try now.  And that would make me astonishingly sad. Probably completely miserable, but I don't know. I'm thinking about it. We'll see. Yeah. I saw your MX Linux pop-up. I thought, all right, let's see where he's got a slighting Linux, MX Linux then. But yeah, he's impressed. Yeah, I really liked it. That was the first one that I had started on before. But yeah, it's nice little distro. I don't mind. I don't care for Ubuntu because they kind of shove snaps in your face. But I don't know. We'll see if that happens in the next week or so. My setup works really well right now, other than random KDE stuff popping up that I don't know if I really want to switch away from it. But my ADD will probably get the better of me and, you know, eventually hop. The last thing I want to talk about is that because, as you know, my audio setup is very complicated. I got the Scarlet Solo to do the mic and the input and stuff. And it took me weeks to get that fixed, you know, as you know. But I decided to make my setup a little bit more complicated and I got a DAC. So that has been a little bit of an experience, but mostly it's been fairly good. It was just mostly plug and play. It's just a matter of making sure that each application knows that the input comes from the Scarlet Solo and the output goes to the DAC. It's been a little crazy, but not too bad. I don't know. Sounds good though. I mean, sounds fantastic. All right. So, contact info. If you want to get in contact with us, you can do so at the Linuxcast on Twitter. I'm at MTWB. Martin is Martin Twitter. You can find all these links and stuff in the show notes, whether that be on the podcast or on the video. You can also subscribe at thelinuxcast.org, which transfers you over to our anchor page where you'll find all the links to Spotify and iTunes and all that stuff. You can also subscribe to us on YouTube at youtube.com slash linuxcast. And you can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank our very first Patreon, Devin or maybe Davon. I'm not going to try to pronounce his last name. It's not something I could be able to do. And finally, you can also follow us on Facebook at facebook.com slash linuxcast. All right. So, each and every week, Martin and I each select one news item that we would talk just briefly about. So, Martin, your news item for this week. Right. So, I kept my news item from last week because it didn't record. So, Linux 5.11. It was out yesterday. But my news was Linus has been up to his old tricks, branding the Super Bowl as a juiced-up version of the kids' egg and spoon race, while expressing his inability to wrap his head around the rules despite being in the US for over two decades. Oh, and this is disastrous, branding the taken spoon. I mean, it's obviously incorrect as everyone knows that it's a mass advertising circus with a bit of futuristic ruby added in all seriousness, though. There's a fair few improvements on 5.11. I haven't had the chance to go through them all, but there's like some, I think there's some guitar hero things. You can start to run Linux on the Ouija console that came out a while ago that was a crowd-funded project. I know there's a couple of tweaks, I believe, to give you 5% running various different processes. So, it could look good. So, hopefully I'll be able to drop a bit more information even though once everything comes a bit more clear and I've had time to swat up on it. But yeah, all good. 5.11 out yesterday. Supposedly there's some very interesting gaming stuff that's in the kernel this time to get to because a lot of the games now come with that DRM anti-cheat stuff. Supposedly there's some stuff in the kernel now that will allow developers or whatever, specifically wine developers to work towards getting by that kind of stuff so that you can actually play more and more games on Linux. That should be pretty fun. Brilliant. Another last update. It did various different able to use different console gamepads and everything. So, it looks like there seems to be concentrated a little bit more on that. But yeah, why not? I'm sure there's plenty of people out there, myself included, that literally has got a Windows machine. It's just primarily a Roblox machine. So, I mean, that's all that mine's really used for. But yeah, I'll dig a bit deeper into that. Well, it's going to be loads and loads. But yeah, I'll dig into that. How about yourself? What news you got? All right. So, Martin Wimpris, affectionately known as Wimpy, has been leading the Ubuntu desktop team for, like, I think about two years now, maybe three. And he announced this last week that he's actually leaving Ubuntu. So, that's a little bit of sad news. The reason why I kind of put this on there is just because it seems that Canonical is going through a little bit of a problem retaining the desktop guy. I don't know if there's anything nefarious or going on here. Maybe he's just found a better opportunity somewhere else. But it just seems like there's a little bit of instability in terms of the desktop leading. It's a little worrying because, as we all know, Canonical makes most of their money and stuff by providing Ubuntu to servers and companies and stuff. So, the desktop's kind of always fallen a little bit by the wayside. And we're a little worrying that maybe the leadership there won't continue to focus so much on the desktop as they have been in the past. I mean, it's one of those chicken and egg, isn't it? I mean, if you're happy and comfortable as a Linux user at work, you might just think, oh, I'll give you a spin at home, save spending any money, or save transferring OSes.  I mean, to be fair, I'm starting to forget a number of my shortcuts for the Windows desktop. But yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, I'd saw that bit of news as well that he was leaving. I've heard a couple of podcasts and things with him on there. Good guy, yeah. Shame about that. But onwards and upwards, that's the way to look at it. Yeah. All right, so let's jump into our main topic. Now, originally, I was going to have a go at Linux Mint. And just for fun. But I decided to kind of broaden it out a little bit, because one of the things that we talk a little bit about in the Linux community is that fragmentation is a real issue. So there's a whole bunch of developers. I mean, the open source community is actually really large. I mean, for the most part, I mean, not everyone's working on distros or working on servers and applications and stuff. But it seems that for a lot of the time, we've actually spent a lot of times just creating more and more derivatives of things that have existed before. So we're always forking stuff because whether it's because we just want complete control of developers or we don't agree on what direction the app is taking. So we just take it for our own, whatever. And we see this a lot with Linux distributions. Specifically, I mean, we have Debian, which is like the daddy of Linux. And it's swanned Ubuntu and it has several other derivatives, Devuan and several others. Ubuntu itself has its own derivatives, mate and tons of not mate, but mint and a whole bunch of others. Arch is the same way. We have Arch and we have Manjaro and Endeavor and Arch Labs and tons and tons. Fedora is the same way. OpenSUSE, I believe, has a few forks of it. So I mean, we just have all of these derivatives.  But alternatively, I feel a lot of the time it's just developers putting their resources and time into things that necessarily maybe shouldn't exist or aren't necessarily exist for good reasons. So I guess, what are your thoughts on Linux derivatives, Martin? Just trying to think to be truthful. I mean, yeah, more choice is a better for everyone. I mean, we've all installed a distribution or something like that. And just thought, why is somebody, I mean, obviously, they've probably put the heart and soul into it. But there's a number of distros out there that just seem pointless. There isn't like a twist or something special. I mean, you've got your various different categories. If you want Mac OS type, you can go to that. If you want to do it the hard way, you can do Arch. If you want it nice and easy, you want Linux Mint. I mean, more choice is obviously best for everyone. But yeah, I mean, the water does get a bit muddy. And I suppose for anyone new coming in, it's just you could get swallowed up by the amount of choice, essentially, whether there should just literally be some sort of Linux adventure type game, where you click start here are used to Windows, are used to Mac, and just click through. And then it'll say, well, here's a top five that we could quite happily recommend to you that would fit in ideally. I