Leseprobe

120 Denis’s famous dictum that ‘a picture—before being a warhorse, a nude woman or telling some other story—is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a particu- lar pattern.’ 15 Another expression of the same ideal in Barnes’s collection is Vincent van Gogh’s portrait of The Postman Joseph-Étienne Roulin (Fig. 2), in which the model’s bust is shown in front of an ornamental imaginary wallpaper. The arabesques of the vegetable motif echo those of the postman’s bifurcated beard, and Barnes, who could not but notice such a device, may have been inspired by this fictional wall to provide his real ones with metal ornaments—he did not dress the walls of his galleries in patterned fabric or paper, as did the collectors andmuseum founders of the Gilded Age, nor did he paint themwhite, like the modernists, but he used jute cloth, a choice consonant with the primitivism of a Gauguin and a Van Gogh. The further abstracted forms of a later generation, for instance Figure 2: Vincent van Gogh, The Postman (Joseph-Étienne Roulin) , 1889, oil on canvas, 65.7×55.2 cm, inv. BF37. Philadelphia, Barnes Foundation.