mean, then again, there's good things because you might will have a random distro that way down a distro watch that has got some kooky little things in it that maybe other bigger ones do borrow from. So it's a hard one. I mean, at the end of the day, there's hundreds and hundreds to choose from. I mean, you've only got to look at the amount of different flavors, types that sit in the top 50. I mean, yeah, more choice is better. But I do think that sometimes it does appear that we seem to be drowning in these new distros. Yeah. And there's no way to stop it, right? I mean, the developers are going to just going to do what they're going to do. It just feels kind of, I mean, it just feels like sometimes, like, for example, I mean, I know I pick on Linux Mint, so I use Linux Mint after making that Linux Mint is useless video. And I actually really enjoyed Cinnamon. So Cinnamon has a reason, good reason to exist. It's like the modern version of Maté or Genome 2 or something, you know, it has a lot of modern quirks, it's very easy on the eyes. It's very easy to use. So Cinnamon itself has a reason to exist. It's just that, you know, the, you know, the things beyond that, so like they basically just took a boon to and then they've ripped up the snaps capability of it and put in FlatHack and then made it Cinnamon. And that's basically what the focus of Linux Mint has become. And maybe that's a good enough reason for Linux Mint to exist. It just feels like they're also always in this kind of tug of war with canonical over, you know, whether or not, you know, certain things should be the way they are, you know, and stuff. And in Linux Mint, you know, specifically, it just feels always felt to me like they should focus on the Debian edition. But I mean, there are other examples. So like Manjaro has a lot of quirkiness to it because it is an ArchBase distro, but it's not a traditional ArchBase distro in that it isn't truly rolling. I mean, it's rolling in that it's a delayed rolling release.  And usually, their updates are all released all at the same time. So like I have updates come in like every Friday, whereas ArchBase comes in like every minute, you know, so I mean, they all have a lot of these have quirks, but I think actually the best example of a distribution that I just find completely unreasonably there for whatever reason is solace, I just did a review on solace and I don't understand the purpose of solace existing. It doesn't have good support for its own repos. So I mean, like if you want to install third party stuff, it's kind of hacky. I mean, the only really way to get good software and solace is to use Snap, in which case, why are you using it?  And it just doesn't seem like there's a good reason for it to exist. I mean, other than the developers want it to, you know, it doesn't serve a purpose in the Linux community. And I know a lot of people will use solace and, you know, it has a lot of like grassroots support from people who really like the people who started it. And that's fine. I suppose it just feels like maybe there needs to be a point. I guess my point is that if you're going to develop a Linux distribution that there should be a substantive difference that you can put forth to what you're basing it on. So like if you're basing your distribution on Ubuntu, you know, be like meant and just focus on Flatpak. That's a good that's a good difference that I didn't really see when I first before I used it, you know, because Flatpaks are different. It's a different choice and it allows you allow someone to use an Ubuntu based, you know, distribution without having to have snaps shoved in their face, you know.  It's just that I feel like there has to be something that you're doing at least a little bit different.  That's just my thoughts. Yeah, I think, like you say, it's scattered. I mean, obviously you've got one man bands that have put together a distro and basically just pretty took with various wallpapers and bits like that. I mean, like that Garuda Linux and they're already installed. Obviously it was a GUI install of Arch, which was pleasant. And then it gave me the option to get off the top of that my head, but gave you the normal welcome screen. And then I could add additional or programs to it. And it was a really enjoyable experience. I mean, if I didn't know anything, obviously it wouldn't be so enjoyable, but it was nice to actually have a welcome screen that go into a store, right? I don't know, the audacity, download Skype, or do VLC. It roughly guided, right, what graphical, what games I could do, the Steam, Lutris, Play on Linux, all things like that, different repositories off the back of that.  And I mean, bringing it back to Linux Mint.  I mean, I really don't know why it isn't number one, because straight out of the box, you've got so many packages available to you. I mean, as soon as you log in, you've got Redshift for backing up your system images, you've got Warpinator for transferring to another PC, Running Warpinator, you've got the web apps, Container Eyes programs, won't talk about hypnotics. Straight off the gauge, you've got a USB writer. So if you don't like it, you can download an ISO straight away and just burn yourself another one, the amount of bags of rubbish of downloading and have to download a decent USB writer to get rid of the thing is amazing. But I do, I mean, it's horses for courses, isn't it? Everyone's got the favourite, oh, well, you should use this or you should use that. But I mean, it just, it all brings down to comfort. I mean, you're obviously comfortable at Archer, installing it, carry on doing it the hard way from my point of view. But what I want is just to have a package it downloads. I mean, I won't call it bloat because they've got to install it with maybe a couple of readers, VLC, JPEG viewer, bits and pieces. It's just whatever you feel happy with.  And that was brilliant. Everything you could ever want for audio and video was built into it. So if you're on that side of the spectrum, audio, video enthusiasts or whatnot, I mean, there you go, you've got a distro, just install it. And you don't, you won't be wanting to download anything else because you've got everything in one distro. I mean, if you want just something for your old, eight, nine year old laptop, you could do, well, MX Linux and Mint's fine on it, but you could go to Puppy OS or things like that. It just depends on what you're comfortable with with just finding that comfort blanket of knowing what you're looking for. I mean, if you're on to wanting to sick and tired of whatever operating system she's on, you obviously wouldn't chuck a Solus FreeBSD or anything like that.  I'd like to think, I mean, everyone seems quite happy with Ubuntu, but it just depends what people's comfort is. I mean, if people want to start with bare bones, Debian, they just do the plain vanilla Debian and build on to it. I mean, that's got, it's a bit of a nightmare to install, but you get your selection of your desktops and everything as you're installing it. But yeah, I think it just is unrambling there. It's just literally your comfort zone, but it's actually knowing what you are comfortable in, whether it's endless customisation with KDE or quite happy with Budgie. It all depends. I mean, you wouldn't want to give it a newbie KDE straight off the bat, but they'll probably progress to something like that. They'll all find their own distro that does suit them. But I think we just drowned in in choice at the moment for anyone new to it. That's really what they, I guess what we need is, I mean, we're never going to stop the problem of having distros that are very niche, I guess. What we need is a good way of showing users, especially new users, what distros they should use. I mean, if you Google best distros for new users, you're always going to get the same answers. You're going to get mint. You're going to get Ubuntu. Those are probably the main ones. I mean, every once in a while, maybe you'll get Manjaro or whatever. At the end, I mean, and those are good articles to allow those blogs or whatever to get views and stuff, but you get along to the question of who made them the expert, right?  I mean, how do you know that they know what they're talking about? So, plus you have to, I mean, if you're coming from Windows to Linux, you have to be willing to do the research on what, you know, that transition is going to mean for you. I mean, and it can't just be, you know, I went to OMG Ubuntu, so Ubuntu is the best choice. So, I mean, the challenge is finding, I guess, new Linux users that are interested in going that extra little bit to do the research and saying, you know, this is the amount of work that I'm willing to do. This is, you know, these are the applications that I need.  And I used it, and it's really good. And it does add, it adds a lot. It's one of those examples of things that they've taken Debian, and they've made it better. And I think of, I think if we always saw, you know, the derivatives of stuff of the main distros do that, they always take the mothership and then somehow improve it, somehow make it useful for our surf, like Ubuntu Studio is a good example, because they've taken, you know, and maybe Canonical has done it, but somebody has taken Ubuntu and said, you know, we're going to take this and make it extremely focused on being really good for video and audio production. That is a good use of a derivative. It's when you get to a derivative that's, you know, we're just going to, we just don't like Ubuntu, so we're going to run our own, you know, distro, you know, just so that we can have control over it. That's when I get to that, you know, having a bit of a problem with things, but it's just one of those things, right? So, I don't know. It's one of those big topics that's going to come up, you know, time and time again. How do you fix fragmentation on Linux? And I think that if you ask an Ubuntu guy, their solution to fragmentation on Linux is going to be snaps, right? So the biggest fragmentation on Linux is always package management. And because, I mean, Ubuntu has apt and, you know, Arch has Pacman and the AUR and, you know, OpenSuicide has Zipper and Fedora has DNF and it's just over on and on and on. And it's one, I mean, that's the biggest hurdle users have moving from one district to another is because the applications are all probably all available, but you have to learn how to install them. So canonical's answer to that is going to be snaps, Fedora and Red Hat, their answer is going to be flat hub and flat packs. You know, it's just one of those solutions and there's not really that maybe one of those are the solution for the fragmentation on the package management side, but there's not really a solution for fragmentation on, you know, the distribution side because there's just always going to be that abundance of choice. I think we beat that horse to death is what we did. I don't know if there's anything more to say about that one. All right, so let's go ahead and just move past the big topic and move into our apps of the week. So Martin, your app of the week. Right, it's an app called Haruna. So it's a QT client for MPV linked below to the GitHub page. It also might be in your software center. It wasn't mine on Mint, but it can be found in the AUR or installed as a flat pack. So it's basically a usual MPV player. You can copy and paste YouTube addresses. So it supports YouTube DL, which allows playing online video from over a thousand sites. I just couldn't believe how many sites it used. I've never actually used YouTube DL, but the amount of sites that you can copy and paste into I'm guessing YouTube DL obviously, but Haruna, whether it's BBC and obviously copy YouTube addresses in and watch YouTube videos with no ad breaks. That's my pick. Looks cool. All right, so I'm going to be bringing you surprise surprise a terminal based application called Pulse Mixer. So my continued quest to make my setup, my audio setup as complicated as possible. I found an application called Pulse Mixer. Basically what this is is a terminal version of PAVU control. And basically I've just bound this to a key binding and it allows me to just to change volume. I mean, you can change source and stuff in it too, but it's not, you know, whatever. Basically, I just wanted to weigh because for whatever reason, when I plugged in my DAC, I had it automatically sets the volume at 100%. And the only, and it doesn't respond to my media keys on my keyboard for whatever reason, like it will change the volume up and down, but it always stays at 100%. So I wanted an application where I could just quickly get into the key binding and just use the mouse or use the use the VIM keys in order to change volumes up and down so that I don't have to actually go through and have my ears blown out by 100% volume. The DAC itself does have a volume control on the front of it, but sometimes I'm just much too lazy to reach the, I don't know, five inches away that it would take to get to the volume control. So it's much easier just to do a key binding away. And it's so much easier. So that's my pick. It's on GitHub. I will find a link before I put the show notes up. So that's it. Okay, so I think that that's it, right, Martin? Anything else to say today? No, I wasn't all ready for a Linux mint off to be truthful, but you let me down. I didn't want to pick on Linux mint. I was like, because after using it, it was good. I like cinnamon a lot. I think that cinnamon Linux mint go hand in hand so that my original argument that Linux mint doesn't need to exist is is not valid because cinnamon is good. Like there's a good reason for cinnamon to exist. That's the reason why I think that you know, Linux mint is actually better than what I originally thought it was. I still wish that they would focus on the Debian edition just because I want less support for canonical. I want fewer Ubuntu distribution derivatives and more Debian based derivatives just because it's not canonical, a huge corporation and I'd much rather have a community based thing. I also think that Linux mint eventually would be happier to have a little bit more control over what they get not only from downstream, but what they have to send back upstream. It just makes more sense because Debian focuses mostly on FlapX as well. It makes more sense to me than always being in this constant fight with canonical over snaps and trying to figure out who's supposed to package Chromium and all this nonsense. I am sorry that we didn't get into the fight that you were looking for. So sorry. Make sure you subscribe youtube.com slash linuxcast.org and our next topic is file backup. We're going to talk about backing up your files, where you should do it, how you should do it, all that kind of stuff. That's Martin's topic so that will be next week. Thanks for watching. Stay safe. See you later guys.


What's up home slizzles? My name is Derek Mola. I'm an intern here at ACMI My favorite movie is Ghostbusters because that chick is toast I'm from Lemister, Massachusetts good old home of the clam chowder I Really want to be ACMI because everybody is really cool And they have a lot of cool equipment and gear and I want to learn how to use all of it That's perfect


We have a fun unboxing for you. This is the Ritma 2022 Special Edition carbon fiber gift set. And I love that these arrive just in time for the holiday season, because that's a great choice. As you can see, it comes with three pins and a full-size bottle of Monteverdi ink. And that's the Monteverdi Midnight Black. And you also get one refill because this set comes with one fountain pin, one roller ball pin and one ballpoint pin all in that carbon fiber finish. Let's take a look at the ballpoint and then you have your, I believe the roller balls in the middle and then your fountain pin. Let's set the box aside and get a better look at these pins. This is the ballpoint. And the ballpoint is operated with a twist action. And these carbon fiber pins are a special edition for 2022 and they are paired with a gunmetal trim. And that carbon fiber barrel is treated with a clear protective layer. So you have that great textured look from the carbon fiber, but it won't feel rough on your hands. Okay, so if you didn't notice, we did switch over to the roller ball here and you access your roller ball refill just by removing the barrel. One of the popular RITMA features for the roller ball and the fountain pin is that it has that magnetic cap design. So it is magnetic to close and also to post. Let's take a look at the fountain pin. On the back of the cap there, you can see that it is engraved with the collection name and number. This is your fountain pin nib.  The Monne Ritma fountain pin is a cartridge converter pin and it does include a converter, but if you want to use your own or you want to use ink cartridges, they are compatible with standard international size ink cartridges and converters. The Monne Ritma collection is well balanced and heavyweight. It's machine to perfection using a mixture of steel and aluminum. As I said before, the Postwell Magnetic Cap is one of the most popular features, but people also love that the barrel is an anodized aluminum barrel with that matte finish and this gun middle trim paired with that carbon fiber is a really great look. Check out more information at pinchlay.com.


I thought that this topic would be appropriate for this time of year. Just a quick plug for the education program here at the Barnes Foundation. How many of you are first-time visitors? That's good, okay. So many of you know that despite our remarkable collection, the Barnes Foundation has always been an educational institution. And so talks like this are an extension of that. But our real sort of focus is on classes, both short four-session classes as well as semester-long classes. And we have a certificate program that has both accredited class, accredited options, but also semester-long classes. And I see many of my students in the audience, which is very reassuring. The semester, unfortunately, for the fall is already fully subscribed, but the spring semester will come around before you know it. And if you're interested in taking classes, the best way to get notice on that is to sign up to get our email notifications that will give you a heads up as to when classes will be posted online. Okay, so without any further ado. So many of you are familiar with this scene. This is the main gallery of the Barnes Foundation. We're looking at the south wall. And the south wall is the first thing that viewers see when they enter the main gallery. In fact, everything about the Barnes Foundation is deliberate. So the fact that Barnes chose to put directly in front of his visitors or students as a window is of particular importance. We come out of the natural world where we have our everyday lived experiences. We come into the main gallery of the Barnes Foundation. And the first thing Barnes directs our attention to is a window that looks back out in Marion, back out onto the Arboretum and here onto the Parkway. As a visual reminder of the importance, the interconnectedness between our everyday lived experiences and the experiences we're about to have in the galleries at the Barnes Foundation, that they are not something separate, but something that things that are inextricably linked. And then on this first wall that we see, Barnes presents to the viewer and the students two of the modern masters of his own era, and that is represented both by, represented of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Matisse both by the dance mural and also by the riffian here and Picasso by 1907's composition or the peasants. So Barnes is signaling the importance of contemporary art. Now keep in mind Barnes was assembling this from the 20s on to his death in 1950, but these were the two really important artists of his generation. But as important to that is that flanking those pieces are works by two American artists, William Glackens and Maurice Prendergast. These were, and this signals a couple things. First the connectedness between these artists and these European masters of Matisse and Picasso, but also the importance of American art to the collection. The fact that he juxtaposes these works together again is of great importance. These artists are as important to the collection as Matisse and Picasso, as well as Renoir and Cézanne. Glackens and Prendergast were not only contemporaries of each others and of Barnes, but they were friends, they were colleagues, they vacationed together. They exhibited together in two of the most important early American modern exhibitions, both 1908's exhibition of the, quote, eight group of eight at Macbeth galleries in New York, but also 1913's Armory show. So these were really important artists for an emerging modern American art. And they also had not only close relationships with each other, but also with Albert Barnes. So these three figures, their lives intertwine in really important ways. And although, and I'll show you, so here's Glackens the raft that's here to the left, and Prendergast's the beach that's to the right. So that each of these artists, while very different from each other, were important to Barnes's concept of what art should be in their own unique way. That is that each of them learned from the advances, the dramatic change of impressionism, but reshaped those advances in their own unique and personal ways, ways that make them individual. So much so that when Barnes published his first, his second publication for the Foundation, The Art in Painting from 1925, he singled out these two artists as being of particular importance. And just as an aside before I move forward, it also points out the importance of American art to this collection. We often think of the Barnes Foundation collection in terms of its French post-impressionist collection, and rightly so. But as Richard Wattenmaker, who has written and spoken most eloquently on both of these artists, as well as the American collection here at the Foundation, Richard recognized that American artists are represented by at least two works in every one of the Foundation's 23 galleries. So there's no gallery that one can enter where American art isn't represented. The Barnes Foundation is an American institution. Its philosophy is grounded in, rooted in American pragmatism and Barnes's close relationship with John Dewey. And so part of my motivation for doing this is also to remind us, those of us familiar with the collection, how important American art is to the Barnes Foundation. My goal for this evening is fairly simple, and that is to look at these two artists through a particular lens, and that is through this subject of beach scenes or figures by the water. For Maurice Prendergast, the older of the two artists, this was a theme that resonated throughout his life, something he started exploring early on and all the way to the end of his life. For William Glackens, although he did it on and off, there was a period from 1911 to 1915, where he really concentrated on these scenes, particularly 1916, excuse me, particularly over a series of summers that he spent in Bellport, Long Island, many of which the works created during those summers are represented here in the Foundation's collection. And the beach scenes also give us an opportunity to explore the important ways in which the form, the plastic form, that is the expressive vocabulary of both of these artists evolved. They are, again, a kind of lens that we can see how both artists matured expressively and then how that maturation then evolved or continued to develop throughout their lives. And that's, again, particularly true with Maurice Prendergast. So, Maurice Prendergast, again, the older of the two. Prendergast, my other hope is that I'm going to put our discussion in a bit of a historical context, but I really want to focus on the works themselves and really look at some of the particular and important qualities that connect both of these artists, but also, obviously, distinguish them. But I think it's helpful to sort of put it in some sort of historical context as well, just to sort of place them in a timeline. So, Maurice Prendergast was born in 1859 in St. John's Newfoundland when it was a British colony in North America. His family moved to Boston 10 years later. And when you read about Maurice Prendergast, you can't help but also almost always or inevitably refer to his brother Charles, who likewise was an artist and a frame maker. These two had such a close bond that to talk about one, they had workshops together, they traveled together to talk about one is almost always talk about the other. So it's going to be somewhat of a challenge just to talk about Maurice, but that will be my effort. So his family moved to Boston where they lived on the east side. And not a lot is known about his early life as an artist. Ellen Glavin, the art historian, has, I think, successfully argued that Maurice's first introduction to art was in school, in public school, where in the latter part of the 19th century there was an emphasis in the Boston public and actually the Commonwealth of Massachusetts public schools to train students in industrial drawing. As you may know, New England was known for its textiles mill, textile mills rather, and they were facing fierce competition from Europe and there was the feeling that part of what was lacking in that education was a clear training in drawing. So this is possibly where Maurice Prendergas got his first training as an artist, which he then carried on after schooling to doing lettering for commercial signage. Both Maurice and Charles were lifelong Francophiles, and in 1890, Maurice had his first opportunity to travel to France. He was 32 years old, so he was already fairly mature. And he spent the next four years in Paris. He studied at the Academy de Julianne, which is very famous for, as an alternative school to the academy. It was a much sort of freer way of learning. And it was there that he became friends with other English-speaking artists, including James Morris, who was a Canadian artist, who is also represented in the Foundation's collection. With Morris, Prendergas traveled to the coast, particularly to Dieppe, which is on the Normandy coast as well as Saint-Malo. And both of these subjects are important for both artists, but Saint-Malo in particular for Maurice Prendergas. While there, Prendergas produced works such as this. This is the Luxembourg Garden from 1890, 1894. And in this early work, we can see some of the roots of some of the quintessential qualities that are recognizable for Maurice Prendergas. While the palette is very different, it's very sort of local, sort of muted, the composition is particularly Prendergas. The figures in the foreground, for instance, they're rooted and planted. And then Prendergas uses spatial relationships and figures and objects in that picture space as a way of moving the viewer's eye through and into the picture space. So, for instance, the figures, the line of the curbing that just happens to align with the staircase in the back, the figures that are placed on either side of this central skewer of trees. And then, importantly, this line of trees and foliage in the background that act as an end point for the viewer's eye, so that the viewer can travel into that picture space and then back out. The handling of the color of the paint is very loose. I'll zoom in here a little bit. You'll see that it has a loose brushy quality that adds a textural quality, a texture to it, and that the description of the figures are more general than specific. There's the suggestion of these being individuals, but they're not portraits per se. And certainly as we move back into space, they're really just types, young girl, older woman, rather than specific figures. So as I said, after four years, Prendergas moved back back to Boston. And when he moved back, he began to exhibit his work and exhibited quite extensively. And this is something that carried through his life. He was always interested in showing his work, getting his work out. He exhibited not only in Boston, but also here in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, as well as in New York and Chicago. And the earliest work in the Foundation's collection is this work. A little more in line with what we think of when we think of Maurice Prendergas's work. This is on the beach from 1896-97. This is a watercolor that is normally up in gallery 17, but is currently down. This is a watercolor. And the medium itself enables some of the particular interests that Prendergas is beginning to develop, and that is in a palette that's lighter and brighter and airier. But we can see ways in which this corresponds with the earlier work. That is, we have these sort of generalized figures in the foreground that are sort of planted and rooted. They create a kind of visual foundation. And then figures distributed throughout the rest of the picture space, moving our eye back to the coastline and then even further still back into the horizon line. And then we see interest in drawing the viewer back into the foreground. What I find particularly remarkable about this work, among many things, is this cluster of figures to the right. He distinguishes these figures not in terms of their specificity, but in terms of color, very particular arrangement of color. So if your eye follows from the red, for instance, that red, those red figures are distributed throughout the cluster, and similar with the blue and the white figures. And each of those, I think, specifically are intended to break up the predominant gray-black figures. So there are sort of the most dominant figures in there, and then these more colorful luminous figures allow Prendergas to separate those figures, distinguish them, and the end result being, and identify a clearly understood grouping of figures, rather than just sort of a mass. The composition, although it's strongly vertical, is very typical of Prendergas as well, in that it's built on horizontal bands. So the bands of the figures, of the shoreline, of the water, of the sky. This helps organize the composition so that even though there's a tremendous amount of visual movement through the picture, there's a sense of organization as to where those things are in space. In 1907, after 13 years, Prendergas returned to France, and 1907 is an important sort of turning point for Prendergas, because while we see elements of the mature Prendergas that we know in these early works, there's something critically missing. When he returned in 1907, he returned specifically because he wanted to go back to Saint-Malo, this coastal town in Brittany. It's a walled medieval town where he had visited before with James Morris in his first visit. He wanted to return there as an opportunity to explore the possibilities of painting in this seascape. Before he left for Paris in 1907, though, he agreed to participate in this show that I mentioned earlier that would take place the next year, the exhibition of the eight that include, along with Prendergas, artists centered around Robert Henry, who I'll say more about later, William Glackens, as I mentioned, but also the artist George Luke. George Luke's rather, Arthur B. Davis, Everett Chin, John Sloan, and Ernst Lawson.  In 1907, Prendergas returns. He spent some time in Paris where he was able to see exhibitions both by Chardin and Watteau, and I don't have time to go into it here, but his interest in the art of the traditions, looking at the traditions of art, the French tradition going all the way back to antiquity, but also the modern tradition is a key component of Prendergas' work. Again, Richard Rockmaker does a nice job of exploring ways in which Prendergas took forms either from antiquity or from modern artists and reshaped them into his own forms and then sort of interjects them into his pictures. These figures are sort of identifiable when we're looking for them, but they're so fully integrated into the compositions that they don't stand out as being somehow far into Prendergas' form. So the other thing in 1907 that Prendergas encountered was a newfound interest in the work of Paul Cézanne. Paul Cézanne had died just a few months prior to that, and before going down to Sama Lo, Prendergas saw an exhibition of Cézanne's watercolors, and Prendergas obviously having an interest in that medium as well, and he wrote in a letter to a friend and fellow painter, Miss Williams, he wrote about seeing this exhibition of Cézanne's watercolor. He left everything to the imagination. They are great for their simplicity and suggestive quality, and in that observation I think we see sensibilities that resonate with Prendergas' own work. So Prendergas is learning not necessarily by being schooled, but by seeing what other artists are doing, and in particular the profound impact that's seeing the work of Paul Cézanne had on him. Yes, it's right. And so this is a work painted in that summer of 1907 at Sama Lo. This is a small work, and we can see sort of the nascent, mature Prendergas here in this picture. And as importantly, we see how much his form has already begun to evolve. I very much like this image because we get to see the edge of the picture, and if you look here at the edge, you'll see that it's painted on a tan brown. You see how this band of tan and brown runs down the full side of it, and this is on both sides. We painted it on a ground of tan brown, which is the color, for instance, we see here, and we also see it peeking through down here. But I think most importantly is how he then overlays these cooler colors of aqua and blue and deeper blue, and so that the combination of the underpainting with these cooler colors enables him to create this tremendously rich palette. So his color now begins to evolve from that very local muted color to, it begins to gain a sense of vibrancy, but he's still sort of tempering it with these warmer colors. The looseness of his color application remains, and notice now he's thinking more, not sort of haphazardly, but more organized. So for instance, these short brushstrokes that create the sky, and here again you see that umber peeking through, or the elongated brushstrokes that build up the tomb of Chateaubriand, which is a landmark of Saint-Malo, and then down the bottom this line of figures. These are quintessentially pretergast figures. Again, suggestive of figures with parasols, certainly not specifically descriptive of that, but that he's using now enhanced and increased boldness of color in these large sort of ovals of colors that as you see run all along the front of the picture. So think back to the Luxembourg garden with those figures rooted in the front, and then the first beach scene with those seated figures in the front. Now he's transformed that into this band of figures along the bottom edge of the picture, but now that band, rather than being merely static, is enlivened because we have these lozenges of color that move up and down and up and down, and then that same idea is carried over into the next band of colors. So what this infusion of impressionist, post-impressionist color enables pretergast to do is to create visual activity of things that the figures aren't themselves doing things, but our eye is moved in and out up and down through the composition. So it becomes a much more vibrant, much more active visual experience. So pretergast painted a large body of over 35 oils, most of them small ones during the summer in San Malo, and then before departing to go back to the United States, he stayed long enough to be able to see the October salon to autumn, the autumn salon of the salon in which 56 works by Paul Cezanne were exhibited. And that moment, so this autumn salon in 1907, was very critical for the development of modern art in general, not just for pretergast, but this was an exhibition that had deep influences on the first artists we saw in the main gallery, Matisse and Pablo Picasso, both of them went and saw this exhibition, and evidence of that is in gallery 11 at the foundation. Matisse's blue still life in which we literally see Matisse almost conjuring up the memory of Cezanne in this riotously active, highly luminous painting. So again the effect of Cezanne resonating through the development of modern art. So pretergast again returned in the end of 1907, preparing for this very important show of the eight that was shown in February of 1908. Pretergast showed 16 works, the bulk of which were paintings that he had done the previous summer in San Malo, and this event was again very much sort of a declaration of the arrival of modern art in America. And it's possible that this painting itself was part of that exhibition. There a lot has been written about the exhibition of the eight, and that's worthy of a talk in and of itself. The only thing that I'll say is that Pretergast's work was of particular focus for the critics, confounding for some, but some saw what Pretergast was attempting to do. Some of those critics that had seen French art saw the resonance of what Pretergast was doing. But again what the critics focused on, whether good or bad, was his use of color. Again this bold, high-key new palette. Traveling was always an important part of Pretergast's life in 1911. He and his brother Charles traveled to Venice. There's a whole body of work that came from that trip. And while he was in Venice, Pretergast had one of several bouts of illness. He had to undergo an operation that forced him to stay throughout the year. And this sort of going back and forth between good health and poor health is something that again continues to reoccur through his life, obviously up until the end. So he returned in 1912. And 1912 becomes a particular important year for us here at the Barnes Foundation. It was a year that Barnes began to really seriously collect works of art. And Richard Wattmaker in the American catalog of the collection goes through some of the correspondence back and forth between Barnes and Pretergast where Barnes is trying to get Pretergast to first send him work or getting him to... Barnes is saying that he wants to buy work and Pretergast is sort of holding back. He has an exhibition that's up and he doesn't want to get in the middle of the dealer and Barnes and Barnes is trying to get around the dealer. Again, quintessential Barnes is trying to get his own way. And Pretergast is very gently and kindly trying to stave him off. But eventually in 1912 Barnes does begin to buy works by Pretergast and this work by him from San Milo is part of it. That same year Pretergast vacationed with Glackens. And as we'll see in a minute, 1912 was the year that Barnes began to rekindle a friendship with William Glackens. So we see these sort of three artists, these three individuals rather, their lives begin to intertwine again. In 1912, as I said, Pretergast and Glackens spent summer in Cape Cod together. The Barnes's went up and visited them. There's Ira Barnes, Ira Glackens in his book on his father. Glackens in the Ashkahn School talks about Barnes and Mrs. Barnes coming up and spending time with them, Barnes taking them around in his car, around to different areas, different places for the painters to paint. So again, this 1912 year I'll return to in a little while, becomes very important as well. 1913, here comes the second important exhibition for the advancement of quote American art, although overshadowed by European art, that being the 1913's Armory Shell. The focus of the Armory Shell was organized by American artists led by Walter Pock and Arthur B. Davis. The purpose of the exhibition was to highlight American art. They wanted to include European art, but unfortunately the European art ended up outshadowing the, outshining rather the American art. This was the exhibition where Marcel Duchamp's new descending staircase was first exhibited and all of the focus was on the European art. So the American artists were, they were happy that modern art was getting a viewing, but certainly disappointed that it wasn't their art. So 1913, 1910, 12, 13. So in this scene simply called the beach, beach scene rather from 1910, 1913. Here again we see the continued evolution of Prendergast's form. In particular with figures like this, we see the way in which his color harmonies, his interrelationship of these little spots of color become increasingly complex.  The other thing we begin to see him utilize more are these color lines. And you see even with a color line how he varies the color, he adds these spots of, for instance, a deeper red over this lighter violet color or the way that he has a grouping of these little spots of either pink, orange, or yellow over top these umber colors. The effect is that from a distance we get an overall sense of color, but the closer we look we see that those color areas are made up of a wide variety of colors. And in addition what he's also begun to do is distribute color everywhere. Rather than color being sort of isolated to an individual figure, he begins to use color all over the canvas. And that adds both a sense of vitality, that is of color really being first and foremost, but it also creates a sense of unification, that everything in the picture is made out of the same composition, the same material. In this picture we see again these recurring themes, compositional themes with the horizontal bands, the bands of the landscape in the sea, the shoreline in the sea, the landscape in the distance, the skyline, and then overlaid that these vertical units of the figures, the vertical units that add again visual variety to the otherwise fairly static horizontal bands. And this brings us back to the work that's in the main gallery. So this is the beach number three painted 1914-1915. And in many ways this picture is sort of a culmination of all of the things that we've discussed up to this point. And in particular the complexity of color relationships. This is what Barnes saw of importance in Prendergast's work, that by this period and even by 1910, Prendergast was making color compositions. Everything about these pictures is about what can color do, what is the effect of color, color to color, color in terms of fields of color or blocks of color, or as we see here this really complex overlaying of various color applications. So spots of colors with lines of colors over top, some are opaque, some are more transparent. Again color distribution, notice how the yellow in the blue is then carried over to be a yellow against violet, but the amount of yellow brightens that area where the blue dominates here. And again this color distribution is something we see throughout the picture. The figures are types. They're not individuals and this again goes back to really the first image we looked at. They're doing different things, but they're not specific individuals. Again it's not portrait in any way. They're generalized. They're generalized and yet they're set doing specific things. They're sitting, they're leaning, they're riding, they're adjusting something. But none of that adds any activity to the figures. The figures are static and still. And in this picture particularly as we considered in terms of the first San Malo picture we see the way in which Prendergast could change the quality of his color. So this picture has a much drier feel. It takes on almost a fresco-like quality. And the alignment of the figures very much resonates with the traditions of art going all the way back to the Byzantine era. I said this isn't a focus of the talk, but I think it's important at least to highlight, particularly because in much of the writing, particularly the early writing about Prendergast he was sort of viewed as being sort of a simple, uneducated painter who did things sort of naturally. But that's absolutely not the case. He knew the traditions of art well, both from firsthand experience in his travels, but also from a vast library of books that he referred to. And so this connection, not just in the alignment of the figures, so in the Byzantine work from San Vitali we see the way in which the Byzantine tended to align figures, these elongated vertical figures pushed to the foreground. We see Prendergast doing something similar, again with these aligned figures, very much pushed to the foreground. And then in addition, the way in which Prendergast's spots of color again resonate with the tessera, the little chunks of little squares of either gold or glass and gold or stone or precious metal, the way in which Prendergast's spots of color very much echo those tessera. So his work, not only in terms of composition, but also in terms of quality, very much resonate with the great traditions of art. Jumping to the last work that's in the Foundation collection, this is Marblehead Harbor from 1918-1920. We can see the way in which for all of its similarity with what we saw earlier from 1914-1915 or even earlier than that, how Prendergast continues to evolve his compositions. In this one, obviously the scale of the figures is more in keeping with the other color units, whether boats or houses in the picture. And how, while we often tend to think of Prendergast's work as being dealing with fairly shallow space, we're here, as Barnes himself pointed out, Prendergast was exploring spatial intervals, so the way our eye moves from boat to boat to boat or figure to figure to figure or house to house to house, and how Prendergast has created clean, clear-cut space between them, so our eye moves from one to the other, traversing open space, and so that there's a sense from foreground through middle ground to background of the eye moving through clean, cut, clearly defined space. And we see him using, again, ideas we saw him exploring early on, for instance, figures that are very generalized, but then combining them with things like architecture that's fairly clearly defined, right, with its dimensionality reinforced by these linear perimeter lines or the doors and windows being clearly articulated. So it's not so much a matter of him a disinterest in clarity, but clarity where it suits his need, where he wants things to be clearly defined, he would do so elsewhere, for instance, with figures, he leaves them more generalized. Of this picture, this is one of the pictures that Barnes addressed in the art and painting at the time called Landscape. He wrote of this picture, and here I quote, the entire canvas is a succession of contrasts of line, color, space, mass, and spatial relationships that produce a series of interlocking rhythms crisply punctuated at clean-cut intervals. In every part of the picture, there is an infinite number of variations of color, light, line, mass, space, and general treatment, which correspond to the internal variations in contrapuntal music. In fact, Barnes very often referred to Prentagast's work in musical terms, also likening his work to a Bach fugue with this crisp interplay of color in Prentagast's work and sound in the Bach music. Having found this mature style, this mature form, the rest of Prentagast's life was really an exploration of what he could do to and with that. As I mentioned earlier, he suffered from a series of ailments which, at the end of his life, culminated in progressive circulatory issues. In 1924, he underwent surgery, although his condition worsened after that. And in January 31 of that year, one of the last persons to see Prentagast while he was in hospital was William Glackens. And Prentagast died the following day. Of Prentagast, Barnes wrote in the art of painting, the most important factor in his form, not surprising, is color. Few painters ever had a fine feeling of pure color, both in its direct sensuous quality and in the possible variety of its uses. The sharply contrasted areas spotted with light give an effect of staccato color movement throughout the whole picture. And one like that sometimes achieved of Renoir, high praise for Barnes. Color movement give to his best pictures the glowing vitality of the great mosaics and, at other times, the charm and delicacy of the finest earliest tapestries and frescoes. So this is taken from the 1925 Arden painting. So early on Barnes recognized the importance of Prentagast, which brings us to William Glackens. Glackens and Barnes were classmates at Central High School along with John Sloan. While Barnes excelled at academics at Central High School, Glackens was more well known for, certainly his brilliant intellect, but more for his satirical sketches of his teachers, showing them not as they would like to be portrayed, but as the students saw them. And that comes directly from Barnes' account of their time at Central High. That early idea of him being able, of Glackens being able to immediately capture the likeness or the personality of someone, that is at the root of what William Glackens was. In the 1890s, he worked as an artist reporter here in Philadelphia. This is at a time before photographs were reprinted in newspapers. He fell in with a group of artists, including John Sloan, another Central High School classmate, as well as George Luke's, all around the figure Robert Henry, who was a really important teacher, both coming out of the academy, but also in these sort of newspaper artists' reporter circles. They formed a group called, that they called the Four or the Charcoal Club, and these four artists then went on to form the foundation of what became the Eight. Not mentioned earlier. Glackens traveled to Paris for the first time in 1906 with Robert Henry, and he also befriended James Wilson Morris, the Canadian I mentioned earlier. Pernigas had just left, Glackens comes, so Morris becomes also the sort of mutual friend between the two. Glackens went on to be hired by McClure's magazine and sent to cover the Spanish-American War, including capturing images from the Battle of San Juan Hill. And Glackens' ability to capture the specific aspects of figures in their movement, in their personality, in how they hold themselves or how they travel through space, all of these are a cornerstone of his plastic form. And it is illustration at its best, as we'll see in a minute. So this is the earliest work of Glackens in the foundation's collection in Gallery 13 in the east wall over the door heading back into the main gallery. It's a beach at Dieppe. Again, this is along the Normandy coast, painted in 1906. As with Pernigas, we see the way the influence, the strong influence of the French painter Edward Manet in the color applications, in these obvious brush strokes, and in particular the way in which Glackens is swirling wet-on-wet paint to create these sort of streaks of color, and we see that throughout. So this was very much the instruction of Manet by way of Robert Henry, Henry really being the disciple of both Manet and Velazquez and departing that information to his colleagues in Philadelphia. In this scene, by the way, this was painted on the delayed honeymoon of Glackens in Edith Demek, his wife, who were pictured here. And so in this picture, again, we see the way in which Glackens is able to capture the particular comportment of a figure. So for instance, if we look at this figure at the extreme left, we get a sense not only of her being a female, but of the specific posture and what she's doing. He is able to convey the sense of concentration of her holding this rake, of the tilt of the head, of the weight and set of the body, of the turn of the torso. And yet when you look closely, it's done so simply. It's just simple brush strokes that so directly convey these qualities, this information. And this is true of each of the figures throughout this picture. Each of them are doing something specific. This figure, for instance. Just a cluster of brush strokes, and yet we get a sense both of the struggle to hold the hat against the wind, the wind pressing against the body, the body tilting back against the force of the wind, and the cloth of the dress moving forward. All of this just so simply conveyed and yet clearly conveyed. And again, this is Glocken's gift that he's able to do this so quickly. The palette is similar to what we saw in the early work of Prenogas. That is, it's a very local color. It's a very simple color. And just as an example of his ability, we're fortunate to have several examples of Glocken's sketches. He would go out on the street and sketch figures as they would walk by. And in these groupings of figures, you can see the way in which he's selecting figures for particular purposes, right? That they're doing something that captures his interest, and yet he's able to do it, like with a figure, these two figures, for instance, he's able to do it with just an accumulation of lines. But lines that have such variety, if we look at this figure, the line is thick and thin. It's bold at the bottom, bold at the bottom to sort of plant and ground the figure. There's a sense of, again, the movement of the figure through space, of the figure being contained. And each of the figures on so many of these sketches hone in on specific qualities about the individual. Again, it's not about who the figure is, but what the figure is doing, or what's being done to the figure, when it's the winds, for instance, that the figure is struggling against, but the specificity with which he was able to achieve that. Actually, let me go back. For Glocken's, now this is not a beach scene. I realize that. But for Glocken's 1907, 1908, was of particular, 1908 in particular, was of profound importance. And this was the moment when he deliberately retaught himself about color. Having been informed the previous summer, having spent with Maurice Prendergast from Cape Cod, having seen with Prendergast how Prendergast's color had evolved, particularly informed by Impressionist color, Glocken's wanted to capture that same sort of intensity of hue in his own work. And while it's just a preliminary sketch on the left, you see the way, even with the little bit of color that he did add, it was just what those things are, like the green of the grass, the blue of the individual, or the sort of haziness of the sky, where with the racetrack, and this is a work that he painted and then repainted, painted first in local color and then in this new palette, we see the way in which the palette is not just high key, but it's like the volumes turned up to 11. Green is not just green, but it's kelly green. The sky is not just blue, but it's cobalt. The red of the roof of the shed isn't just red, but it's magenta and pink. Everything has this forceful brilliance and it's the combination of these colors to each other. The warm golden yellow of the ground against that cobalt blue that creates the shock and power of each of those color areas. And yet with that, notice what he retains and that is the sense of activity of the figures, of the riders and horses, of the figure leaning on the gate, of these figures, one with his foot up on the bottom rail of the fence. Again, them doing specific things, even though they're very general figures, but they're doing these things that are so specific. And that he's also using color to create, color to create space, both in terms of the atmospheric perspective of the background where things get hazier and lighter, but also this brilliant pool of luminous yellow that becomes a focal point that draws our eye deep into space and then the activity in the foreground, the swirling of activity in the foreground, being a constant magnet drawing our eye back. But as I said, the focus for this talk is beach scenes and it's in this period, now this is from 1910, but from 1908 through about 1916, he begins to use, certainly from 1910 to 1916, he begins to use beach scenes or figures by the water as a way of expanding and exploring this newfound interest in the expressive potential of color. So here we see rather than the large blocks of color from the racetrack, we see him begin to break color up into these little dabs of color and notice what he's begun to do. So the, quote, blue of the water is now infused with spots of yellow and lines of magenta red and areas of green along with these little spots of white. So he's begun to use what we call broken color, that is color that has, the spectrum of which has been separated and then in little components added back so that the overall effect, when you look at this field at the bottom of the picture, the overall effect is of blue, but when you look closely, it's actually composed of a wide variety of colors and we see him doing something similar here to the left to what is, quote, brown grass. Look at all of the colors that he juxtaposed to create that quality. So both broken color as well as color according. So this picture is also in the main gallery. It's on the northeast corner. So there's two works by Glackens, sort of side by side essentially. This one in 1910, the other one from 1915. This is unusual in a couple different ways. First for our vantage point as a viewer. So he's put us out onto the water and we look back to the seashore, back to the shore in this architecture on it. We're maybe on a pier or on a boat, but what that does is it limits the water aspect of it and it enhances the importance of the landscape.  Along with this, and again, the color is bright. It's luminous. There's a sense of light being everywhere, everything filled with light, not just on the water but everywhere. The general lack of shadows, right? He's not creating, he's not locating figures by contrasting them with shadowed areas but rather allowing them to sit as these bold color-made figures. One of the aspects of this picture that I have always found curious is his use of what I would call unseen space or his exploration of unseen space. And what I mean by that is he's doing it at least three times here with this figure, this figure, and this figure. What I mean is that they're all moving but they're moving into space that we don't see. They're moving between buildings or into a building or out of the picture space. And it's a way that even within this fairly confined and restricted picture space he's able to suggest additional space. That is space that's between things or beyond what we actually see. And although Glackens was certainly aware of the traditions of art, it's not something he necessarily drew on as much but this is something that was of particular use, was used particularly by Flemish artists. That is, as Flemish artists were beginning to explore what picture space could do, they often did this sort of exploration of unseen space. Which means this to another picture in the collection. So around this time he was, Glackens rather was showing his work. And it's not that nobody understood what he was doing, it's just that sort of fewer critics certainly understood as clearly as Barnes did what Glackens was after. But one who did was the critic James Honaker who wrote, and I'll just read a brief portion of this, he wrote, and this is in 1910, he wrote, Glackens color grows more harmonious though often shocks by its brilliant dissidents. He's pulling up the key year after year and his studies at Cape Cod, at Cape Cod summer before last and at Nova Scotia last, so the previous one that's from his summer at Nova Scotia are of exceeding interest because apart from their technical accomplishments they begin to show however dimly the gold to which this ambitious and gifted young man is steering. Beaches of inland seas, the water of which are vivid blue, skies that are hard blue as Italy's, white cloud-like boulders. All of these he says recall the presence of what William James called the emotion of recognition. And again this goes back to Glackens ability to show us things that we immediately connect with because there are often sort of physical memories that we see in his moving animated figures, things that are familiar to us. In this picture, the little pier, we see something a little different than we saw previously. Here he turns his attention out to the sea and notice again, he's expanding on this use of both broken color and color courting. And as importantly, he's learned how to adjust his color. So you'll notice that he's using these tightly packed and compact crescent-shaped colors, brushstrokes rather, and that he's again color courting, interspersing these magenta colors with blue and with green. And yet when we look up here the brushstrokes become farther apart. They're softened, they're not as hard and as insistent. And so he's able to create variety in both how he treats color and how his color, the effect that his color application has. And this picture is somewhat different because the figures themselves aren't necessarily the entire focus. They're part of the composition or not the entire composition. And in many ways they function in a similar way that the boats or the pier or the dog function. And that is as these points of interest. You'll notice that the figures aren't nearly as animated as in some of the earlier ones. They're much stiller, much calmer. And so in many ways they function as compositional elements, not so much as the entire focus of the picture. And as I said, 1911 begins a period when the Glackens spend a series of summers in Belport and Belport Long Island. And this becomes, because he returns over and over again it becomes a real sort of key point for the Glackens development. His son Ira Glackens, I keep saying Ira Glackens, Ira Glackens wrote again in his book about his father. He said he said of Belport at the time, Belport was a simple place. Cottages, nothing showy. Belport was still an unspoiled town and life was largely confined to the village street. There were no large estates in the neighborhood. Near the beach stood a large barn-like quote vacation home from New York shop girls which supplied subjects for many of my father's canvases. A fairy every fine day took bathers across the bay to the ocean beach, old inlet, whose rolling white dunes and scraggly bayberries and beach plums saw many picnics. Picnics. And that brings us back to... So in the raft, I think in many ways we see all of the aspects that have been developing up to this point realized. So this is from 1915. We see the harmonious use of broken color corded. So in the variations of how these intermixed colors are distributed in these identifiable brush strokes in these tiny little crescent shapes. But as importantly, the focus on the figures. They are clearly of dominance. And these, again, although I've said this before, I think it's worth repeating, that these are specific figures but not individual figures. So they're doing things that are specific. Each figure in this picture is doing something different from somebody else. They're about to slide. They're splashing. They're bobbing. They're reaching. Each figure then has its individuality expressed in terms of its sense of motion or activity. But the figures themselves are highly generalized. So you'll notice facial features are all but eliminated. The forms of the figures are attenuated, elongated. The appendages have been simplified. The hands don't articulate fingers but rather almost like these mitts, right? Thumb and then sort of a tapered end. Similarly with the feet. The feet of the figures are just these sort of delicately tapered forms. This elongation accentuates the linear quality of the figures. And you'll see that most of them are doing something with their arms. And that adds a sense of activity as well. So the arms are curving. They're inching. They're encircling. So they become active in the composition. And that activity is carried over into the other things. To the extent that we almost hear the putt-putt-putt of the boat. And here's the stream that it leaves. We feel the lean or tilt of the sailboat or the rocking of the raft itself. Everything is in motion. Everything is moving. And we connect with that. Importantly Glackens creates this deep-receding seascape and then populates it throughout the composition. Everywhere we look, there is something occupying that space. There's no dead open space. Where there is open space, that's necessary transition from one thing to the other. From the sailboat to the figure on the top of the slide to the sailboat in the distance. Or the episodic quality of these figures. We have a sense, if you look at the relationship of these figures to each other, we have a sense of continuity or of continuum of this figure sliding down the slide and splashing into the water. And then bobbing along and then swimming around and there's a narrative that's suggested. It's not a narrative that's described or told but everything connects with one another both in terms of how he treats it in his palette but also in terms of what the figures are doing and the relationship of figures to figures. And most importantly what we see in this picture is that Glackens has successfully transformed his illustrative skill his ability to capture quickly and simply but directly the activity of figures he has been able to transform that and now expresses it in terms of color. Color becomes a medium that all of everything we perceive in this picture is said. And that transition from illustration to illustrative expressive quality that's what allows Glackens to not merely be an illustrator but to importantly be an illustrator artist of being somebody that is able to say what he has to say not merely in how it's described but in terms of his chosen medium that being color. So after this time in Belport it's not that Glackens never returned to beat scenes they just didn't necessarily an important part of the subjects that he chose to describe but over this period after this time at Belport Glackens and Barnes remained close friends I think it's impossible to imagine Barnes being the collector educator that he was without his friendship with Glackens. Glackens was the one person he entrusted a large sum of money to go to Europe in 1912 and buy the best examples of modern art. Barnes never did that again but he continued to consult Glackens Glackens was somebody who's not just his eye but Barnes greatly admired and listened to in many ways Glackens schooled Barnes in what modern art could be both by what he showed him in that buying trip and bringing back but also what he himself did what Glackens himself did Glackens died very unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage in the spring of 1938 on hearing the news Barnes wrote to Edith Dimmock Glackens wife and here I quote I was shocked and not only that but a feeling of deep sorrow because I loved Butts Barnes' nickname for Glackens as I never loved but a half a dozen people in my life he was so real and so gentle that I would have given millions to possess and he had the millions and he would have bought it if he could and here importantly as an artist I don't need to tell you I esteemed him only Maurice, Maurice Prendergas among all American painters I knew was in his class he will live forever in the foundation collection among the great painters of the past who could they speak would say that he was of the elect that statement so recognizing with the passing of William Glackens that only Maurice Prendergas was of the same level as he saw in William Glackens and Barnes was true to his word that Glackens would always have a place in the foundation not only in the main gallery where he's represented by the two works but also in gallery 12 the quote American Room that is very much dominated by Glackens work and then distributed throughout the rest of the foundation that commitment not only to William Glackens but obviously also to Maurice Prendergas but to American art and the importance of modern American art in its relationship not just to the traditions of art but to modern European art as I said at the beginning of this very much at the foundation of what this place is and so why did Barnes hold these two artists in such high esteem as he wrote about both of these artists he returned to one thing not surprisingly their understanding and use of color that what they had to express was always done in terms of their chosen medium the vocabulary of a painter being color and that they did it in multiple ways but that importantly what they did was rooted also in the traditions of art that they took from what they learned of impressionism and didn't redo it but actually made it their own made it into their own form their own what they what interested them and what their focus was and that's why these two artists were and remain important artists thank you so we have time if anybody has any questions we don't have time but I have time if anybody has any questions nope that's fine ok well thank you all for coming out tonight